Prairie: A Natural History

For a long time it has come back to us in wishes, this great prairie and these beautiful canyons.

IN A CENTURY when the natural world is slowly dying all around us—when wildness has been pushed to the margins—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.

The raucous call of the yellow-headed blackbird is fading from parts of the prairies because of regional declines in the population of this species. Loss of wetland habitat, intensified by drought, may be the root of the problem. Overall, the species is secure.

Admittedly, the trends of recent decades 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, wind farms, strip malls or rural subdivisions. According to a recent assessment, about 425,000 square miles (1.1 million square kilometers) of natural grassland have been destroyed in the western United States in the last 150 years. Of these losses, almost 10 percent—42,000 square miles (110,000 square kilometers), an area nearly half the size of Wyoming—were incurred between 1950 and 1990. Although current statistics are not readily available, the destruction has clearly not stopped. We can rip up 10,000-year-old grassland in an instant, but it is beyond our powers to create it.

Almost as worrying as the outright disappearance of native prairie is the degradation of what is left, whether through overgrazing, fragmentation by energy development, or the intrusion of invasive plants. Not surprisingly, this incremental damage—death by a thousand cuts—is taking a toll on species that rely on wild grasslands for their survival. Take birds, for example. A study released in 2003 by the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation (cec) identified thirty-two species of birds that are “highly dependent” on the Great Plains of Canada and the United States, in the sense that more than half of the 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. By analyzing data from the Breeding Bird Survey (a standardized count conducted each year since 1966 in both Canada and the United States), the cec determined that more than 60 percent of the species that rely on the Great Plains are declining in abundance. In contrast, 23 percent of woodland species and about 28 percent of all bird species in North America are experiencing losses.

Once restricted to the foothills and aspen parklands, mountain bluebirds expanded eastward across the plains following settlement. Their initial success was dampened by competition from house sparrows and European starlings (both introduced from Europe). Fortunately, the provision of nesting boxes has helped to ease the situation in many localities, and these bluer-than-sky-blue creatures still add a shock of color to spring on the western prairies.
Arthur Savage photo

A similar study in 2005 focused exclusively on upland prairie birds— Swainson’s hawks, killdeers, meadowlarks, bobolinks, long-billed curlews, and the like. Of the thirty-seven species under consideration, all but five were found to be in decline. What do these “prairie canaries” have to tell us about the state of our grassland ecosystems? And if prairie birds are suffering, how can we be confident that the other critters out there (the rodents and creepy-crawlies, say, that inspire less interest) are managing any better?

> THE SKY IS ROUND

Lakota elder Nicholas Black Elk, Hehaka Sapa, was born on the Little Powder River near what is now the Montana/Wyoming border in 1863. He died on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in 1950. This quotation is taken from the book Black Elk Speaks, which he published in 1932 with coauthor John G. Neihardt:

Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves.

By now, you may be wondering what happened to the “landscape of hope” that you were promised a few minutes ago. We’re lovers in a dangerous time, and preserving the splendor of the living world is a global challenge. As Bruce Cockburn’s lyrics remind us, “nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight.” Yes, the trends are disheartening. Yes, the risks are real; but so is the potential for renewal. In spite of everything, native grassland still persists across the Great Plains, whether as isolated remnants in the Corn Belt or as vast sweeps of rangeland in the western provinces and states. And even though many of the prairie’s special creatures are under severe stress, it is encouraging to remember that every single one of them is still with us. The only known exceptions are the passenger pigeon, a bird that was driven from superabundance into oblivion by market hunting in the nineteenth century, and the Rocky Mountain locust—the scourge of pioneer agriculture—which is thought to have vanished around 1900. A number of important subspecies have also been lost to the past, including the prairie-adapted races of wolves, grizzly bears, and bighorn sheep, each with its own genetic innovations.

Any human-caused extinction is a cause for regret. Yet given the intensity of development on the prairies in the last hundred-plus years, this record is better than anyone could have dared to hope for. It is a reminder that the grasslands and their native species are adaptable and tough, capable of coping with blizzards, fires, and hundred-year drought. Within limits, they can even cope with us. Yet natural adaptability on its own would not have been enough to bring the full complement of species through a century of crisis. Faced with rapid and violent change, several of the region’s unique life-forms would almost certainly have disappeared without the intervention of conservation-minded people. The survival of species like the bison stands as proof that people who love the prairie and take a stand on its behalf are the last, best hope of the wild West.

> GRASSLAND-DEPENDENT BIRDS

According to a report entitled the “Importance of North America’s Grasslands to Birds,” there are about three dozen avian species that are critically dependent on the Great Plains grasslands of Canada and the United States for survival. In each case, at least half of the continental population is found in the region during all or part of the year, often in association with native grasslands and natural wetlands. The list is arranged in declining order of dependency, with birds that rely on the plains exclusively, or almost exclusively, at the top and those that are more widely distributed at the bottom. Asterisks indicate species that have been highlighted by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service as “species of conservation concern.”

Year-Round

* lesser prairie chicken
* greater prairie chicken
sharp-tailed grouse
* McCown’s longspur

Nonbreeding season

Smith’s longspur
sandhill crane
common merganser

Breeding season

* Sprague’s pipit
* marbled godwit
* upland sandpiper
* mountain plover
  blue-winged teal
* Swainson’s hawk
* Mississippi kite
  western meadowlark
* Baird’s sparrow
* chestnut-collared longspur
* lark bunting
* grasshopper sparrow
* piping plover
  yellow-headed blackbird
  western kingbird
* ferruginous hawk
  canvasback
* black tern
  Wilson’s phalarope
  gadwall
* Nelson’s sharp-tailed sparrow
  northern shoveler
  willet
* marsh wren
* long-billed curlew

The story of environmental resistance on the Great Plains goes at least back to 1872 and the bloody era of the bison slaughter. In a year when 2 million bison were killed for their hides—their carcasses left to rot—a man named Samuel Walking Coyote took the exceptional step of rounding up seven orphaned calves and driving them from the Milk River country to his home on the Flathead Reservation in western Montana. There they and their burly descendants soon found their way into the hands of two local ranchers, Charles Allard and Michel Pablo, the latter a reformed buffalo hunter who wanted to make amends for his involvement in the bloodbath. Over the next twenty years, as the last of the wild herds were exterminated, Pablo and Allard devoted themselves to breeding and rearing their captive stock. By 1891, the two men possessed around thirty-five head, making theirs one of the largest herds of bison in existence. (The other survivors included a handful of stragglers in Yellowstone National Park, plus a couple of dozen private herds in Canada and the United States, with a combined population of two hundred to three hundred bison.)

Proving that conservation can be good business, Pablo and Allard managed their herd successfully for the next thirty years, selling hides and mounted heads and supplying live animals to zoos, parks, and other ranchers. Then, in the early 1900s, a change in government regulations opened the Flathead lands to homesteading—an intrusion that Pablo and Allard were helpless to resist—and there was no longer any place for them or their bison. Was the species finally being pushed into oblivion? Faced with this bleak prospect, a group of prominent eastern conservationists formed the American Bison Society, one of the first national environmental groups in North America, in 1905. Its objective was to establish wildlife refuges and, while there was still a chance, stock them with some of the captive bison. In short order, two small blocks of land were acquired, the Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge in Oklahoma and the National Bison Range in Montana, the latter situated on what until then had been Flathead land, a maneuver that continues to be a bone of contention.

There are now about 500,000 bison on the Great Plains, up from a few hundred at the turn of the last century. Only a small fraction (about 4 percent) are managed for conservation. Small herd size and an inadequate land base frustrate efforts to maintain the species.

With the refuges in place, whether by fair means or foul, it was time to bring on the bison. A deal was struck with Pablo and Allard for the purchase of their herd, but Congress vetoed it as a waste of taxpayers’ dollars. The Bison Society then set to work collecting private donations, in nickels and dimes, and ultimately raised enough funds to purchase a few head of breeding stock. Meanwhile, news that the Pablo-Allard herd was for sale sped north to Banff, Alberta, where it reached the ear of park superintendent Howard Douglas. A conservationist who already oversaw a small herd of bison in Rocky Mountain (now Banff) National Park, Douglas persuaded his superiors in the parks service to buy the Pablo-Allard outfit and transport the animals to Elk Island National Park, near Edmonton. Although it took six successive spring roundups to catch the half-wild beasts, just over seven hundred animals were eventually transferred across the border to relative safety.

Elk Island was supposed to be a stopover on the way to the animals’ real home, the brand new Buffalo National Park near Wainwright, Alberta. About fifty of the animals managed to evade capture, however, and had to be left behind at Elk Island. The rest of the animals were duly transported to southern Alberta, where some of them were eventually crossbred with cows in an attempt to make them more amenable to domestication. Most of the bison in commercial production today carry cattle genes from this kind of misguided experiment. So, too, do many of the bison in Wood Buffalo National Park in northern Alberta, where the Wainwright herd—by then 6,700 strong—was transferred during World War ii. The escapees at Elk Island, by contrast, are thought to breed true to their ancestral stock, as 100-percent-pure-and-unadulterated plains bison. (Other sources of pure plains-bison genetics include the herds at Wind Cave and Yellowstone national parks, in South Dakota and Wyoming, respectively, and likely those at Henry Mountains State Park in Utah, Sullys Hill National Game Preserve in North Dakota and Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.) Of all the bison alive today, less than 1.5 percent are the Real Deal from a genetic point of view, and it is more by good luck than good management that we have any at all.

If there is a moral to this story, it is that prairie conservation is a high-stakes, high-risk undertaking, with a surprise at every bend and a constant call for new strategies and alliances. Plains bison would not have survived the last century without human help, however bumbling and misguided that “help” has sometimes been. The fact that the species exists today is a tribute to a fractious and imperfect collaboration between ranchers and city slickers, individuals and groups, Natives and non-Natives, citizens and civil servants, each group following its own bent—and with a little luck thrown in at critical moments. By engaging the problem from different angles, a diverse coalition of people came up with diverse approaches that, over time, have permitted them to confront a series of unexpected challenges. Just as an ecosystem relies on the interplay among species, so conservation depends on the interplay among people, with all their differences.

These days, the bigwigs in bison conservation are beginning to dream about boosting the recovery effort into a whole new dimension. In their minds’ eyes, they can already envisage several herds of pure plains bison, each at least a thousand animals strong, roaming over wide vistas of windswept grassland. (Canadian Forces Base Suffield in Alberta, Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge in Montana, and the Pine Ridge region of South Dakota and Nebraska are among the locations that have featured in these speculations.) Ideally, these populations would be free not only of cattle genes but also of cattle diseases, like anthrax and brucellosis, yet would be subject to a full suite of predators— perhaps grizzlies and certainly wolves—and other natural, evolutionary pressures. That’s what it will take, the experts tell us, for plains bison to advance from mere survival toward restoration as the living, breathing embodiment of the prairie ecosystem, capable not only of restoring ecological function but also of “inspiring, sustaining and connecting human cultures.” Is this just a pipedream? Or might this hopeful vision be just the spark we need to bring diverse interests together over a fresh pot of joe and get us talking to one another about the future?

Bison carry the romance of the grasslands on their broad shoulders, so it is perhaps not surprising that they continue to inspire people to take action on their behalf. But many other grassland-adapted species have also benefited from human intervention. One thinks, for example, of the swift fox, a small, bat-eared, rodent-hunting canid that was once widely distributed across the Great Plains but that, after settlement, became severely diminished in both population and range. Thanks in large part to a captive-breeding program initiated by Beryl and Miles Smeeton of the Cochrane Ecological Institute, the species has been reintroduced to an area in southeastern Alberta and southwestern Saskatchewan from which it had disappeared, and a similar recovery is also under way on the Blackfeet reservation in Montana. Meanwhile, reintroductions are in progress on Kainai (Blood tribal) lands in Alberta and at Badlands National Park and the Bad River Ranches in South Dakota. At the same time, a host of agencies and individuals are engaged in the conservation of other organisms, from endangered prairie orchids to native butterflies and bees to rattlesnakes and other reptiles that rely on native prairie.

“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—broad 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. 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. To this day, there are at least ten regional landscapes on the northern plains that are dominated, as far as the eye can see, by expanses of native prairie. Several of these areas encompass as much as 4,600 square miles (12,000 square kilometers), larger than either Jasper or Yellowstone national parks, making them of real significance for conservation. With this in mind, the World Wildlife Fund recently identified the northern plains as a “biologically outstanding” habitat and one of its Global 200 targets for biodiversity conservation. Opportunities for large-scale conservation on the southern plains are also coming into focus.

Very little of this land has been formally protected by law. In fact, across the Great Plains as a whole only about 1 percent of the countryside has been set aside in parks or conservation reserves, less than in any other biome in North America. 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 varmints like prairie dogs, wolves, and wild bison won’t find a warm 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 tame pasture, a pricey ranchette, or an oil field with its network of service roads, breaks up the landscape and subtly alters its ecological function. 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 introduced species such 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.

One way to prevent these losses is to keep livestock on the range and to maintain the historical use of the land for grazing. Perhaps the best-known proponent of this approach to conservation is billionaire-businessman-turned-cowpoke Ted Turner. In an attempt to disprove the adage that the best way to make a small fortune in the livestock industry is to start with a large one, Turner has invested a portion of his wealth in a string of ranches across the Great Plains, with the intention of showing the world that conservation can pay. Now the largest bison producer in the country, with a combined herd on his various holdings of some forty thousand to fifty thousand head, he makes it a policy to stock his ranches below industry standards, both as a means of saving money (no need to provide extra feed during droughts) and as a safeguard against overgrazing. What’s more, through the Turner Endangered Species Fund, he and his family are attempting to improve the prospects of prairie dogs, black-footed ferrets, and other species at risk both on the Turner properties and elsewhere. And finally, he has launched a chain of restaurants under the banner of Ted’s Montana Grill, where diners can share his taste for prairie conservation.

The livestock industry has been the subject of intense criticism from environmentalists, often for valid reasons. But not all ranches are created equal. Under thoughtful management, working rangelands can be highly productive for wildlife and, at their best, have been known to support more native species, at higher densities, than are found on nearby wildlife refuges. Buying range-fed beef or bison from a conservation-minded producer has a significance that extends far beyond the dinner table. Happily, these prairie-friendly products are readily available in many parts of the Great Plains, whether purchased at the farm gate or through farmers’ markets, health food stores, and other alternative outlets. A number of producers are also offering their range-fed meats to a broad public through the Internet, under trademarks such as Conservation Beef and Wild Idea bison.

Two other strategies for conserving native grassland deserve mention. The first is a type of legal contract known as a conservation easement. Simply put, an easement is a commitment made by a landowner to exempt a specified parcel of land from future development. In return, he or she qualifies to receive compensation from the sponsoring organization, usually an environmental group (like the Nature Conservancy or Ducks Unlimited) or a government agency (like the United States Fish and Wildlife Service). Although the terms of the contracts vary, the restrictions typically include a ban on cultivation, subdivision, and the destruction or degradation of wetlands; sometimes energy development and road building are also prohibited. These limitations apply not only to the current owner but also to anyone who subsequently acquires the land, thereby achieving permanent protection at the cost of a onetime payment. And even though the payouts are modest, they have been welcomed by ranchers, who find themselves chronically caught between high costs of production and low prices at the livestock market.

Conserving rangelands ensures a future for species like the prairie rattlesnake. To survive, rattlers need grasslands for summer hunting and bankside crevices as hibernacula, or communal winter dens. Though venomous, prairie rattlesnakes are not aggressive and will typically slither away if given half a chance.

A second strategy—setting aside sweeping landscapes for wildlife, in parks and ecological reserves—understandably raises the hackles of private landowners. But with fair compensation for those who choose to sell and the promise of a diversified economy, built around ecotourism, to sustain those who remain on the land, there can sometimes be a meeting of minds, a softening of differences, and a merging of agendas.

> WIDE OPEN FOR CONSERVATION

In 2004, the Commission for Environmental Cooperation and the Nature Conservancy brought together a panel of experts to identify the most important and promising sites for grassland conservation in North America.

The regions they identified, as shown on this map, represent the best of what’s left, combining high bio-diversity value with expanses of intact grassland. Similar opportunities also exist in three areas of northern Mexico: Tokio-Mapimi, Marfa-Big Bend-Maderas del Carmen, and the Sierra Madre Occidental Foothills.

> COWBOY CONSERVATION

If there were legal protection for endangered societies as well as species, the ranching communities of the western plains would surely top the list. In one struggling town after another, school enrollments are declining, storefronts are boarded up, and the ranchers who meet on coffee row are no longer young. A uniquely western way of life is at risk of blinking out.

In the past, conservationists and ranchers have often had a testy relationship, as insensitivity to local values met head on with local suspicion of outsiders. But tempers have mellowed with time, and the old adversaries are increasingly able to find common ground in their concern for the future. Ranchers want to earn a living from ranching, and conservationists want them to succeed, as part of a strengthened and diversified nature-based economy.

In a report entitled New Directions for the Prairie Economy: Connecting Conservation and Rural Development in the Northern Great Plains, published in 2009, the World Wildlife Fund presents a twelve-point plan for “fostering nature-based economic development in ways that also support the goals of biodiversity conservation.” Key recommendations include: expanding ranch-based ecotourism (including hunting) to “reward landowners who conserve biodiversity”; developing markets for bio-diversity-friendly beef and other grassland products, possibly through certification and labeling; enlarging ecological reserves to encompass at least 10 percent of the northern plains; expanding support for Indigenous people’s ecological and cultural aspirations; securing adequate funding for existing conservation programs, which are chronically underresourced; and providing compensation to ranchers for the billions of dollars worth of ecological services they provide, including protection of watersheds, prevention of soil erosion, and the sequestration of carbon.

“We have no illusions that a nature-based economy is the main path to meeting the region’s rural development needs,” the report’s authors admit, “or that rural development is the best path to conserving the region’s biodiversity. But we do believe there is a place where these two paths intersect, where there is common ground for merging the interests and needs of both for mutual benefit.”

> GOING, GOING . . .

There are more than 460 “species of concern” on the Great Plains. These are organisms faring so badly in population and reproductive success that they are feared to be heading toward extinction. Although compilations vary, the list includes something like 18 species of crayfish and other crustaceans, 19 species of reptiles (among them the Black Hills redbelly snake), 19 amphibians (including a kind of blind salamander found only in Texas caves), 21 birds (the whooping crane, for example, and the lesser prairie chicken), 26 mammals (including the black-footed ferret and the swift fox), 33 fishes (sturgeon, minnows, darters, shiners, and chubs), 41 snails and mussels, 57 spiders and insects (including the so-called superb grasshopper, also from Texas), and well over 200 kinds of plants (the blowout penstemon, for example, found only on active sand dunes, and the delicate prairie fringed orchids, among many others).

One species that is conspicuously absent from this disheartening roster is the black-tailed prairie dog, though it also deserves mention. After initially declaring the species “endangered but precluded” from listing because of other priorities, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service changed its mind in 2007. The prairie dog is no longer a candidate for listing. Meanwhile, their plight continues to affect dozens of other species that are specialized to live in and around prairie-dog towns, including such vulnerable birds as the mountain plover, ferruginous hawk, and burrowing owl.

Species that are habitat specialists, rather than generalists, are at elevated risk of extinction because they are not well equipped for change. If their habitat vanishes, they are finished. It is therefore not surprising that most of the species at risk, about 70 percent, are endemics. These are organisms with unique adaptations to unique habitats. The narrower the specialization, the more vulnerable a species is to becoming rare and ultimately going extinct. For this reason, the Edwards Plateau of Texas, which has more than its share of unusual organisms, is also a zone of endangerment.

2010-12-16T23-02-55-394_9781553658993_0278_001

Monarch butterfly, at risk

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. Meanwhile, 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; pretty little deer mice patter around barns and granaries. Although farmland is not prairie, it nonetheless provides habitat for many species of native animals and plants. Sometimes these farmyard populations 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. We’re talking about 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 bright with flowers. Although some of these 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 also 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 to replant it. This has called for innovation in both equipment and techniques and has sparked the development of a native-seed industry. Creating new prairie is tricky, expensive and, in terms of species richness, never a complete success, but it is an inspiring step in the right direction.

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 verges. Taken together, these strips add up to about half a million acres (roughly 2,000 square kilometers) 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 50,000 acres (20,000 hectares) of roadside have been seeded, a little more every year, to either a four-grass mixture—typically big and little bluestem, sideoats 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 one case, 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 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.”

Big bluestem pushes up through a profusion of goldenrod and other wild flowers in a prairie-restoration project in western Illinois.

The thought that corridors of prairie might one day run along roads and highways across the Great Plains is cheerful to contemplate. But even if it eventually happens, it will not be enough: life cannot be relegated to the margins. In areas devoted to farming, the working landscape is an ecoregion all its own, where there is a great deal more at stake than crop production. Admittedly, cultivated land provides less-than-ideal habitat for many organisms, notably for those that cannot cope with chronic disruption. Yet for species that have been able to make the transition to the agroecosystem, farmland is home, and what happens there is critical to their survival.

The acceptance of conservation as an everyday aspect of farming practice has been halting. On the plus side, thanks to the object lessons of the Dirty Thirties and the 1980s drought, the importance of soil conservation is now well established and has been widely translated into both policy and action. On the debit side, however, conservation of wildlife habitat is often a hard sell. Sometimes producers resist as a matter of principle. Having devoted their efforts to producing food to feed a hungry world, they argue that leaving space “idle” for wildlife is a misuse of productive potential. But while this position would have been irresistible in the 1960s, when an exploding human population faced a net shortage of food, it is no longer convincing. In the intervening decades, a complex suite of developments, some of them halfway around the world, have opened up new and more hopeful options for prairie agriculture. The achievements of the world’s farmers since World War ii have been stunning. Between 1950 and 1992, for example, world grain production increased by 170 percent, with only a 1 percent expansion of the area under cultivation. Although many people still go hungry, there is more than enough food available to feed everyone on Earth, a situation that is expected to persist well into the future. This triumph has come about as the result of a no-holds-barred commitment to maximizing production, known colloquially as the Green Revolution. Sparked by an Iowa-born scientist named Norman Borlaug, who won a Nobel Prize in 1970 for his work, the revolution was based on the development of high-yield varieties of wheat and corn. And yield they did, provided that they were supplied with ample stores of nitrogen, from artificial fertilizer, and abundant water, typically from irrigation.

Unfortunately, the environmental costs of this high-tech fix are only now being seen. On the Great Plains, in particular, the damage has included the depletion of aquifers through irrigation, the poisoning of groundwater with agricultural chemicals, and the overfertilization of entire river systems. There is now an enormous dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, caused by an influx of nutrients, mostly nitrogen and phosphorus, from artificial fertilizers applied to farmlands in the Missouri/Mississippi drainage.

But perhaps the most serious and unexpected downside of the Green Revolution was the collapse of world markets. As the supply of farm commodities outstripped demand, prices dropped to levels that hadn’t been seen since the Great Depression. In response to this economic disaster, many producers rooted out fencerows, shelterbelts, wetlands, and other uncropped lands in an attempt to increase their salable harvest. And as if pressure from the marketplace were not enough, farmers often received extra inducement from government income-support programs, in which entitlements were based on the area under cultivation. The more you plowed up, the more you stood to receive. The result of these combined forces has been an incremental loss of habitat from the farm landscape and a corresponding decline in the abundance and diversity of wildlife.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Since about 2006, world grain prices have come out of their decades-long doldrums and begun spiking up, doubling, tripling, and quadrupling to record-high levels. Although partly driven by global consumer demand, the price rise has really taken off because of the rocketing market for biofuels. Crops like wheat and corn, once valued as foodstuffs, have now become feedstock for ethanol production. While the biofuel boom has provided welcome relief for farmers (especially the big players in the game), it has done nothing to ease the pressure on prairie landscapes. In fact, the drive toward industrial intensification has itself intensified. In the U.S., for example, thousands—perhaps even millions—of acres of marginal farmland that were seeded to grass under the Conservation Reserve Program in the 1980s and 1990s are being brought back under the plow, at an untold cost to grassland birds and waterfowl. Meanwhile, carbon that had been sequestered in the soil is being released when the land is worked, putting the lie to biofuel’s promise of a low-carbon future.

The grain-based ethanol industry has developed as an instrument of public policy, backed by millions in public funds. Fortunately, public influence is also being exerted in less ambiguous directions. The last decade has seen the creation of innovative programs (typically underfunded but important nonetheless) that pay farmers for managing their private land for the public good by providing services to the environment. Both the 2008 Agricultural Policy Framework in Canada and the 2009 Farm Bill in the U.S. provide limited compensation to farmers who fulfill specific agreements to reduce effluents and emissions, conserve soil fertility, provide habitat for wildlife, or provide other benefits to society.

Of course, long before these programs existed, there were already farmers who set high standards for themselves and managed their lands for conservation. For some, it was a simple matter of taking a little extra time to maneuver around marshes and ponds or delaying their haying operations until late in the season when the ground-nesting birds are gone. But others have made a day-in, day-out commitment to farming with, rather than on, the land, using methods that attempt to mimic the natural ecosystem. Sometimes disparaged as hopeless romantics with a nostalgic attachment to the past, these organic, or holistic, producers are practitioners of a high-yield, knowledge-based, thoroughly modern system that continues to evolve as agroecological science advances. Drawing on research and personal experience, organic farmers use a variety of techniques, such as green manures (crops that are grown and then plowed under to build the soil), intercropping (green manures and crops sown together), and crop rotations (a sequence of crops planted in a field in succeeding years), to add diversity and complexity to their fields. New methods for controlling weeds without tillage, by using cover crops as mulch, are the focus of intensive investigation. Although not a panacea, organic techniques achieve many well-documented benefits, including improved retention of organic matter in the soil, increased diversity of soil organisms, fewer plant diseases and pest infestations, more variety in cropping systems, reduced runoff of inorganic nutrients, and a lower burden of environmental toxins. Despite the inevitable disturbance to wildlife caused by field work, organic farms also generally support more species in greater abundance—everything from spiders to bees to birds—than are found on their conventional counterparts.

Yields from organic fields are often lower than those achieved on other farms, and organics are sometimes derided as boutique agriculture. But researchers in South Dakota have found that organic methods can be highly productive, especially during droughts, with yields that equal or even outstrip those of high-input farms. And a recent analysis by scientists from the University of Michigan suggests that organic farming has the potential to meet the caloric requirements of a hungry world, without increasing in the area under cultivation and at a reduced cost to soil, water, air quality, and life in general.

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 enhance 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 thousands of 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 9˚f (5˚c). Now, the experts tell us, we are about to experience a perturbation of similar magnitude but one that we ourselves have triggered. The problem, of course, is the 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 this process, the average world temperature is expected to increase by somewhere between 2.0˚f and 11.54˚f (1.1˚c and 6.4˚c) before 2100. If these predictions are even close to being accurate, the Earth may soon be hotter than at any time in the past million years, and the change will have occurred more rapidly than any on record.

Protection and enhancement of the prairie’s uniquely productive wetlands is a top priority everywhere on the Great Plains.

Despite the clamor of dissent in the media and the blogosphere, climatologists are increasingly united about the probable, 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 clear-cut. In the case of the Great Plains, for example, the predictions call for the climate to be hotter 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 in human activity will be good or bad 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 enhancing 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 those who come after us. This approach is sometimes referred to as a strategy of “no regrets,” because the work is worth doing now, no matter what happens next.