Leafy spurge hawkmouth controls the spread of leafy spurge, an invasive species that arrived from Europe in 1827. Photo © James R. Page
In 1960, 3 million acres of land were designated national grasslands, and put under U.S. Forest Service purview. There are twenty national grasslands, all managed by the Forest Service. They share a natural history characterized by remarkable ecological and economic value, political impact, biological diversity and resilience—and a vastness found in few other places in North America. These grasslands are the Loess Hills in Iowa, the Mescalero Dunes in New Mexico, the Black Hills Coniferous Forest in South Dakota, the Little Missouri Mountains in Montana—and others in almost every region. Candace Savage’s book Prairie: A Natural History explores these remarkable ecosystems, celebrating this oft-unsung landscape with perspective and affection.
The following excerpt is the third in a three-part series from Prairie.
In a century where the natural world is slowly dying all around us—when the Earth is losing species at an average rate of one every twenty minutes—the wide-open spaces of the Great Plains are a landscape of hope. Here is an ecosystem that has experienced the full onslaught of modernization in one brief historical instant and that, though battered and torn, still inspires us with its splendor. This is a country filled with light. It is a place where city streets flow out onto the prairie and draw us along until, almost before we know it, we find ourselves rolling down a dusty gravel road, with warm gusts of meadowlark song blowing in through the open window. It is a land where the seasons surge over us like tides, from the sudden upwelling of spring to the languid heat of summer and from the rushing retreat of autumn to the great sparkling silence of winter.
Look up into the darkness of a prairie night and you will see the universe streaming with stars. Suddenly, it becomes possible to picture yourself on the third planet out from the sun, traveling through the mystery and wonder of whatever is out there.
The prairie opens us to the immensities of space and time. Like few other places on Earth, it reminds us that life operates within broad horizons, with sight lines that extend from the past through the present and into the future. Just as the buffalo prairie is gone, though not forgotten, the countryside that we see before us is even now being transformed into the living landscape of tomorrow. As we look at the world that we have inherited from our ancestors, it is impossible not to think of the generations who will come after us. The wild prairie that we leave to them will be our legacy.
Admittedly, the trends of the modern era have not been encouraging. Although the big plow-down of the settlement era is behind us, native prairie is still being lost year by year and bit by bit, whether to cropland, oil fields, strip malls or suburban developments. According to a recent “biological-trends assessment” conducted by a team of researchers from several western universities, a total of about 1.2 million square kilometers (465,000 square miles) of natural grassland has been destroyed in the western United States since the onset of intensive settlement. Of these losses, almost 10 percent—110,000 square kilometers (43,000 square miles), an area half the size of Kansas—were incurred between 1950 and 1990. And although figures for the period between 1990 and the present have not yet been tabulated, it is clear that the destruction is relentless. In Colorado alone, more than 1,100 square kilometers (420 square miles) of farm and ranch land are lost every year, and the rate is accelerating.
Not surprisingly, this continuing assault on the prairie ecosystem imposes an escalating stress on species that rely on wild grasslands for their survival. A study released in 2003 by the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation identified thirty-two species of birds that are “highly dependent” on the Great Plains of Canada and the United States, in that more than half of their population is found in the region at some time of year. This group includes not only permanent, year-round residents, such as prairie chickens, but also fair-weather friends, like Sprague’s pipits and marbled godwits, which are present only during the breeding season. In addition, there is a short list of species—sandhill cranes and common mergansers among them—that crowd onto the southern plains during the winter.
Cowboy Conservation
“To keep every cog and wheel,” the American environmental philosopher Aldo Leopold once wrote, “is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.” But simply retaining all the pieces of the ecosystem will not be enough in itself; we also need places where the cogs and wheels can be put back together. To ensure their long-term survival, grassland species need wild grasslands—wide expanses of native prairie that, through a natural process of disturbance and renewal, are able to maintain a living mosaic of habitats for a full complement of birds and animals. And herein lies another reason for optimism. Despite all the historic losses, large areas of more-or-less natural prairie still exist, especially on the rangelands of the northwestern short- and mixed-grass ecoregions in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas and Nebraska. In fact, a recent study of conservation opportunities on the northern plains identified no fewer than ten regional landscapes that to this day are dominated by expanses of native prairie. Several of these areas—including, for example, the land between the Frenchman River in Saskatchewan and the Milk River in Montana—each encompass as much as 12,000 square kilometers (4,600 square miles), larger than either Jasper or Yellowstone national parks, making them of real significance for conservation. Similar opportunities almost certainly also exist on the southern plains, but they have not yet been mapped and prioritized.
Very little of this land has been set aside in parks or conservation reserves. Across the Great Plains as a whole only about 1 percent of the countryside has been protected by law, less than in any other biome in North America. Instead, the surviving expanses of native prairie are hard-working landscapes that today, as in the past, provide the basis for western cattle production. This is cowboy country. Ranches are not wildlife refuges, and over the years, ranchers have made it clear that large predators and other “vermin” will not find a welcome here. But at the same time, ranching has placed a value on both wild prairie as grazing land and on the esthetics of broad horizons. For many ranchers, maintaining large expanses of native pasture in productive condition has been a labor of love as well as an act of economic self-interest. It is a tribute to their efforts that several recent conservation projects, including Grasslands National Park and Old Man on His Back Conservation Area in Saskatchewan and the Tall Grass Prairie National Preserves in Oklahoma and Kansas, have been established on lands that were previously managed as commercial ranches.
Ranching not only has the advantage of preventing the prairie from being plowed up. It also helps to keep it from becoming fragmented. Anything that takes a bite out of the natural grassland, whether it be a hayfield, an oil well or a pricey ranchette, breaks up the landscape and subtly alters its ecological workings. A study conducted in Colorado showed that the subdivision of ranch land into acreages led to the displacement of grassland birds, such as lark buntings and meadowlarks, and their replacement with robins, magpies and other common and garden species. The pattern was the same for carnivores, with coyotes and bobcats ceding their role as predators to domestic pets. Most worrying of all was the discovery that these cut-up tracts of prairie were much more susceptible than working ranch lands to intrusions by a long list of invasive plants, including such introduced species as smooth brome, crested wheatgrass, leafy spurge and dozens of others. Given an inch of bare ground, these aggressive weeds will literally take a mile, eventually overwhelming and choking out the natural vegetation. The more lines of disturbance are scratched across the country, the more access these invaders gain and the more quickly the native prairie is forced to give way.
Meanwhile, Down on the Farm…
The importance of protecting the surviving horizons of native grassland can scarcely be overstated. But it is not the only urgent priority for prairie conservation. To borrow again from Aldo Leopold, relegating wild prairie to the western rangelands is like relegating happiness to heaven; one may never get there to enjoy it. Happily, however, there are other pleasures. The parts of the country that have been altered by farming still shimmer with life. Roadsides are heady with wild roses; geese explode out of farmers’ fields; red foxes patter around barns and granaries. Although farmland is not prairie, it nonetheless provides living space to many plants and animals that find themselves at home in the prairie ecosystem. Sometimes these lone survivors are all that is left, remnants of a world that has otherwise vanished.
Take the case of the tallgrass prairie. Apart from a relatively small enclave in the Flint Hills and Osage Plains of Kansas and Oklahoma (where the soil is too rocky to till), this ecoregion has been almost 100 percent converted to crop production. Welcome to the row-after-row-after-row-ness of the Corn Belt. All that remains of the native vegetation are small, isolated patches that somehow escaped the plow, leaving a tantalizing glimpse of a country alight with butterflies and flowers. Although some of the fragments are smaller than backyard gardens, each one demands attention and care as a unique example of a critically imperiled ecosystem. (Because of local variations in growing conditions and through pure chance, no two remnants have exactly the same species in the same proportions.) Through the combined initiatives of national and local organizations, many of these prairie remnants are now protected by law and are intensively managed to prevent the incursion of woody invasives and other takeover artists. Similar rescue efforts have begun in the mixed-grass ecoregions.
These islands of survival provide critical habitat for many species at risk: the dickcissel, the regal fritillary butterfly, the ornate box turtle, the prairie rattlesnake and on and on. But, alas, these small, isolated populations remain under constant threat. If some misfortune befalls them—whether through disease or predation or drought—there are no neighboring populations to move in and replace them, with the result that a single disastrous season could wipe them out. The only possible solution is, wherever possible, to create blocks of habitat large enough to support viable populations or to provide corridors between the existing fragments. Hence, the current lively interest in prairie restoration. Going against the historical trend of plowing prairie up, conservation-minded people have begun, on a modest scale, to replant it. This has called for innovation in both equipment and techniques and has begun to spark the development of a native-seed industry. Creating new prairie is tricky and expensive, but it is happening.
The cause of prairie restoration has found some unexpected advocates, among them the Iowa Department of Transportation. Iowa is farming country taken to the extreme, with only scant vestiges of native prairie. What the state does have, however, is a go-anywhere grid of roads, all of which have vegetated margins. Taken together, these strips add up to about 2,000 square kilometers (roughly half a million acres) of unproductive land that requires mowing, spraying and other regular maintenance. In an attempt to reduce costs in the late 1980s, the transportation authorities began to experiment with the use of native plants, on the assumption that they were adapted to local conditions and could look after themselves. Since then, more than 20,000 hectares (about 50,000 acres) of roadside have been seeded, a little more every year, to either a four-grass mixture—typically big and little bluestem, side- oats grama and Indian grass—or to a colorful assortment of native grasses and wildflowers.
The results have exceeded all expectations. In addition to controlling expenses, the flower-rich plantings in particular have become slender oases of life, blooming not only with flowers but also with butterflies. In 2001, for example, researchers found five times as many butterflies and twice as many species in the high-quality restorations as in comparable grassy or weedy ditches. This success has recently inspired the Iowa Transportation Commission to pump millions of dollars into the Living Roadways Program, making the state a leader in what it calls “eco-logical transportation.”
All of these complexities—of rangeland and farmland, easements and frameworks, opportunities and options—can be summed up in two basic concepts. They are the mantras of prairie conservation. The first is to protect and restore wild prairie wherever it still exists, whether as large, connected landscapes or, where no alternative is left, as one-of-a-kind fragments. The second, often overlapping priority is to manage the working landscape for wildness so that it not only serves the interests of people but also supports a diversity of swimming, flying, walking and crawling forms of life. Achieving these goals will not be easy. Failing to achieve them will mean a continuing downward trend for many of the prairie region’s unique ecoregions and species.
These priorities take on even greater urgency in the context of climate change. The grasslands as we know them emerged some ten thousand years ago, at the end of a three-million-year-long ordeal of glaciation. The difference between the desolation of the Ice Age and the birth of the prairies was a natural warming trend that caused the average global temperature to rise by about 5¡C (9¡F). Now, the experts tell us, we are about to experience a perturbation of similar magnitude, but one that we ourselves have triggered. The problem is a thick, insulating blanket of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and other industrial emissions that envelops the Earth and prevents heat from radiating away from the surface. Depending in part on how successful we are in curbing these processes, the average world temperature is expected to increase by somewhere between 1.4¡C and 5.8¡C (2.5¡F and 10.4¡F) before the year 2100. If these predictions are even close to being accurate, the Earth will soon be hotter than at any time in the past million years, and the change will have occurred more rapidly than any on record.
There is no longer any serious debate among scientists about the large-scale consequences of the greenhouse effect. In addition to atmospheric warming, the outlook includes the melting of polar ice packs, a rise in sea levels (with consequent flooding), and an increase in natural disasters such as droughts, fires, hurricanes and tornadoes. But although the big picture is clear—even distressingly so—attempts to produce localized forecasts have so far been far less successful. In the case of the Great Plains, for example, most experts expect the climate to be hotter, drier and more extreme than it has been in the past, with lower water levels in rivers and lakes and a reduced area of wetlands. But nobody knows what will happen.
The wild prairies are, in the deepest sense, a manifestation of the climate. From the ground up, the living world is attuned to wind and rain, sun and snow, seasons of death and seasons of growth. As these basic realities are altered, everything will be touched and change will ripple and ricochet through the ecosystem. On the one hand, human land-use patterns are certain to be transformed, as people attempt to adapt to a rapid-fire succession of opportunities and challenges. Whether these shifts will be positive or negative for wildlife is anyone’s guess. At the same time, the changed climatic regime will also affect wildlife directly, by opening up new prospects for some species (especially generalists) and closing in on others (particularly those that are isolated or have specialized requirements). Are we heading toward a nightmarish future dominated by weeds and pests, in which the prairies are stripped of their special beauty and begin to look like everywhere else?
There is no way to hold back the future. But we can shape the course of events by engaging—fully, deeply, and passionately—with the present. The survival of the wild prairie and its creatures will depend, in no small part, on our ability to ensure their well-being right now. By protecting and restoring wild prairie and managing the working landscape for wildness, we can strengthen and enhance the ecosystem, in all its diversity and abundance, both for our own sake and for the future. This approach is sometimes referred to as a strategy of “no regrets,” because the work is worth doing now, no matter what happens next.