Becoming Wild Again
"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." – Aldo Leopold
Like nearly everyone in the Kansas River watershed, I spent many happy hours reading George Frazier's Riverine Dreams last year, imagining floating across the land in search of wild pockets and wild landscapes. I don't think I'll make it to northern Montana soon, but reading George's take on the American Prairie Foundation and their ongoing efforts to establish a several-million-acre prairie there sure got the gears turning.
They turned even faster after I visited Quivira National Wildlife Refuge last November, where I saw several (8!) endangered whooping cranes and heard a dawn chorus like nothing I'd heard before. Seemingly millions of birds, scores of species, singing and honking in a relatively small wet area bounded by agricultural fields. Who woulda thunk it?
(By the way, International Dawn Chorus Day takes place on the first Sunday in May. Mark it on your calendar, get up, get out of town, and go listen!)
Back to Quivira — The sheer number of birds brought to mind 19th-century descriptions of passenger pigeons and Carolina parakeets. But hope, the thing with feathers, was present in Quivira. With the rising sun, I saw what I had hoped to see — whooping cranes taking a break in their long flight between south Texas and northern Canada — and so much more.
Upon my return home, I continued my armchair explorations of the wild prairie, following up Riverine Dreams with Sean Garrity's Wild on Purpose and Curtis Freese's Back from the Collapse. The writers of these two books have had first-hand experience at the nascent American Prairie, from fundraising to bison wrestling, spending years teasing out and putting into place the details of the pie-in-the-Big-Sky plan to bring back big prairie and the flora and fauna that evolved with it.
They've made tremendous progress.
As I traveled in my chair, books old and new came into view. Peter Matthiessen's Wildlife in America. Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac. Gary Snyder's Practice of the Wild. Dave Foreman's Wild Earth and The Big Outside. A book about Doug Tompkins called A Wild Idea. As I read I kept bumping into a shift in our thinking that's been bubbling for years. What it boils down to is this: setting areas aside as wilderness is not such a great idea. As the obvious and the unanticipated effects of our consumption continue to shift the very nature of nature, we are learning that putting land aside is, in fact, more a kind of neglect than it is providing nature a chance at remaining wild, or becoming wild again.
But wait a minute.
Doesn't this fly in the face of the ecological thinking behind the 1964 Wilderness Act, which calls for protecting land to preserve its natural condition? Does it not cast aside the work of pioneering advocates of the wild like Aldo Leopold, the Muries, Howard Zahniser, and George Marshall? Didn't wildlife refuges and growing populations of whooping cranes come directly out of it like Athena out of Zeus's head?
Is hands-on rewilding just well-intentioned hubris? Is wilderness, like e.e. cummings' Buffalo Bill, defunct? Or is it needed more than anything?
Suddenly, my worried musing jiu jitsu-d into a series of public presentations examining rewilding - in this case, in this region, rewilding the prairie. Why not invite some smart and experienced folks to talk about it at the library?
So I did.
Rewilding the Prairies Series
I don't figure we'll come up with The Answer, but I expect we'll have some lively conversations. Please join us for any or all of the talks.
The six-part series on Rewilding the Prairie starts April 14th, with Flint Hills rancher Pete Ferrell, who you may have seen in the Prairie Prophecy documentary (more on that below).
Following Pete the next evening will be KU Ecologist Town Peterson, who will offer his perspectives on what we might learn from historic Kansas landscapes. On the 30th, Sara Baer, Director of the Kansas Biological Survey, will expand on her extensive fieldwork in prairie ecology both above and below ground and over time.
Friday, May 15, is Endangered Species Day, and I'm happy to say that biologist Marty Woolard, who I got to know while working on A Kansas Bestiary, will be here to talk about her many years spent with perhaps the most endangered mammal in North America while working with the Kansas black-footed ferret recovery project.
Andrew Rutter, Director of the Baker Wetlands, is actively managing for wildlife on the edge of town, and the many unique challenges of doing so will be the subject of his talk on May 19th.
And in case you missed it, we have a late addition to the series: On May 23, we'll be presenting "Prairie Prophecy," the documentary on Wes Jackson and The Land Institute.
Rewilding, making wild again, is something few have much experience in. Yet there are more and more books exploring the idea and the practice. Here are a few:
MINI-FOREST REVOLUTION: USING THE MIYAWAKI METHOD TO RAPIDLY REWILD THE WORLD
—Jake Vail is an Information Services Assistant at Lawrence Public Library.
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