Background

Fragile Inheritance the organization is named after the book Fragile Inheritance: a painter's ecology of glaciated North America, begun by Aleta Karstad and Frederick W. Schueler in 1985 for Methuen Books.

Written and illustrated over the course of two trans-Canada trips, ambitious and lavishly illustrated with paintings and drawings, the book was passed between publishers in the design stage, and unfortunately remained unpublished. Through three decades since, Fred and Aleta have continued with the same work, the long term monitoring of nature in Canada.

Keeping track of species and ecosystems as they change in many ways, mostly unaccounted for, is an overwhelming task. In the absence of any organized support for the field work, archiving, databasing, analysis, and communication that this entails, Fred and Aleta and their colleagues have dreamed for years of a non-profit organization to support and broaden the scope of this work in a national sense. The time has come for Fragile Inheritance the organization.