| This study traces changes in landscape and land tenure patterns in the Kickapoo Valley since the 1930s. The Valley is a watershed in southwestern Wisconsin whose rolling fields and forests unfold like a pastoral idyll. It is also a place that has undergone profound social and ecological transformations. Land ownership has changed dramatically, with influxes of Amish, back-to-the-landers, urbanites looking for weekend homes, Ho-Chunk Indians, loggers, developers, and speculators, all jostling with each other and long-time dairy farmers for space and local influence. Along with new configurations of landowners have come shifting landscape mosaics, so that the overall pattern of fields, forests, and pastures can now vary greatly, even over short distances. Moreover, forests are undergoing succession from predominantly oak-hickory communities to maple-basswood, a trend this study documents at a landscape scale. Within the landscape and history of this rural place are stories that reach to the heart of our hardest environmental questions. Why, for example, do political debates set property against the environment? How, exactly, does property take shape on the land? What kind of form does it give rural communities? Can we find solutions to controversies such as property versus the environment in the midst of complex, overlapping, continually changing ecological and social systems? To answer these questions, many combinations of analysis are needed---historical and spatial, cultural and ecological, qualitative and quantitative. This research adopts approaches from history, landscape ecology, and geography. One of the most important of these has been the development of a geographic information system, or GIS. Compiling data for the GIS required ecological inventories, together with archival research on historical land ownership and land cover. The GIS allows us to follow spatial patterns over time, and then to juxtapose different places (in this case, three townships). This study develops ways to assess interactions between culture and ecosystems in heavily managed rural landscapes. Ultimately, however, the Kickapoo Valley shows the ways in which our culture views nature first and foremost through a prism of property. |
