Stephen Packard Email & Phone Number

He currently collaborates with and counsels a wide variety of efforts to conserve natural areas, wildlife and habitat and “create a culture of conservation” through which people and nature can re-establish mutually nourishing relationships in a changing world. He publishes blog posts at: http://vestalgrove.blogspot.com and http://woodsandprairie.blogspot.com TED talk at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RICTPEFbRh8

Greater Chicago Area

Packard initiated and helped to design and implement many of the Illinois’ larger ecological restoration projects including Bartel Grassland (750 acres), Orland Grassland (960 acres) and the restoration of the North Branch, Poplar Creek, Deer Grove, and Spring Creek Forest Preserves. These collaborations, with thousands of volunteers working at hundreds of sites, served as model for the creation of similar projects by many agencies in other parts of the United States and internationally. He helped assemble and was a founding board member of the Society for Ecological Restoration, which now has chapters throughout the world and is the pre-eminent organization in this flourishing new field. He helped design and initiate Friends of the Forest Preserves, and Chicago Wilderness magazine. To support the volunteers in the Cook County Forest Preserves, he organized a restoration intern program (first through the Conservancy and later through Audubon and Friends of the Forest Preserves) that has introduced the restoration profession to a new generation. He is a national Honorary Director of “Wild Ones: native plants, natural landscapes.”

Illinois

Packard has worked to develop the practice and popular understanding of ecological restoration and biodiversity conservation. He was the primary initiator of the Volunteer Stewardship Network, Mighty Acorns (youth stewardship program), Nachusa Grasslands, and the Chicago Region Biodiversity Council (Chicago Wilderness) – which became a globally respected collaboration of more than 200 national and local conservation-minded agencies and helped establish biodiversity conservation as a core part of the region’s culture. Packard has extensive experience in the restoration of prairies and oak woodlands. His work on oak ecosystems in particular has led to new insights that have clarified ideas about the composition and dynamics of these formerly-vanishing rare communities. Some have referred to this work as the "rediscovery" of this ecosystem.

Illinois