Protecting Paradise takes the reader through the saga of how the US 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.