Aldo Leopold, Wisconsin ‘s most famed conservationist, urged his students to simply “pay attention. ‘ ‘
He was talking, of course, about more than just the wandering attention spans of students in the classroom. He was explaining an approach to understanding how the natural world works. It was this approach that motivated Leopold to rise before dawn, take his cup of coffee and a notebook to the stoop of his old shack near the Wisconsin River, and wait to hear the morning ‘s first bird songs.
For UW-Madison botanist Don Waller, Leopold ‘s instruction to be attentive to the changes on the landscape around us has been a driving force behind his teaching and his research.