William R. Jordan III

Since 2001 Jordan has been director of the New Academy for Nature and Culture and editor of its online journal Environmental Prospect.

He was a founding member of the Society of Ecological Restoration (1989) and served as SER’s supervisor of administration for its first five years (1989-1993).

In 1984 he organized a symposium to undertake the first systematic exploration of the value of restoration as a technique for basic ecological research. He was senior editor of the resulting book, Restoration Ecology: A Synthetic Approach to Ecological Research.

Jordan worked for 24 years at the University of Wisconsin's Arboretum in Madison. This was the site of early attempts to recreate historic ecological communities, such as tallgrass prairies and maple forests, an effort led by the famed conservationist Aldo Leopold. In 1981 Jordan founded and served as editor of the journal Restoration & Management Notes (now Ecological Restoration), and he was a founding member of the Society of Ecological Restoration.

In 1981, working at the University of Wisconsin arboretum, Jordan founded and edited the journal Restoration & Management Notes (now Ecological Restoration), recognized as the first journal to deal exclusively with the subject of restoration ecology.

He earned a B.S. in biology from Marquette University in 1966, a PhD in botany from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1971, and an MA in journalism in 1975, also from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Bill Jordan (born 1944), more formally William R. Jordan III, is an American botanist and journalist who has played a leading role in the development and critique of ecological restoration as a means of developing an environmentalism that is philosophically more coherent, psychologically more productive, politically more robust, and ecologically more effective. His critique has had a significant influence on environmentalism in the United States and abroad.

Jordan’s critique of environmental thinking stems from his reflections on the pioneering ecological restoration project initiated by Aldo Leopold and a handful of colleagues at the UW-Madison Arboretum in the mid-1930s, and on Leopold’s reflections on land management in "The Land Ethic," the concluding essay in his book A Sand County Almanac. Jordan saw this project, with its commitment to restoration of historic ecosystems, as an early contribution to the development of a form of land management that offers a way for people to achieve what Leopold had called "membership in the land community."