Thanks.

 I'm Steve Ludwig.  I have lived in central New York nearly all my adult life, having come to Syracuse to do graduate work in literature at Syracuse University.  To relax, I took nature-study walks in the countryside and discovered that I had a strong facility with natural history.  Hiking the land  laid down a depth of impressions that got me through stress, as well as through the grayness of Syracuse winters. In time I came to know the landscape better than I knew that of my home state of Michigan.  And I saw that it was being lost.  Ram's Gulch, home to the rare and local Hart's Tongue Fern, was destroyed in the construction of I-481.  At once, I saw that the destruction of that exquisite natural site took place because it was literally in the direct path of a highway, yet also saw that it was representative of scores of natural sites that one way or another were being laid waste by the automobile. Over the years I came to a turning in my job path (PhD's were driving taxis), and I decided to find a graduate program that focused on landscape preservation.  My choice was the University of Wisconsin-Madison, from which I completed a Masters in Science in Landscape Architecture in 2002 after returning to New York.

  I am a landscape generalist, and there is an advantage in not having specialized, since the narrow training of, say forestry or soil science, always gets in the way of the big picture.  I bring a fresh approach to the many disciplines that relate to the environment and try to integrate what they together can teach us about our world.  In doing this I am like the landowner who wants to make sound environmental decisions for the future of the land.  All of the various fields of knowledge that impact the land or elucidate it are needed to re-store, re-connect, and re-wild all of the places that used to be and can again be some version of Ram's Gulch.  Together we can discover what we need to know.