Aldo Leopold: the father of the conservation movement likely would not understand recent moves to cut funding to education and conservation.

Those of us who love Wisconsin can't explain why our affection runs so deep, but I am afflicted deeply with it and have been since I was a boy 70 years ago and my parents drove us three brothers north from Illinois to spend weeks in the woods and on the lakes. I can't put into words the profound power of this love but it absorbs my whole being in an all-consuming way. Those of us who are so afflicted instantly recognize it in others, including Increase Lapham, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Gaylord Nelson, Warren Knowles, Fran Hamerstrom and Lorrie Otto among the many great hearts and minds who preceded us. We also recognize it in our peers who reside in this grand natural mansion, a home that comforts, welcomes, entertains and thrills us. This recognition bonds us tightly. "You love Wisconsin?" I ask quietly when I see this thing in others as I hike, hunt, fish and witness the symphony of its life. "I share it," I confide and we need say no more. We are now bound permanently in a community best described as family.

From this mysterious, shared attraction to our natural home, our Eden, sprang two of its greatest institutions:

■The progressives, who dedicated themselves to understanding, protecting and sharing the natural assets that spark such intense good feeling, who left us with methods to regenerate the forests, protect the "beautiful sheets of water" that are the inland lakes and wild rivers, guard the integrity of habitats that support our nonhuman relatives. These men and women replanted the forests and prairies, saved threatened species, protected shorelines and wetlands. They spent their votes, energy and taxes on the technologies to keep running water clear and breezes pure, on purchasing and restoring the special places, including glacial moraines, savannas, prairies, cliffs, beaches, wetlands and the ancient pockets of rare plant and animal communities.

■The University of Wisconsin, which was guided by a generous vision called "the Wisconsin Idea" under which the university extended its reach to the state's boundaries to help local citizens learn how to nurture and maintain their place in order to live prosperously, in harmony and at peace. In the classroom, the task was to instill a love of learning and to ask, if only that we assume some humility: What primal forces of creation gave us our blessed place, our Garden of Eden? From this need to understand and search for truth evolved the University of Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Idea, which together have brought us honor and respect.

Today, both institutions are under attack from those seemingly confined by the limits of personal ambition, who lack the wonder that guides us, who see our home as a thing to be sold to the highest bidder, to be closed off, carved up and carried away in boats, trains and trucks, leaving wounds that will take centuries to heal, if ever they do heal.