In 1919 Lorrie Otto was born Mary Lorraine Stoeber to Bessie and Ernest Stoeber in Madison, Wisconsin. She graduated with an art major from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1942 and two years later married Owen Otto, son of University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and famous philosopher, Max Otto. It was after she married Owen, who had a sister named Mary, that Mary Lorraine Otto began calling herself Lorrie Otto. She lived in Madison; Portland, Oregon; New York; again in Madison; and Milwaukee before settling down in 1952 with her husband and two young children, Patricia (Tricia) and George, in the Village of Bayside, Wisconsin. Bayside, located 12 miles outside of Milwaukee, was her residence until 2008, when she moved to the state of Washington.
Otto worked to conserve the environment as both a paid teacher-naturalist at Riveredge Nature Center in Newbury (Wisconsin) and as a concerned citizen. Prior to becoming a teacher-naturalist, Otto achieved two major environmental victories. One involved Fairy Chasm, a 19-acre wooded Lake Michigan ravine in her Bayside subdivision. In the early 1960s, the Fish Creek Park Corporation nearly sold the ravine to developers. Recognizing the beauty and worth of the ravine's ecology, Otto learned to identify all the rare plants, led wildflower tours through the woods, attracted media attention, and ultimately convinced enough shareholders in the corporation that the land was worth protecting. By 1970, Fairy Chasm was donated as a nature preserve to The Nature Conservancy.
The second major environmental victory for Otto was the banning of DDT in Wisconsin. After observing dead birds and bats in Fairy Chasm, Otto learned from University of Wisconsin-Madison ornithologist Joseph Hickey that DDT was the likely cause. Shortly thereafter Otto began speaking out against the use of DDT for controlling mosquitoes and Dutch Elm Disease. Not gaining much ground, Otto networked and joined forces with conservation groups, including the Citizens Natural Resources Association (CNRA), to petition the Wisconsin Department of Conservation (now the Department of Natural Resources) for an investigation into the health hazards of DDT. She befriended local scientists, researchers, and conservationists, including Walter Scott of the DNR, who regularly sent her reports, articles, press releases, and bits of proposed legislation, and Charles Wurster, a scientist and leader of a New York conservation group which later became the Environmental Defense Fund. With funds Otto raised through support from CNRA and other groups, Wurster and other experts testified in highly publicized hearings before the DNR. In 1970 Wisconsin became the first state to ban DDT. The scientists and lawyers who gathered as a single group for the first time in Otto's living room the night before the Wisconsin hearings then took the battle to Washington D.C. DDT was banned in the United States in 1972.
In the decades that followed the DDT hearings, Otto devoted her professional and personal life to the cause for which she is most famous: promoting natural landscaping (landscaping with native plants). Through forums such as a monthly column called “Lorrie's Notes,” Madison WHA-FM radio appearances, a Viacom cable television series she produced called Earth Care, and a variety of writings, conference engagements, public appearances, and adult education classes at Riveredge, Otto educated Wisconsin citizens, municipalities, and agencies about natural landscaping. In the mid 1970s, Otto again immersed herself in a highly publicized court battle, this time raising money for a New Berlin, Wisconsin resident, Donald Hagar, who wanted to maintain native plants in his yard. In 1977 Otto influenced a group of women to form the first chapter of The Wild Ones, a natural landscaping club that grew to dozens of chapters across several states during Otto's lifetime. In the early 1990s, Otto helped write and publish CNRA's roadside vegetation booklet, a project she worked on for several years.
Otto's efforts and successes conserving Wisconsin's lands, plants, and wildlife earned her many awards and recognition. She went from being nicknamed “The Weed Lady” to “The Godmother of Natural Landscaping.” In 1999 she was inducted into the Wisconsin Conservation Hall of Fame, an honor she shares with Aldo Leopold, Gaylord Nelson, and John Muir.
