Terrie Cooper. Submitted.
Cooper receives lifetime achievement award
If we’re lucky, the story goes like this: you spend your career doing what you love, 25 of those years with one organization. You retire. Shortly after, you’re honored with a lifetime achievement award recognizing and celebrating your life’s work.
That’s the story (so far) of Terrie Cooper.
Cooper received the 2025 Harold “Bud” Jordahl Lifetime Achievement Award this week from Gathering Waters, Wisconsin’s Alliance for Land Trusts.
“I am so deeply honored, and humbled, to receive this award for what to me was my life’s purpose,” Cooper said. “Since I was a young girl, I have dreamt about helping animals and protecting nature. I am so blessed I followed my heart and collaborated with others to make that dream come true.”
The award honors individuals whose leadership and dedication have had a lasting impact on land conservation in Wisconsin. The award is one of five Land Conservation Leadership Awards that Gathering Waters recently announced.
“Every year, Gathering Waters honors our conservation leaders through the Land Conservation Leadership Awards for their dedication to protecting Wisconsin’s land, water and wildlife,” said Mike Carlson, Gathering Waters executive director. “We extend our thanks and gratitude to these individuals for their efforts to further land conservation, resulting in lasting changes around the state. We’re excited to celebrate their accomplishments.”
Two Decades of Growth and Stewardship
Cooper, who lives in Ellison Bay, spent 25 years with the Door County Land Trust (DCLT), retiring in October 2024. When she joined the organization, founded in 1986, it had protected 1,000 acres. Today, that number exceeds 10,000 acres.
“Many of the land protection projects we’re finalizing today began with conversations she sparked years ago – proof of her long-view vision and ability to build trusted and enduring relationships in the community,” said DCLT Executive Director Emily Wood.
Different people used the same words when describing Cooper: enthusiastic, inspirational and passionate, with high emotional intelligence and numerous natural abilities, including teaching and mentoring.
“She didn’t just love the natural world, she inspired others to see its beauty and fight for its protection,” Wood said.
Former DCLT executive director Dan Burke, who hired Cooper in 1999 after a brief conversation at a land trust convention, saw that early on.
“More than anything else, it was her reputation and natural ability to bring people together that really intrigued me,” said Burke, who left the DCLT in 2016 and currently works for the City of Boulder, Colorado, as its Director of Open Space and Mountains. “Her excitement, almost giddiness, to return home to help protect the iconic places that define Door County was contagious.”
At the time, Cooper was living in Sheboygan, but Door County was the birthplace of her lifelong love affair with nature. This is where she had moved with her mom and three siblings at 9 years of age; this is where she said she discovered nature as her place of refuge, stability and connection.
That discovery guided her career path. Upon graduating from Gibraltar High School, she first earned a BS in Biology/Conservation and Secondary Education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison; later, she took an M.S. in Natural Resources Management/Environmental Education.
She taught at nature centers from Milwaukee to Eagle River, becoming involved in a land protection project in Sheboygan, where she founded the Sheboygan Area Land Conservancy (now Glacial Lakes Conservancy). That work led her to the convention where she met Burke – and ultimately, home again.
“I saw first-hand how she grew in tandem with the organization and how her fortitude, her heart, and her moral certainty around the importance of conservation shaped the Land Trust, Door County, and the next generation of conservationists,” said Laurel Duffin Hauser, president of the DCLT board when the organization hired Cooper.
During her DCLT tenure, Cooper successfully co-authored over $30 million of state and federal land acquisition grants and worked on approximately 216 projects – some high-profile, like Grandview Park at the top of the Ellison Bay hill, and Pebble Beach in Sister Bay.
While others drew less awareness, all were important, said Roy Thilly, DCLT board president, who coordinated the nomination package for the Gathering Waters award and wrote the official letter.
“They are projects that protect many acres with precious wetlands, rare orchids and other at-risk native plants, Niagara Escarpment, creek, stream and lake shoreline, wildlife corridors, boreal forest, prairie and migrating bird habitat, on the mainland and islands of the Door,” he said.
A Shifting Landscape and the Work Ahead
Cooper sees conservation as a creative process rooted in community, but worries development is outpacing protection. Only about 10% of the land in Door County is protected.
“In Oconto, it’s 22% because they have county forests, state forests,” she said. “Even Green Bay has 14% protected. The number here in Door County is low.”
As climate change shifts migration patterns of both flora and fauna, Cooper said open land must also serve as wildlife corridors.
“Some of the work of the Land Trust is looking at these corridors,” Cooper said. “Even the tundra swans are up here in the winter – that did not use to happen. The grassland birds weren’t here 150 years ago because this was all forest.”
One of Cooper’s tools is education. One of her ideas is to overlay a zoning map on a stretch of open land to show what it could be if built out.
“More people would understand what the future could hold; what’s at stake,” she said.
Cooper referenced a quote by Aldo Leopold: “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” She said she lives that, seeing what others don’t – the damage beneath the beauty.
“What broke my heart was to see along Cottage Row [in Fish Creek], putting up out-of-scale buildings, taking down all the cedar trees, widening the roads,” she said. “And they don’t really understand what they’re living on, the fragility, the thin soil, the fractured rock.
“To me, it’s biodiversity,” she continued. “I want people to understand and really appreciate the uniqueness of Door County, the species, all the microclimates and habitats; it’s a real microcosm of diversity. I’d like people to appreciate that and the fragility of it – and not just think about recreation, honestly.”
Her post-retirement plans are to share that knowledge. She is helping document DCLT history, plans to keep leading hikes, and wants to write.
“I can ID birds and plants – I’m a naturalist – but the things we’ve been talking about are what I’d like to write about,” she said. “And people are seeking that information. They want to understand, and when they do, things can change.”
Excerpt from “A Journey in Time” by Terrie Cooper, from The Nature of Door: Door County Writers and Artists on Preservation and Place, 2006, (Norb Blei’s) Cross+Roads Press, Ellison Bay.
“I am in love with this place, I am in love with all these special wild places that define Door. They have shaped the person I am, the way I see the world, the passion I feel for my life’s purpose, the sadness I feel at times in how quickly things are changing here and the joy I feel in the critically important work I do.”