Wisconsin Public Television	University Place		Wisconsin Academy Fellow:	Stanley A. Temple		4/27/14	UP5776  cc [APPLAUSE]  >> I have to make a confession that I've rarely made in public. I was born with a serious and untreatable condition that has persisted for my entire life. Much to my mother's dismay, symptoms, such as keeping menageries of wild animals in my room... [LAUGHTER] And frequent truancy for school when outdoor activities seemed much more interesting than the classroom became apparent at a very early age. Along the way, I had many enablers who sort of helped me cope with my condition. Early on, Rachel Carson gave me encouragement and helped me understand that it wasn't particularly nerdy to be an eight-year-old bird watcher. [LAUGHTER] Late in life when I worked at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, the staff at the museum provided frequent cover for me when I would show up in the middle of the week during school hours. No one ever asked why I was there. [LAUGHTER] It was also during this time as a teenager that I discovered that I was not the only one with this condition. Aldo Leopold gave me a clue in the opening sentence of A Sand County Almanac: "There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot." Finally, in 1979, my condition was given a name by my friend and colleague EO Wilson. 

I had biophilia. [LAUGHTER] That innate, unwavering concern and attraction to other species and nature in general. My biophilia was relatively benign until the age of eight, and that was when, for the first time, I grasped the concept of extinction. And it was really troubling to me that there were all of these wondrous species that I would never see because we human beings had pushed them over the brink before I was born. My family recounts that I was in a funk for months. [LAUGHTER] But I was saddened and outraged that we would do something like this to the things that I had come to know and love. Well, true to my youthful pledge, I pursued a career focused on saving species and the habitats on which they depend. Through my research in teaching and conservation at the University of Wisconsin and my public service to conservation organizations in Wisconsin and around the world, I was able to make a difference. Species extinctions were prevented and important natural areas were protected. But there was always a troubling obstacle to my efforts because most people didn't share my biophilia, at least not to the extent that they were willing to make sacrifices in order to preserve biodiversity. 

Following in Aldo Leopold's footsteps at the University of Wisconsin, of course, I was greatly influenced by his thinking. And as I approached retirement, I suddenly came to the realization that I had spent probably too much of my time generating and disseminating what Aldo Leopold called ecological knowledge in hopes that if people simply knew the nature of the problems they were creating that they would change their behavior. Well, as Leopold noted, ecological knowledge alone is insufficient to change behavior. It needs to be coupled with an ecological conscience, a sense of what's right and wrong. And if you have an ecological conscience and then are given ecological knowledge, you're likely to make the right choices and change your behavior. And it dawned on me that I had basically failed to address this key part of this solution to the problems that I had been addressing throughout my career. And I realized that I had mostly interacted with people who shared by biophilia. I basically interacted with the choir. These were people who had an ecological conscience and whose minds were pretty much made up as mine was. Since retiring from academia, I am trying to address that oversight in my career. 

And the way that I've been doing that is to try to reach out to more general audiences, focusing on two very important themes. Climate change, in this case using Aldo Leopold's phenological data, the careful meticulous records that Aldo Leopold kept of the timing of seasonal events in the natural world to get people to recognize, as John Magnuson did, that climate change is happening in their own backyard and they can observe it in the species that live around them. That second that I'm tackling currently in 2014 relates to my core interest in the biodiversity crisis, and that is using the 2014 centennial of the passenger pigeon's extinction as a very teachable moment about the biodiversity crisis. And as many of you will probably know, I am pulling out all the stops this year, trying to reach as many audiences as I possibly can with this message. And to show you the lengths that I have gone to, last week I scored one of my real coups. Capital Brewery is going to be introducing Passenger Pigeon Pale Ale. [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE]  On September 1st, the day that Martha, that last passenger pigeon, died in her cage at the Cincinnati Zoo. Some of you will also be interested that, venturing far outside my comfort zone, we have also managed to get the University of Wisconsin Symphony Orchestra to perform the first symphony ever written in the United States, which was written by the European immigrant Anthony Philip Heinrich in honor of the passenger pigeon. It has been performed once in the world. [LAUGHTER] In 1857 in Prague. 

[LAUGHTER] So this year perhaps the University of Wisconsin Symphony will be the first to premiere it in the United States. And any event, I'm very hopeful that I can continue to make a difference, and I certainly look forward to working with the Wisconsin Academy on these and other mutual interests. [APPLAUSE]