Prairie retrospective

I’m back home sitting at my desk.  Laundry is mostly done and the yard has been mowed.  Time to try to put it all into some perspective. 

Let’s go back to the beginning.  The motivation for the trip, at its most basic, was to see grasslands and grassland birds with the realization that both are in serious declines.  I had the good fortune to see wide open landscapes that seem to have retained most of the functional parts.  The Flint Hills and the Sand Hills are still functional grasslands. 

What quickly changed was that the birds became less of the focus.  The big picture of healthy ecosystems replaced the birds.  I’m still a devout birder, but we can’t allow ourselves to become focused on any one species or taxa.  No bird lives independently of its environment, any more than a fish or human does.  And I think that’s an even more important topic of discussion – the relationship of people to the environment.  Our interest in the environment is also an interest in our survival.  That sounds dramatic, more so than I want to be, but it’s true.  What happens to animals will happen to people.  We all swim in the same pond.

Had you driven through western North Dakota 5 years ago, you might have assumed it would stay wide open.  What reason would you have to think otherwise?  Today you should come to a different conclusion.  The change has been rapid and significant.  The trip could not have played out to tell the tale any better.  I saw what is and what needs to remain, and I saw why we need to make every effort now to protect what we have.  The folks in Kansas have initiated the Flint Hills Legacy Conservation Area as a way to protect one of the last remaining pieces of the tallgrass prairie.  We can’t wait until they’re threatened to begin to act.  We have to be proactive not reactive.  The bad guys move a lot faster than we do; if the firewalls aren’t in place before they get started we have very little hope.

I sometimes think that as conservation professionals we’re little more than environmental janitors.  So much of what we’re doing is cleaning up others’ messes.  The secondary intent of the trip was to increase awareness of the loss of grasslands and grassland birds.  For once I want to prevent the mess.  Wherever possible, I want to keep what we have rather than try to recreate what was.  We have folks doing some amazing things to put some pieces back in place and I applaud their efforts.  There are a lot of messes yet to be addressed.  But there are also places where we have things worth protecting.  I don’t know if I can say if I was successful.  I may have just been preaching to the choir.

I think this wraps up the posts from my prairie pilgrimage.  I will continue to post material to this blog.  As I said previously, my areas of interest include grasslands and grassland birds, shade coffee, energy, and ecotourism, so I’ll extensively on them.  Whether you continue to follow this blog, I hope you’ll choose to act deliberately. 

Don’t just do; choose.