Its sublimity arises from its unbounded extent, its barren monotony and desolation, its still, unmoved, calm, stern, almost self-confident grandeur, its strange power of deception, its want of echo, and, in fine, its power of throwing a man back upon himself and giving him a feeling of lone helplessness, strangely mingled at the same time with a feeling of liberty and freedom from restraint.—Pike 1832
May I not be permitted, in this place, to introduce a few reflections on the magical influences of the prairies? It is difficult to express by words the varied impressions which their spectacle produces. Their sight never wearies.—Nicollet 1838
I think the prairie will die without finding a voice. Its democracy may be against it. Prairie grass never seems to know anybody.—Quayle 1905
My feeling for tallgrass prairie is like that of a modern man who has fallen in love with the face in a faded tintype. Only the frame is still real; the rest is illusion and dream.—Madson 1979
Whatever else prairie is—grass, sky, wind—it is most of all a paradigm of infinity, a clearing full of many things except boundaries, and its power comes from its apparent limitlessness.—Least Heat-Moon 1991
To understand and enjoy them fully, one must be sensitive to the whispers and expect to encounter neither forbidding mountains nor spectacular shorelines. Instead their long, unencumbered vistas are an invitation to look inward toward the soul as well as outward toward the horizon, to look down on tiny prairie wildflowers and upward toward endless cerulean skies with equal appreciation.—Johnsgard 2003
AS I WAS PUTTING the finishing touches on this book, a couple friends with the US Fish and Wildlife Service told me about a new tract of land the Service had just acquired, not too far from the first house I bought when I moved to Minnesota. It was so new they didn’t have signs posted around the perimeter yet. I had to debate whether it was worth a four-hour drive to see it, but some of their photos were just too tempting. It was an amazing tract of native prairie. I saw more individuals of blanket flower, locoweed, downy paintbrush, prairie milkvetch, prairie smoke, at this site than I’ve seen collectively over my career. It was worth the drive. Why was it still prairie? Why wasn’t it a cornfield, or a series of trophy homes, or a gravel pit like the adjacent property? It was still prairie because it still had cattle on it in recent decades.
In each of the following quotes, we can probably substitute “prairie” for “prairie-chicken.” These quotes have two ideas. First, private landowners play a key role in prairie conservation. Second, as we understand more and more of the science of the prairie, we are starting to see that economic uses and ecological goals can mesh very well with a little conversation and planning.
The future of the prairie chicken is in the hands of the landowners of America. (Grange 1939)
The future of the prairie chicken in Missouri is in the hands of all the people in the state, but it depends most of all upon those who use the soil. (Schwartz 1945)
Fortunately, the practices recommended for the most profitable long-time use of grasslands are beneficial to prairie chickens. (Baker 1953)
We don’t always need to build fences, literally or figuratively, and decorate those fences with signs to protect the prairie. Directly or indirectly, those fences and signs can divide people from nature. Here’s a line, with people, society, and the economy on one side and wildlife, plant communities, and ecology on the other. If there’s one theme for this book it’s the role people played historically in the development of the prairie and the role people need to play in the future of the prairie. If there has ever been an ecosystem that shows there’s no good divide between people and nature, it’s the tallgrass prairie.
I’m a huge advocate for public lands. But I also realize that a lot of conservation can happen on private lands. Prairie conservationists need to work with federal and state wildlife agencies. They also need to work with organizations such as The Nature Conservancy or The Prairie Enthusiasts. Just as importantly, they need to become friends with ranchers, beekeepers, and others who work the land. The examples used throughout this book demonstrate repeatedly that what’s often good for ranchers and cattle, bees and beekeepers, is good for conservationists and wildlife. And vice versa. This is the most natural partnership out there.
Yes, some of the smallest remnants in the eastern prairie region do need to be managed very carefully. They almost need to be treated as gardens. No one is advocating grazing or haying in a one-acre cemetery prairie in eastern Illinois or western Indiana.
However, managing prairie landscapes, areas large enough for prairie-chickens, variable fire seasons and frequencies, some grazing and haying, and containing wet, mesic, and dry prairies, can be done in both an ecological and an economic context. In fact, those two words have the same Greek root, oikos. In few other areas of conservation can ecology and economics be so well connected for the mutual benefit of both as they can with prairie conservation.
Is every private pasture managed perfectly? No, but a lot of them are managed pretty well. Grazing gives the conservation and agricultural communities a reason to sit down together and discuss how they can help each other. If land isn’t growing cows, it’s probably going to be growing corn or condos. Of the three, I know which one is the best friend of prairie wildlife.
If we want a vibrant prairie ecology, then we need a robust prairie economy.
In the frequently quoted final sentences of Wallace Stegner’s essay “Coda: Wilderness Letter,” he writes, “We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, as a part of the geography of hope” (1969). I’m not sure this works for the prairie. It’s not enough, you’ll miss too much, if you just go to the edge and look in. Prairie requires entry and immersion.
To know prairie, one must be immersed in it in some way. You don’t come to know the prairie by standing at its edge and looking in; you must be in the prairie and let it get into you. (Drobney 1999)
[M]any of this grand landscape’s best features, paradoxically, are visible only close at hand. (Gruchow 1999)
Grasslands are never best appreciated from afar; distance might well lend enchantment to mountains, but prairies require close and personal contacts to deliver their subtle brand of magic. (Johnsgard 2003)
Once you do learn to look out across, at, and into the prairie, to see the prairie at multiple scales of space and imagine multiple scales of time, you will start to understand the mystery of what’s out there. Or maybe better understand that none of us can understand all that’s out there. Once you get into the prairie, once you fall in love, the grasses and forbs and birds and mammals and clouds and weathers will slowly but surely seep into you.
And here a warning is in order. As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about staring into the abyss, sometimes the prairie will make you fall under its spell. And if it does, something will happen to you on the prairie that probably can’t happen anywhere else. What that something is, is for everyone to find and find out for themselves.
But raise the eyes to the bare prairie, and they sweep the horizon. Nothing stops them. They stare, stare—and sometimes the prairie gets to staring back. (Humphrey 1931)
It’s a dangerous place, this vast ocean of prairie. Something happens to us here. (Norris 1993)
The prairie is both small and big, near and far, intimate and remote, familiar and unknowable. The prairie may be unique in all these paradoxes and contradictions. Perhaps more than anything the prairie is a mixture of sadness and joy. It’s impossible not to feel uplifted standing in the summer prairie with the wind making all the flowers and grasses dance. It’s impossible not to feel downhearted knowing this experience is so rare today.
If it is almost gone, is it worth fighting for that last 1 percent? Yes! Why? We can again turn to Stegner’s “Coda: Wilderness Letter”: “Something will have gone out of us as a people if we let the remaining wilderness be destroyed . . . if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction.” We can’t let that happen. We need to take national, regional, and cultural pride in this once magnificent ecosystem.
Then as to scenery (giving my own thought and feeling,) while I know the standard claim is that Yosemite, Niagara falls, the upper Yellowstone and the like, afford the greatest natural shows, I am not so sure but the Prairies and Plains, while less stunning at first sight, last longer, fill the esthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest, and make North America’s characteristic landscape. (Whitman 1882)
The prairie, in all its expressions is a massive subtle place, with a long history of contradictions and misunderstanding. But it is worth the effort at comprehension. It is, after all, the center of our national identity. (Fields 1888 quoted in Least Heat-Moon 1991)
Every American has the right as part of his cultural heritage to stand in grass as high as his head in order to feel some small measure of history coursing through his veins. (Elder 1961)
The prairie is a land of paradox and contradiction. The tallgrass prairie is both a melting pot and barrier that prevents mixing of species. People largely helped create and shape the tallgrass prairie over millennia. People eliminated the tallgrass prairie in decades. Is the prairie artificial or unnatural, or is it one of the best examples on the planet of how people and the natural world can work together sustainably? People often used the ocean as a metaphor for the early prairie. Today the prairie is a series of tiny islands and atolls in a sea of corn and beans. The landscape that is most alive from a prairie lover’s perspective is often on the ground consecrated to the dead. The prairie is chaotic, confusing, and constantly changing. Over the decades, the science and our understanding of the prairie changes almost as fast as the prairie itself changes. Those changes won’t stop. Although I tried to represent the latest science in this book, eventually this book will look a little old-fashioned as science reveals even more and our understanding changes.
None of that should discourage anyone from getting to know, trying to understand, and falling in love with the prairie in general and their special prairie specifically. The prairie is worth the effort at comprehension. Even if we know that we’ll never reach our goal of complete understanding, this is one of those cases where the journey may be even more important than the destination.
Edward Abbey’s quote from the end of my disclaimer bears repeating because of its importance. “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.” The prairie needs more science. There’s still so much we don’t understand. But even more, the prairie needs poets, artists, writers, and photographers who can capture the beauty and emotion of the prairie. And they need to share that beauty with others. The prairie requires full engagement with both the head and the heart.
Aldo Leopold wondered whether it was even worth asking the question of what a thousand acres of Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo. Let’s ask the question.
Whether you go afield holding a camera, binoculars, shotgun, pen and paper, artist’s brush or pencil, or a child’s hand, ask the question. Whether you’re most worried about gamebirds or songbirds, ask the question. Whether you’re worried about honeybees, monarch butterflies, or regal fritillaries, ask the question. If you’re interested in carbon sequestration to slow climate change, ask the question. If your town is interested in protecting its drinking water or minimizing downstream flooding, ask the question. If you’re interested in the history of the Midwest, ask the question. If you want your children to have the opportunity to hear the lost, plaintive, booming of the prairie chicken, ask the question. If you don’t want to deny future generations the opportunity to drown in a field of big bluestem and feel history coursing through their veins, ask the question.
My hope is that this book gives every reader a new understanding of the science, the history, and the story of the tallgrass prairie. Visit new prairies. Revisit familiar prairies again, and again, and again. Enjoy, immerse, appreciate, absorb, engage, learn, and love. Just get out there.