[media-credit name=’RAY PFEIFFER / Herald Photo’ align=’alignright’ width=’336′][/media-credit]University of Wisconsin professor William Cronon spoke Tuesday about the importance of Wisconsin's geography in shaping the state's history and culture.

Cronon's talk was the first in a series of lectures honoring the late Wisconsin Sen. Gaylord Nelson and his influence in preserving the state's environment.

Presenting his essay "Landscape and Home: A Sense of Place in Wisconsin," Cronon spoke eloquently about his experiences within Wisconsin's wilderness and the work Nelson did to maintain those wildlife areas.

"We're all children of 'Earth Day,'" Cronon told the audience packing the Wisconsin Historical Society auditorium, referring to the national holiday Nelson helped found. "There was a man in 1970 (the year the holiday was officially recognized) who taught us it was possible to make a difference, to make the world a better place."

Before reading from his self-described "love letter to the state of Wisconsin," Cronon added it was Nelson who made the preservation of the wilderness he wrote about possible.

"There's very little designated wilderness in the state of Wisconsin, and where there is, it's because of Gaylord Nelson," Cronon said.

Cronon also spoke highly of the many educational opportunities that institutes, such as the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, provide for students at UW.

"Few universities on this planet have as huge a tradition of environmental education," Cronon said. "And Wisconsin is better for that fact."

As a research professor of history, geography and environmental studies at UW, Cronon has focused much of his research on the role landscapes have played in the integration of environmental and social histories.

"It's fascinating to read the landscape as a place of many stories," Cronon said. "Think about Wisconsin's environmental tradition, the balance between farming and wilderness — millions of ordinary folks that have permanently altered the land we see today."

Cronon used his childhood experience of "spelunking" — the exploration of caves — to symbolize what a region's landscape teaches.

"Caves exist not only in natural places, but in human time and culture," Cronon said. "Just by talking to the neighbors, you learn the history of Wisconsin."

Cronon went on to describe the stories he heard of caves being used in Wisconsin's Underground Railroad to hide people escaping slavery, as refuges for draft-dodgers and "at least two were simply called 'counterfeiter dens.'"

Cronon also discussed the work of three historians who have their roots near the small Wisconsin town of Portage.

The most important of these historians was Frederick Jackson Turner, who was born in Portage in 1861 and theorized about the historical impact of the frontier West on American history.

Cronon used Turner and the other historians to further his main argument that landscape plays an important role in molding a region's history.

"[Turner] reminded colleagues of a specific insight," Cronon said. "Frontier history was nothing more than [a] making of the American landscape."

Students left Tuesday's lecture impressed with Cronon's words.

"It was great," UW junior Adam Schumaker, whose geography class has been studying the cultural impacts of environment, said. "It was an awesome synthesis of what we've been learning.”