To Pete and To John and Brent
Disclaimer
THOSE WHO CLAIM to understand the tallgrass prairie often speak loudly and use strong declarative sentences. It’s usually pretty easy to tune them out. There are also those who understand that the prairie is so complex that no one person will ever comprehend all of it or even fully grasp the small segment of the prairie they have spent their life studying, formally or informally. These people speak softly and end many of their comments with question marks. They can be fascinating to converse with. In “Coda: Wilderness Letter,” one of the foundational essays of the conservation movement, Wallace Stegner (1969) quotes Sherwood Anderson, who wrote about the prairies: “I can remember old fellows in my home town speaking freely of an evening on the big empty plains. It had taken the shrillness out of them. They had learned the trick of quiet.” The people who best understand the prairie understand quiet and the art of listening.
This book is a summary of my conversations with many people much smarter and more experienced than I, as well as my own education, research, experiences, and observations. It is a reflection of my own interest in and passion for the prairie.
None of the statements that I make in this book is carved in stone and almost everything is debatable. In fact, many of the topics I cover, such as the very nature of what a plant community is, have been vigorously debated for many decades. There are no final answers to these questions or any winners in the debates. I don’t ask any reader to agree with everything in this book. I do hope this book sparks thought and discussion. What I am trying to portray is the ever-changing nature of scientific perspective as it studies a dynamic ecosystem, the tallgrass prairie.
I rely heavily on the long-term data set from Konza Prairie in eastern Kansas in this book, simply because it is one of the few long-term prairie data sets out there. Cedar Creek, just south of my current home in Minnesota, is another valuable source of information. Both are founding members of the National Science Foundation’s Long-Term Ecological Research program. I stand by the validity of my graphs and think I crunched the numbers correctly, but they were designed to be descriptive, not definitive. They would not stand up to the statistical rigor and peer-review process of a research journal. However, that isn’t the intent of this book.
The modern Midwest is a human-dominated ecosystem. Humans have largely destroyed or replaced a diverse mix of grasses and wildflowers with monocultures of corn or beans. Even before the plow, humans played a large role in structuring the very nature of the tallgrass prairie.
Over my writing desk at home is a watercolor of prairie-chickens titled “Prairie Foghorn” by Ross Hier, my friend and favorite artist. Next to that is the following quote from Edward Abbey from his book The Journey Home (1977). Although written about Abbey’s southwestern deserts, the idea translates to other ecosystems such as the tallgrass prairie. “The moral I labor toward is that a landscape as splendid as that of the Colorado Plateau can best be understood and given human significance by poets who have their feet planted in concrete—concrete data—and by scientists whose heads and hearts have not lost the capacity for wonder. Any good poet in our age at least, must begin with the scientific view of the world; and any scientist worth listening to must be something of a poet, must possess the ability to communicate to the rest of us his sense of love and wonder at what his work discovers.” This book is one person’s attempt to communicate the science as he understands it as well as his love and wonder for the tallgrass prairie.
Grass is the forgiveness of Nature—her constant benediction. . . . Forests decay, harvests perish, flowers vanish, but grass is immortal.—Ingalls 1905
You must not be in the prairie; but the prairie must be in you. That alone will do as qualification for a biographer of the prairie. . . . He who tells the prairie mystery must wear the prairie in his heart.—Quayle 1905
Prairie, to most Americans, is a flat place once dotted with covered wagons.—Leopold 1942a
Newcomers to the prairie are at first disconcerted by its nakedness. Later they will wish it were not so private.—Gruchow 1985
Only grass is eternal.—Erdrich 1994
[T]he Great Plains are more notable for what they are not than what they are.—Johnsgard 2003
HAVE YOU EVER visited two or more prairies and noticed that each one is just a little different than the others? Have you ever visited the same prairie twice and noticed it was a little different than the last time you were there, whether that last trip was a day, month, year, or decade ago? If you can answer yes to any of those questions, then you have the tools to be a prairie ecologist. Or maybe you already are a prairie ecologist and just didn’t know it.
The prairie will always reveal something new to the careful observer. Your hundredth trip should be just as eye-opening as the first. In fact, it should be far more eye-opening since you’ll know much more about what to look for.
One topic I want to emphasize is the idea of uncertainty. What will happen when we burn this prairie? What will the prairie look like the spring after it was grazed? We have a good general idea what will happen, but even today we often have to wait to see how some of the details work themselves out.
The prairie itself is hard to define. What is a prairie? Where are its boundaries? Is it prairie, singular, or prairies, plural? The tallgrass prairie may be the youngest ecosystem in North America. Before the Wisconsin glacier retreated, there wasn’t anything a modern observer would recognize as prairie. Because it’s so young, no species have had time to evolve in the prairie setting. The prairie is a mixed-up mishmash of plants and animals from other ecosystems.
The prairie has played a strong role in the life of this country. The oaks of the eastern forests, the pineries of New England and the Great Lakes region, metals from Minnesota’s iron range, and the coal seams of the Appalachians built this country. The tallgrass prairie region became the breadbasket of the country and of the world.
The energies of our other black fuels, coal and oil, are rather modest, short-term sources of power when compared to the great black loams of the American midlands. (Madson 1982)
Americans were so eager to mine this fertility that the prairie plants and animals that created the soil were gone in a generation, a blink of the eye geologically. It’s interesting to note in the literature how early some regretted this loss.
The Terre Haute [Indiana] prairie, however, has been all reclaimed, or rather, botanically speaking, desecrated by the hand of man, and no portion of it now remains in a state of nature. (Short 1845)
When I first came here in 1843 . . . the great abundance of wild plants, most of them new to me, made a deep impression on my mind, but during those thirty-two years a large number of our plants have gradually become rare and some even completely eradicated. (Kumlien 1876)
Once a forest is cut over, it can regrow because all of the roots, seeds, fungi, and bacteria remain in the soil. The forest looks different after harvest, but it is still a forest. Once settlers broke the prairie, they plowed and planted every year until the original prairie wasn’t even a memory. Especially in its eastern reaches, native prairie exists only as an old cemetery here, the edge of a railroad grade there, and a few lost and forgotten out of the way corners. The eastern tallgrass prairie is the only ecosystem in North America that people have driven to functional extinction.
The prairie is unique in other ways. Geology and climate initially created the tallgrass prairie. People and their fires maintained and expanded the prairie for millennia. Indeed, it’s easy to argue that without people, there may not have been a tallgrass prairie as we think of it. People then destroyed the prairie across much of the Midwest. The current generation is responsible for bringing it back. People have played a strong role in every stage of the prairie’s history.
Our role in the tallgrass prairie challenges us to rethink the human–nature dichotomy. Is it people versus nature, people and nature, people in nature? Are people a part of the natural world? Are people dependent on nature? Is nature dependent on people? Are people only a destructive force when it comes to nature or can they be constructive? In North America we can modify this question even further. Are people who walked to North America from the west across the Bering Land Bridge thousands of years ago more natural than people who arrived in North America from the east by boat, willingly or unwillingly, after 1492?
Although I cite dozens of historians, ecologists, and other prairie experts, there are two women who have had a disproportionate and positive effect on the prairies. Lady Bird Johnson strongly influenced Americans across the country, but especially those living in the grasslands, in her advocacy for native wildflowers (Johnson and Lees 1998). The role the other woman played is best illustrated in the title of her biography, Katherine Ordway: The Lady Who Saved the Prairies (W. D. Blair 1989).
This book is not a how-to on prairie restoration and management. My intent with this book is to give the reader the historical, scientific, and perhaps philosophical background to understand the whys and hows of management and restoration. Second, the reader will understand the role prairies play, and still play, in developing basic ecological theories that scientists apply to other ecosystems. Third, the reader will gain an appreciation for the complexities and dynamics of the tallgrass prairie, both over the last several thousand years, the last century, and the last year. Numerous factors influence the prairie, directly and indirectly, and these factors all interact with one another and have different feedback mechanisms. The prairie changes depending on how we look at it, at what scale, or over what period of time. See the following quotes.
Thus, the effects of fire on grassland N [nitrogen] budgets were modified by grazing, and the effects of grazing on the patch structure of grasslands were modified by fire. (Hobbs et al. 1991)
Species richness is inversely related to grazing intensity, but relative density increases proportionately to grazing intensity. (Zimmerman 1993)
This is just a sample of how complicated things are out there on the prairie. While these statements might not make sense to you at the beginning of this book, they will by the end. This book should both answer some questions you’ve always had and stimulate more questions with your next prairie visit.
Finally, I offer a word of caution and suggestion on how to view both the prairie and our opportunities to do good works in the future. Conservationists in general have maybe not always had the best communications strategy. We can be downright negative in many cases. Leopold (1991) warns us that “conservationists have, I fear, adopted the pedagogical method of the prophets: we mutter darkly about impending doom. . . . But do people mend their ways for fear of calamity? I doubt it. They are more likely to do it out of pure curiosity and interest.”
Much of that doom comes from our experiences. While we sometimes win a few little skirmishes, we all too often lose the larger battles. Battles often result in wounds. I hope this book educates and informs you, but a result of information is that “one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds” (Leopold 1949).
That said, there’s nothing as satisfying as a day in the prairie. I always feel happier and more relaxed leaving a prairie than entering it. Frederick and Fran Hamerstrom were famous prairie-chicken researchers in Wisconsin and graduate students of Leopold. One of Frederick’s favorite sayings was, “good works don’t have to be done in a sepulchral atmosphere” (Corneli 2002). If walking through, sitting in, studying, or sharing the prairie with others doesn’t bring you joy, then something is wrong.
I started writing this book as a continuation of my trying to understand the science and ecology of the tallgrass prairie. Although my understanding did grow, my love grew even more.
After certain principles and facts become clear, however, one comes not only to know and understand the grasslands but also to delight in them and to love them. (Weaver 1954)
There are reasons to be despondent about the history of the tallgrass region. This book should excite and inspire your curiosity and interest, your delight and love, when it comes to the future of the prairie. Describing the short-grass prairie of his youth on the Montana-Saskatchewan border, Wallace Stegner wrote, “I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from” (1962). I am from the prairie, and so are many others.