Nine Stories of Moral Ambition

Intro: Saving the world can be fun and a worthy mission, if we work on it together. 

Second Intro: These three stories are Part 1 of a promised written version of the "Nine Stories" talk Stephen Packard gave at “Wild Things – a Conference of People and Nature” in March 2025. This post's title reflects a recent interesting book and web initiative on “Moral Ambition” by Rutger Bregman. It seemed apt, if his concept could be broadened to fit the likes of us. See Endnote.

Teaser: this beautiful and endangered plant will rise out of the brush in Story three. 

Story one: Doug and Dot Wade seem to Fail, but later Succeed

One fine day in 1987, we walked across a vast but degraded prairie, attempting to found the support group that would ultimately save what we now call Nachusa Grasslands. On that walk one of our mentors, Doug Wade, told a few of us younger conservationists about his secret for fundraising. It required taking a heavy frying pan on a prairie hike with a rich donor. You explain to him how to tell a fox den from a coyote den. You show him how to stick your head in the hole. Fox dens smell musky. Coyote dens smell unmistakably like dog. It’s a familiar smell, surprising in that context.

 

Okay:  When the donor’s head is in the hole, you take that frying pan and give him a good clout in the butt, so his head gets stuck, and you offer to pull him back out … in exchange for big money. 

 

It was a bad joke. Kind of stupid and perplexing at the time. Perhaps it reflected the fact that so many of Doug’s good and visionary ideas didn’t get funded. The Wades had been students of and close friends with the conservation prophet, Aldo Leopold, and they felt urgency to provide the next generation of leadership.

Shortly after Leopold died in 1948, Doug was hired by Dartmouth College but was not happy there. After other false startes, he came home to the tallgrass and taught field biology at Northern Illinois University, out in farm country. People respected Doug and deeply admired his wife Dot — for her warmth and ability to help high-strung academics and environmentalists to get along with each other. Dot established a business raising and selling prairie plants – the first of its kind, at a time when few had ever heard about them, or cared. She once said to me, “I couldn’t imagine who’d ever buy one; I thought you’d need to be a very intellectual person, probably from Chicago.”

 

In later years, I tried to visit Dot every time I was out that way, because I liked her. I did not think of her as a potential donor, even though, as Nature Conservancy staff, I was supposed to be on the lookout for such. On one visit, she told me that another organization was visiting her more often than I was. I gave her a funny look, and said, “It sounds like that organization is buttering you up.”

 

Dot’s face broadened into an enormous smile, and she said: “I love to be buttered up!” It turned out that she’d inherited stock in an ice cream company her dad had started in New Jersey. She soon donated $56,000 dollars to Nachusa.  

 

Doug and Dot Wade launched what we now call Wild Things. 

But back in 1975, the Wades had a powerful idea that didn’t need funding.  The word “biodiversity” did not yet exist. But a few academics had been pointing out that tiny, shrinking prairie remnants were all that remained of the fabled rich grasslands of The Prairie State. The first North American Prairie Conference had been organized by Professor Pete Schram at nearby Knox College in 1968. Starting then, every two years those scientists would come together and share what they were learning – speaking scientific Latin — on weekdays. The Wades thought “Maybe enough people are starting to care that we could organize a little conference where a wider range people, including volunteers, could come together to learn and strategize on prairie conservation.” Would people show up? Doug convinced his university to sponsor it, on the condition that attendees paid for their lunches. When an amazing 150 people had signed up, the university told him that was as many lunches as the facility could handle. He should close registration. Wade sent out the notice, “Registration is still open, but from now on, bring your own lunch!” 

 

That conference has been held every second year since, and this year was its 50^th anniversary. Now it’s called Wild Things (they make our hearts sing). It kept going because volunteers did the work - in part because they respected Doug and Dot. In 2025, it drew 2,600 people. (The North American Prairie Conference also continues, attracting hundreds.) 

 

In 2025, Wild Things included more than 140 presentations and workshops that sought to be enjoyable and meaningful to every kind of person. Ultimately, for this planet to thrive in good health, most people need to understand and care. Doug and Dot helped empower many of us with moral ambition.  

Story two: She Built Bridges for Bird Conservation. 

 

Judy Pollock is a birder and activist. She and her husband Scott connected to environmental work on a delegation to Guatemala with local activists. But on her return to Chicago, she found herself with little free time – aside from her job as a teacher and raising two young kids. Yet, still wanting to contribute to conservation, she came across an invitation to help monitor birds in restoration areas and advise stewards on that part of the challenge.

 

North Branch Prairie Project stewards, supported by The Nature Conservancy, were cutting brush to rescue often-nearly-gone prairie remnants, an acre here, twenty acres there. At the ten-acre Miami Woods Prairie (a Cook County Forest Preserve, then of fair quality, at best) she found breeding indigo buntings, willow flycatchers, yellowthroats, and others. As the shrubs vanished, those birds dwindled. The steward told her that was okay, on the theory they’d be replaced by higher-conservation-priority prairie birds. Judy explained that no prairie bird would ever breed on a ten-acre prairie; it’s too small. So why wreck the habitat of the shrubland birds (also declining) that did breed there? The steward wasn’t convinced. In a few years, all the brush and most of the birds were gone; Judy felt like she’d wasted her time. She occasionally recommended that the restoration folks reconsider their approach to birds. No one seemed to listen.

Sonia, Scott the younger, Scott the dad, and Judy Pollock check out the ecosystem. 

In early 1996, Judy talked with other birders, and they organized a conference – with birders and restoration folks picking the speakers together. In that context, birders and stewards could get together with equal standing, present their cases, and work stuff out. It succeeded – leading to the formation of the Bird Conservation Network, a new, focused, powerful constituency that pursued a number of new and larger bird conservation efforts.

 

Later, when Judy and others heard that an O’Hare airport expansion plan would damage a small, degraded marsh that was of value to migratory shorebirds, they spoke up, making some Chicago city officials nervous that environmentalist objections could stall the project. Criticism can be just negative, but successful advocacy needs ultimately to be constructive. In this case, a compatible solution was proposed by Openlands, and in response O’Hare contributed an impressive 26 million dollars to a fund for restoring health to thousands of acres of bird habitat – especially wetlands, prairies, and shrublands. Over the years, such work became Judy’s profession. 

 

Over the years Judy played a major role in reviving the Wild Things conference and promoting local prairie bird, shrubland bird, and all bird habitat – especially at the Bartel Grassland, Orland Grassland, and the Spring Creek Preserves. 

 

Judy and others also worked successfully with Mayor Daley to have Chicago’s tall building lights dimmed during migration, saving the lives of thousands of tired migrating birds, which had been attracted to and then crashing into those buildings for decades. A big success. 

 

Initiative, advocacy, and restoration: You go, Judy!

 

Endnote to Story two: Backstory on the $26M

 

Much biodiversity depends on thriving natural ecosystems. During the 1980s and 90s, an awareness of this fact was increasing (locally and nationally), thanks in part to media and volunteer stewardship initiatives in the Chicago region. A key contributor in the growing conservation community was Jean Sellar, a creative and dedicated biologist in the Chicago office of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. When word reached her that Material Services Corporation apparently illegally destroyed a natural prairie and wetland in its ownership, the Corps approached them about mitigation. To avoid a lawsuit, Material Services agreed on donating $7M to a restoration fund administered by Openlands. This precedent had a national impact in efforts to focus Army Corps resources on returning disrupted hydrology to its original form when practical, rather than channelizing and damming etc. To collaborate strategically with natural ecosystem processes can sometimes produce better solutions than those depending on concrete and steel. 

 

When the City of Chicago sought a mitigation to facilitate the expansion of the O’Hare Airport, they followed that example. One day in its pile of mail, Openlands fished out a regular business envelope containing a check for $26,000,000. Thus began massive benefits for many worthy sites. It reflected the work of a great many people who made conservation needs understandable and urgent in the public mind. 

 

Story three: Childhood Memories Cause Good Trouble 

 

The heroine of this story is Barbara Turner. She donated a rare, high-quality oak woodland as a Nature Preserve and protected it as a steward, pulling garlic mustard and cutting buckthorn. I came into this story when I was hired by the Nature Preserves Commission to help watch over such sites. I asked Barbara to show me some of the rare, interesting wildflowers that were the site’s treasures. She took me from place to place, saying, “They used to be here. I’m sure they were here.” Troubled, she finally said, “Well I hoped not to have to do this. I know we're not supposed to, but I mow a small area of the preserve as a classroom when school children come to visit.” She took me there, and we saw the sought-after plants, including the Endangered wood pea. But we had to face the fact that something was wrong.

 

Others at this time were also starting to realize that the oak woodlands needed fire to maintain their biodiversity, so we sent a letter to the Commission requesting approval for experimental burning of Nature Preserve oak woodlands – which had never been done up till then. 

 

At the next meeting of the Commission, there was a buzz in the air as people had come to witness expected controversy. But when the agenda reached that item, the chair sternly decreed that no approval could be considered except in the context of a specific proposal from a preserve landowner that included a carefully designed study. (Days later he stormed into my office and angrily told me that he wanted to hear no more on this subject!!!) But as soon as the Commission meeting ended, Barbara approached me and offered her woods for the experiment. Botanist Jerry Wilhelm came over and offered to do the study – for free. 

 

The Commission turned down our request. But, as is so often true, the “defeat” was just face-saving and foot-dragging. The Commission soon came up with $20,000 to study burning at four savanna/woodland sites: Reed-turner Woodland, Somme Prairie Grove, Wadsworth Savanna, and Middlefork Savanna. All these oak ecosystem complexes began to receive regular burns, and the data showed that the burns worked. Biodiversity perked up. But damage had been done. At Reed-Turner Woodland, some species were gone and others recovered very slowly.  

 

In the meantime Barbara kept thinking about what seemed to have been happening. She'd been an enthusiastic student and friend of conservationist May Thielgaard Watts, who'd visited the site. Barbara searched her memory and old photos and reported the unsettling realization that her precious woodland had been, decades earlier, much richer and more beautiful. She then proposed another experiment. “What do you think?” she asked. “The so-called lawn around our house is really just the woods, mowed occasionally for many years. What if we stopped mowing and started burning?” At her insistence, we burned right up to the foundation. After two years, her former lawn bloomed with the endangered wood pea as well as violet bush clover, an open woodland species never before reported in Lake County. It turned out that occasional mowing had done less damage to the ecosystem than “letting nature take its course.” 

 

After a review of these experiments, the Commission began standard approvals for controlled burns in oak savannas and woodlands - thanks in large part to the vision and courage of Barbara Turner.

 This post is part 1 of what we hope will soon be all Nine Stories. 

Endnote

Rutger Bregman started "The School For Moral Ambition" with a mostly inspiring vision. Many of the people in these stories seem to embody what he writes about. Unfortunately, in some interviews Bregman focuses a bit much on elites. He argues that, with cultural change, some of "the smartest people in the room" will find riches ultimately tedious and unfulfilling and direct their talents toward what's good and right. Consumerism and "pride of wealth and privilege" would be superseded by lives of less affluence and more happiness and satisfaction. Yes, fine, that would be good for the rich and powerful. But perhaps this thinking could apply in varied ways to the majority of the Earth's people, who want better lives and a better world.  

Acknowledgements 

Christos Economou, Eriko Kojima, Stone Hansard, and Jane Jordan provided helpful proofing and edits.