Craig Limpach is the president and founder of the ecological design firm, Genius Loci, Inc. The Latin term genius loci translates to "spirit of place”. Classically trained and educated in landscape architecture, his work marries the field of ecological restoration with the world’s garden traditions by utilizing only native plants to create an ecology of place. His award winning projects have spanned the grounds of universities, a housing development, public spaces, and private residences. He also works in the field of regenerative agriculture, redesigning farms on an ecosystem model that utilizes native plants and animals as commercial food crops.

Though Craig has been a student of nature his entire life, his professional journey began in psychology, which he studied for five years at Ohio State University and the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. He combined nature and psychology working at wilderness camps with troubled youth in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Tennessee.

As a student in Fairbanks, Craig had the opportunity to work in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on Alaska’s North Slope. Immersed in an intact ecosystem with a full biological community of muskox, caribou, arctic foxes, wolves, pristine rivers teeming with fish, and the unbroken natural rhythm from time immemorial, he learned what it meant to be a good citizen from a grizzly. This life-changing experience led him to shift from the human construct to an ecological one. Craig then spent twelve years as a field biologist working on bird, marine mammal, and plant surveys in seventeen states for several agencies, including: the U.S. Forest Service; the National Park Service; the Army Corps of Engineers; the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences; and Whitefish Point Bird Observatory, as well as private corporations. One of his peak life experiences was a close encounter with three wolves on an island in Lake Superior. He also founded a river advocacy group, Friends of the Black River, in Ohio, his birthplace.

Drawing on his experiences in Alaska, Craig became increasingly interested and active in ecological restoration. He envisions a renewed wild landscape that benefits not only nature but individuals and human culture as a whole, believing that all humankind’s troubles can be traced to a single source—that of deep alienation from nature. In pursuit of a skill set that would allow a greater avenue of ecological healing and artistic expression, Craig returned to school at Ohio State University for landscape architecture and eventually founded Genius Loci, Inc. He has been intimately restoring ecology for his clients for over twenty years: “By listening to the land, we becomes its voice.”

Craig is a Buddhist/animist, deep ecologist, writer/poet, and artist. He enjoys his own personal wild garden of over 220 plant species with his cat Cricky, and continues the spiritual practice of subsistence hunting as learned from Indigenous people in Alaska.

Podcasts, Poems, and Articles by Craig Limpach