Every farm is a story, but rarely is the story told as it is here with such depth, honesty, emotion, and inspiration. Presented here is the remarkable journey of the Cates Family Farm and the people who have learned through the lessons of experience to live in harmony with their landscape and in gratitude for the gifts it brings.

Through three generations (and with young great-grandchildren, a rising fourth), family members have transitioned from seeing themselves simply as “owners” of a farm to instead becoming caretakers of the land and water where they live and work. They have moved from a commodity-oriented mindset to an understanding that the pastures, fields, streams, forests, and the many species, both domestic and wild, that inhabit this landscape are, in reality, a community, not simply a commodity.

This book gives a comprehensive look at the prehistory, history, and present use of this particular piece of land and the peoples and species that have lived here and continue to do so.

The story of the Cates Family Farm can serve as a paradigm for those with an interest in a more restorative, regenerative, perennialized agriculture and an ethical relationship with “place.” It illustrates the movement away from industrialized, chemically dependent, minimally diversified farming to one that more closely mimics nature’s wisdom—an approach to a viable farm business that honors the legacies of the past inhabitants of the landscape and looks ahead to the health and well-being of the generations to come. It is a story of long and hard work, as well as listening. It is the story of a journey toward a land ethic, gratitude, and hope.

Don Greenwood, former chair, Lower Wisconsin Riverway Board;
retired editor, Weekly Home News, Spring Green, Wisconsin, Driftless Area

Protecting Paradise takes the reader through the saga of how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers removed 149 families from their property in southwest Wisconsin to construct a dam on the Kickapoo River—a dam that was ultimately never completed—and how this failed project evolved into a model for cross-cultural, multi-institutional, grassroots ecological protection and low-impact recreation, through an innovative agreement with the Ho-Chunk Nation. From the author's perspective over more than two decades as the founding director, readers are taken through the journey of how this innovative, inspiring, and controversial place came to be, from the influence of the national environmental movement, scientific modeling of the proposed dam and lake, local-scale grassroots activism, and a unique Memorandum of Understanding between a State and Sovereign Nation.

Marcy West served as the executive director for the Kickapoo Reserve Management Board (KRMB) in the formative years of 1996–2021. In Protecting Paradise, she takes the reader on a tour of the 8,600 acres she came to know and love as it evolved through federal government ownership for a proposed dam and constructed lake to the unique arrangement with the state of Wisconsin and Ho-Chunk Nation to own and jointly manage the public property through the KRMB.

Driftless: An Anthology of Voices from Where We Live brings together essays and poems that explore place through the lenses of family, love, work, home and un-homedness, welcome and exclusion, creativity and open space. Here, the reader will find the unique geology and geography of the Driftless Region, queer rural spaces, generational farming communities, the area's indigenous history, European migration, and a contemporary space peopled with creatives.