I left the ranch early Sunday morning for my trip across the state to join Dan in Northfield MN, where he is teaching at Carleton College. Driving out I took in the latest of what spring had brought to the ranch, the scent of plum blossoms, 3, 2” tulips and a bunch of yellow daffodils waved goodbye. The buffalo were close to the road, and it gave me on more chance to glass them to check for the first baby buffalo. There were none in sight. The morning light was spectacular though on the Cheyenne River Breaks and through the Bad Lands. A stop at Wall Drug for the best donuts ever, (I am very serious about my donuts), and I was off on I-90 were the road flattens and the prairie stretches out for miles. The snow fall and the rains have been good to the prairie grasses, and the animals grazing in them looked quite content. Just as you become satiated with the prairie, you are treated to the intermezzo of the great Missouri River. My god, this is beautiful country, I thought. Dropping back down into the mixed grass prairie, the landscape becomes a patchwork quilt of farming and grass, still beautiful in the colors it offered. The grasslands lessened the closer I got to Minnesota. Farm ground had taken over, leaving only .1% of the native tall grass prairie intact. But, Minnesota can really grow stuff. Although the crops are not yet up, this is evident in the 3’ high tulips.
We have settled into the charming little town of Northfield and the peaceful Carleton Campus.We communicate daily with Wild Idea Buffalo and ranch happenings. Our latest update …….5 baby buffalos! Can’t wait to get home!
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I too have noticed southern Minnesota’s great growing potential recently. Out on long bike rides over the past month, it has been impossible to miss the preparations accumulating for the latest crop of corn, soybeans, and alfalfa. It seems like just yesterday that I was riding through the icy wind, the chaff from last year still littering on the vast fields. Now, though, the tilling-under has happened, and the freshly ploughed fields are ready for the coming planting. Once more, this land will give forth corn, soybeans, and alfalfa in quantities almost unfathomable for a Connecticut Yankee.
Many of us recognize the damage that this system of mechanized agriculture is doing to our health and the health of our planet. Nonetheless, with the chain of my bicycle whirring under me in an infinite loop, I can’t help but imagine myself as part of this damaging cycle. Where do the calories that propel this bike right now come from, anyway? Furthermore, isn’t my impulse to ride out into the country, to propel myself over that land, part of the same philosophy that makes me see beauty in the monotony of mechanized agriculture? For, as the road in front of me turns into the road behind me, it is obvious that I am part of this exploitative system, no matter what I do. And, as my generation slowly starts to inherit stewardship over the earth and its inhabitants, I hope we can always remind ourselves that this problem we can’t just ride away from.
This spring break, some friends and I decided to spend some time at a farm we loved in central Vermont, then make the drive make to Minnesota. Very early one morning, amid high wind and freezing rain, we got in the car and drove through tiny Vermont towns, into upstate New York, and through the Great Lakes region into Cleveland, where we spent the night. The next day, we got brief highway glimpses of Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, before finding our way to Northfield again.
There’s something compelling in the idea of satiation with a landscape, and the changes that take place as miles go by. The Cheyenne River Breaks and the Badlands are completely different from the Wisconsin Dells and the Mississippi River, but you can drive on through and end up in the same place; the landscape, in a way, is a spectrum.
I have lived my entire life throughout the Midwest and the East Coast, so I consider myself pretty well traveled around those parts, but until last summer I had yet to get any true taste of the Great Plains. It’s true that there might be a couple remnants of the Plains scattered around Northfield, but even those modest pockets have grown on me and have caused me to appreciate the region’s unique beauty. I am a big fan of Carleton’s McKnight Prairie (which I visited for a Geology class), and I have always loved the pastoral backdrop surrounding Carleton’s baseball field. It looks as though games are being played out on the savanna, with only tall, amber grass and a few lonely, scattered trees stretching to the horizon beyond third base and left field.
Standing out on the baseball field at Carleton, it’s fun to think that you’re perched on the cusp of hundreds of miles of Plains stretching westward to the Rockies. As we learned from Dan, this view may not entirely be the case, as the Plains that Lewis and Clark discovered have been overrun by monocultures of corn and soy. Even knowing this to be true, perhaps naively I like to cling to the romantic thought that there still are awe-inspiring swaths of Prairie that are out there for me to discover. Seeing Michael Forsberg’s stunning pictures in his book The Great Plains has convinced me that this is the case, even though these threatened gems may be in grave danger of disappearing.
Last summer I finally had the chance to dive headlong into the American west when I drove from Northfield to San Francisco with two close friends. We took the scenic route, meandering through Buffalo Gap, Mount Rushmore, the Bighorn Mountains, Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, the Nevada desert, and Yosemite before reaching our destination after three very full days. Though my only real interaction with the Great Plains and the west has been through this drive (admittedly a very limited view of what the west has to offer) the experience was really just something of a tease that has left me wanting to go back and see more. Many people who make the drive cross-country may see the Plains states as states to be endured (and not particularly enjoyed) before reaching the grandeur of the Rockies, but I sincerely enjoyed our time spent cruising through the grasslands and Black Hills of South Dakota and seeing my first ever antelope in the hilly, open country of northeastern Wyoming. Although I am familiar with this land through its hallowed place in American history and fiction, it was thrilling to finally see the land with my own eyes, especially when it is so incredibly different from anything that can be found back east.
Since I don’t have any concrete plans lined up for this summer, I’ve got the itch to go west again, only this time I wouldn’t be so hurried to make it west, and I’d let the scenery of the Plains steep a little bit more. I’m tempted to take the advice of 19th century politician Horace Greeley to heart and “Go West, young man, go West!”
I was thinking about the purpose of environmental restoration this morning while flipping through Michael Forsberg’s pictures of the Great Plains. Not so many hours later, Dan brought the subject up in our class discussion. I’ve always accepted that environmental restoration is good, but why it’s good, that’s a question to which I’ve never had an easy answer. The benefits of restoration depend largely on its purpose. Is the end goal to return the land to its pre-European-settlement state? Is it to create or preserve beautiful places? Is it to conserve biodiversity for ecosystem function, or as a buffer in the face of advancing climate change? Is it to reduce soil erosion? Should we, must we be a planned part of a restored ecosystem?
Buffalo ranching in the Great Plains is an easy answer because it satisfies all of those functions at once; it restores ecosystem health while at the same time producing a marketable resource. But outside of the Plains, where no such one-size-fits-all answer exists, how do we choose? The optimist in me would like to believe that preserving and restoring wild lands for their own sake is enough, but that nagging, practical, pessimistic voice in the back of my mind is inclined to disagree. The part of me that worries that we’ll never find a way to incorporate externalities into our economic system, the part that wonders if grass-roots activism can ever change something as enormous and entrenched as industrial agriculture. That part of me is inclined to believe that we will never value wildness enough to accept it without asking anything in return. I’m caught between these two warring halves. Until I can find a balance, I’m not sure that I’ll be able to say, definitively, why restoration is good.
The statistic expressed in this essay, “.1% of native tall grass prairie” it is a incredibly grim. It makes me wonder whether preservation is feasible goal. This brought me to the larger idea of the global environmentalism. It is no surprise that the landscape of the planet is starkly different to what existed millions, even thousands of years ago. What I am asking is whether we (as the human race) even make the attempt to get back to the condition of earth before, or shold we move forward? And if we did move forward to eradicate the threat of global warming etc. what exactly would that movement look like? And finally, is it too late to even make such huge efforts to “make up for lost time” or, is it just too late?
Like someone else mentioned in class, I am not an Environmental Studies major. So while I understand the practical concerns involved in “conservation” and “preservation”, I very much prefer to take an idealist viewpoint. I know that it is necessary to have well educated people who understand exactly how difficult it is to maintain the .1% of tall grass prairie and to attempt to restore more of the land that was lost. But in mind we also need people like Michael Forsberg, who takes beautiful pictures and reminds people how to love the land. We also need people like John Muir, Edward Abbey and Henry David Thoreau, not because they have practical solutions to environmental problems but because they are willing to be idealists. So even though I know the number seems daunting, I look at that .1%, (especially what I have seen personally in McKnight Prairie and the Arb) and I see a reason to hope rather than a reason to be pessimistic.
I drove home this weekend, which is a feat that does not happen very often any more. In the hour and a half drive home, I realized that the landscape of southern Minnesota is somehow so drab in the spring, but still very comforting to me. The fields are mostly bare, with some small corn plants shyly popping up in some of the fields and some alfalfa looking very bright against the black dirt and cloudy skies. All I can imagine in the last half an hour of my drive is what the landscape will soon be, bright green corn, soybeans and a few other crops in the fields. Both of these images just make my heart glow with the comfort and warmth of knowing that I am at home. The images from both spring and summer bring up memories from when I was a child, driving in the tractors with my grandparents and throwing hay bails onto a trailer every few weeks, along with many other fond memories. Although I know that agriculture in America must be reformed in order for a more sustainable future to come, it almost makes me a little sad.
I know the necessary changes would have to start gradually, but somehow, I know that even the gradual changes would feel foreign. The contests that are looked forward to every 4th of July to see which cornfield is the highest wouldn’t exist. The county fairs would be completely different with such a diversification of crops. This all sounds great, but change is always hard. The great times that I have had in my childhood would turn into history, and perhaps even sound like a Laura Ingalls Wilder story to some in the future. This just makes me sad and wonder what other changes will happen next. This also brings up the point that the change in agriculture would not only be an economic or moral change, but would almost have to be an emotional change for those with similar stories.