Books
Robert Kuhn McGregor, cm environmental
historian at the University of Illinois at
Springfield and a frequent contributor to
Illinois Issues, is the author of A Wider View
of the Universe: Henry Thoreau's Study
of Nature, published by the University of
Illinois Press. He is tit work on another book
about the Great Lakes.
SPEAKING FOR THE PRAIRIE
Aldo Leopold's subversive science
Review essay by Robert Kuhn McGregor
Photographs courtesy of the Illinois Department of Transportation
PRAIRIE TIME
The Leopold Reserve Revisited
John Ross and Beth Ross, 1998
The University of Wisconsin Press
A SAND COUNTY ALMANAC
And Sketches Here and There
Aldo Leopold, 1949 & 1987
Oxford University Press
Somehow, I always manage to miss
the beginning, when the state's
minions bring out their lighters, their
matches, whatever. Rushing by in the
car, I see the tendrils of flame bearing
down on the sere grasses, the husks of
flowers, the moldering vegetation of
an outdoor museum trapped among
the byways of a concrete cloverleaf.
Plumes of smoke eddy in a halfhearted
effort to blot the sun; birds start up in
confusion. A "prairie" burns in Illinois
once more. Just a few acres, always in
the no man's land between lanes of
streaming traffic, in the places too
small and dangerous to offer any hope
of profit. These we are willing to turn
back to nature.
These prairie fires are carefully controlled, of course — certainly we would
not want the firestorms of the past,
with 30-foot sheets of flame spreading
across the landscape at 30 miles an
hour. Just a little fire, in a little patch of
wildflowers and native grasses. Fire is
an essential ingredient in prairie
restoration, making these yearly rituals
a necessity, here and there in the patchwork habitat that parallels the state's
four-lane freeways. Professionals with
matches, nobly lending the spark
provided, once upon a time, by a seemingly limitless nature. An acre burns,
two acres; the fire is extinguished, the
work done. Fire resistant rhizomes resting in the heated earth begin the work
immediately of restoring fresh editions
of the native plants. Interlopers —
hawkweeds, dandelions, chicory — succumb, defenseless against the flames.
The new year will bring two acres of
bluestem, sunflowers and coneflowers.
A representative prairie. A museum
piece.
Why do we do this?
It is sad, really, if not pathetic. The
Department of Natural Resources,
with a great deal of well-meaning
effort, can restore an acre or two of
pre-Columbian Illinois vegetation here
and there on lands nobody wants. They
can even call this a prairie. Noble as the
effort is, there are some necessary
ingredients lacking. Vastness is the
most obvious. One-fourth of the
millennium ago, the tallgrass prairie
covered most of Illinois, Iowa and
Missouri, and significant portions of
eight other states. The prevailing
metaphor was an immense inland sea
of grass, frightening in its scope and its
dangers, especially in dry weather punctuated by lightning. Somehow, a few
acres burning in the road margins does
not impress the same effect on the modern mind. Animals are missing, too. Try
to find a prairie chicken.Or a buffalo
or two (million). These creatures need
an ecology, not a museum.
There may be prairie restoration in
Illinois, but there is little prairie to
speak of. Land that once spoke the language of prairie dock and blazing star
has been made to say corn and soybeans. The language is simple, and rote.
Lament for vastness lost is nothing
new. No sooner had the prairie begun to
disappear than poets, essayists, romantics, politicians and assorted other
starry-eyed folk began to mourn its loss,
extol its virtues. Such nostalgia was a
satisfying and perfectly safe appeal to a
lost golden age of nature; anyone with a
grain of sense understood that the
prairies — the real prairies — would
never return, as long as there is money
in agriculture. We think about it still,
late in the 20th century, the great grassy
world we have lost. It is to our credit
that we do even this.
20 September 1999 Illinois Issues
Half a century ago, an unusually
perceptive man pondered the Illinois
prairie, and what has become of it.
Aldo Leopold, pioneer ecologist and
professor at the University of Wisconsin, crossed Illinois at 60 miles an hour
in a bus, sometime around World War
II. What he saw inspired a brief essay
approaching poetry, views from a highway that had been "widened and
widened until the field fences threaten
to topple into the road cuts. In the narrow thread of sod between the shaved
banks and the toppling fences grow the
relics of what once was Illinois: the
prairie."
Poor Aldo. Perhaps it is as well that
he did not live on into the age of chemical warfare waged in the name of
agriculture. Even those narrow
threads of sod no longer support
a prairie remnant now. Chemical
defoliants and herbicides have
seen to that.
What disturbed Leopold during his bus ride was the profound
ignorance of his fellow passengers. A farmer in a seat nearby
possesses no idea why Illinois soil
is so fertile, why the nitrogen-fixing prairie plants are the reason.
To this man, prairie flowers are
weeds, nothing more. Farms flash
by, well-ordered, efficient, nary a
plant out of place. This is normal; the cry of an upland plover
is out of place. All is sacrificed to
financial solvency, even the creek
bed is "ditched straight as a
ruler." To Leopold's fellow passengers,
"Illinois has no genesis, no history, no
shoals or deeps, no tides of life and
death." Landscape is all and always.
Illinois is remade in the image of
humankind, "safe for soybeans."
Aldo Leopold died in 1948, fighting
a wildfire in his neighbors' grassland.
His place in America's conservation
history was secured posthumously, with
the publication of A Sand County
Almanac, a collection of nature, ecology and ethics essays pulled together
shortly before his death. Regarded as a
classic of its kind, the book records the
pace and beauty of a natural year in the
Wisconsin prairie country. After carefully crafting images of Canada geese
in concert, the skydance of woodcocks,
the death of an old oak. Leopold
begins a search for human comprehension. for meaning in all he describes. A
Sand County Almanac is far more than
simple nature description. The work is
a challenge to the human conscience, a
demand that we recognize our true
place in the natural world. The faithful
reader cannot finish this book without
facing the fact that the human species is
"a plain citizen" of the biotic community Leopold describes. Nothing more.
Leopold wrote these essays while living on an abandoned farm north of
Madison, Wis. The soil was poor, the
farming marginal for his predecessors,
but the land bore the disfiguring scars
of their determined efforts. Natural
vegetation clung to footholds here and there, erosion and related signs of ill advised tillage abounded. Leopold set
about to restore this land, to renew this
bit of sand country as a home for
upland plovers, woodcocks, prairie
wildflowers. His descendants, familial
and intellectual, have carried on this
work, making a land tortured to the
language of corn instead say bluestem
and goldenrod once more.
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The legacy of Aldo Leopold is two faceted, one could say. His book
inspires, teaching generations of readers and writers a new language of the
earth; his land teaches as well, a
restored vision of an older prairie
world. One recent book attempts to
combine those legacies in a single
vision. Prairie Time, written by John
and Beth Ross, records the cycles of life
in the Aldo Leopold Memorial Reserve
since his death. The authors discuss
nature's behaviors and the human sense
of it all. The book is itself a preservation, an encapsulation of Aldo
Leopold's biotic ideal. It has something
to teach his southern neighbors living
in this former tallgrass prairie.
More than anything, Prairie Time
seeks to remind us that for all our management, our determination to straight-
jacket nature, if not bury it under tons
of concrete, the ecology is alive and
well, Achingly beautiful flowers still
beckon just a little off the graded path,
chickadees still are willing to whisper
about our presence.
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The authors
emphasize the science and practice of
phenology, the tracking of the
occurrence of phenomena
through the natural year. Each
spring, following Leopold's lead,
they have faithfully recorded the
arrival of the Canada geese, the
flowering of the skunk cabbage,
the emergence of the sugar maple
leaves. Armed with half a century
of data on myriad natural events,
they can describe the annual
cycle of nature with reasonable
accuracy. And joy.
John and Beth Ross point out
that Leopold's reserve is really an
edge habitat, a place where two
mostly separate but compatible
ecologies front. Much is woodland, more is grass, but there is
marsh and meadow as well. Each
is a miniature world, home to different
plants and animals the naturalist must
distinguish and understand to comprehend the complexities of the ecology.
The authors recognize, but do not dwell
on, the more essential fact that the
reserve itself is an island, bordered on
all sides by a majoritarian civilization
equipped with pesticides, petrol, concrete and automobiles, fully prepared
to overwhelm this artificial remnant.
This is perhaps the most fundamental problem in this preservation business. An acre here, a few acres off that
way, certainly nothing huge — no
entire states or river basins. By their
tiny size, all these little preserves
become by definition edge habitats.
They are home to edge critters —
Illinois Issues September 1999 21
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What's left? Illinois' prairie remnants
As much as half a century ago, conservationist Aldo Leopold mourned the death of the Midwest's distinctive
ecology. "No living man," he wrote in A Sand County
Almanac, "will see again the long-grass prairie, where a sea of
prairie flowers lapped at the stirrups of the pioneer. We shall do
well to find a forty here and there on which the prairie plants
can be kept alive as species."
Even Leopold might be shocked to see just how tiny the
remaining prairie remnants are now. Still, he might applaud
what he would have called "rear-guard" efforts to reserve
"a forty here and there" of native wildness. He might also
appreciate the irony that most of Illinois' high-quality surviving or restored prairie remnants are located in or near the
state's biggest urban center.
Don McFall, a nature preserve specialist with the state
Department of Natural Resources, lists these sites, from north
to south, as being representative of what we can see again of
this ecological heritage:
• Illinois Beach State Park in Lake County encompasses
500 acres of sandy prairie in ridges and swales. Owned by
the Department of Natural Resources, this is a good place
to view such prairie flowers as blazing star and Indian
paintbrush.
• The 70-acre Somme Prairie, located in northwest Cook
County, is the largest and highest quality of the prairie sites
owned by the Cook County Forest Preserve District.
• Wolf Road Prairie in Westchester in western Cook
County is one of the state's few undisturbed prairies. Visitors
use sidewalks that were built for a failed residential development. The project went under during the Great Depression in
the 1930s, and the land sat idle until ownership was transferred to the Cook County Forest Preserve and the state natural resources agency.
• Belmont Prairie in DuPage County is a small 10-acre
remnant of original prairie owned by the Downers Grove
Park District.
• Indian Boundary Prairies in Markham in southern Cook
County is actually four separate prairie remnants that encompass 300 acres. The private not-for-profit Nature Conservancy and Northeastern Illinois University own the prairies and
are trying to acquire land to connect the remnants.
• The Nachusa Grasslands near Dixon in Lee County is
also a Nature Conservancy prairie. The 1,000 acres have been
restored and managed by a large contingent of volunteers.
• Green River State Conservation Area near Amboy in Lee
County encompasses upland tallgrass and wetland prairies.
• Goose Lake Prairie in Grundy County near Morris is
the largest prairie remnant at 2,500 acres, 1,500 of which is
permanently protected as a nature preserve. The site is
large enough to support not only prairie grasses but such
native birds as meadowlarks, bobolinks, bitterns and rails.
It is not large enough, however, to accommodate prairie
mammals. Owned by the state, Goose Lake Prairie has an
interpretive center and is a good place to start to learn
about Illinois prairies.
• Revis Hill Prairie is a 417-acre loess hill prairie in Mason
County near Mason City. It has abundant purple coneflowers
covering the steep bluffs overlooking Salt Creek.
• Prairie Ridge State Natural Area, owned by the state,
covers 1,000 acres near Effingham in Effingham County The
site offers another good place to see grassland birds.
Beverley Scobell
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raccoons, red foxes, lots and lots of deer
and birds, as well as plants alien and
threatening to the original tallgrass
prairie. This is the chief danger humans
pose to wild nature everywhere. Even
when we consciously set aside country
for native species, we carve it up into tiny
increments that make mere survival an
ever more difficult challenge. There was
lots of habitat for lots of prairie chickens in the 18th century. The birds are at
a decided handicap now, when their
range is limited to a few acres, when a
fox is the next door neighbor.
The last third of Prairie Time is given
over to individual descriptions of the
"Citizens of the Prairie and Savanna":
62 flowers, eight grasses, 14 birds, eight
mammals and a frog. The section reads
like a missing persons report.
I have seen a few of the described
flowers while peregrinating through
central and southern Illinois, spied
some of the birds here and there. None
are common; each sighting is an event
to treasure, to record and remember.
Too many of these species I must make
a special trip to see. Once upon a time,
these were the commoners of the Illinois country, the plants and animals
encountered at every turn. For the most
part, they have disappeared, victims of
an environment combed and shaved,
flattened to a habitat fit for money-producing plants. I suppose this was historically inevitable, but still we have lost
a great deal in the trade-off. It is well to
remember this.
Strangely, John and Beth Ross make
little reference to the philosophical side
of Aldo Leopold's work in their book
on his preserve. Perhaps, living and lov
ing his place for so long, they have
imbibed his world view to the point
that it has become second nature. Echoing Leopold, they seek to emphasize
"why" nature is as it is. They do not dig
deeper into the ethical difficulties
Leopold chose to confront. His most
fundamental question was one asked
by the Greek philosophers so long ago:
What is the human place in nature?
Mostly the Greeks answered that
humanity was obviously separate from
the natural world, superior in every
way Western Civilization, in its strange
and various incarnations, has agreed.
Especially, the United States at its birth
agreed, emphatically.
Following the lead of Henry
Thoreau and John Muir, Aldo
Leopold begged to differ. The more
time you spend outdoors, seeing the
22 September 1999 Illinois Issues
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Growing a roadside praire ecology isn't an row to hoe
There is, the late naturalist. Aldo Leopold believed,
some value in any experience that reminds us of our
distinctive heritage and natural origins. Charles
Gouveia would add that's true even when the experience
happens at 65 miles per hour.
Gouveia, a landscape architect by training, manages the
Illinois Department of Transportation's roadway prairie program, a serendipitous move to reintroduce native wildflowers
and grasses to the interstices
of our high-speed lives.
"We don't pretend that
we're reconstructing
prairies," he allows. "It's
representative. But there's
value in people being
educated to what was here."
What was here, long before
the farmer's plow, were 22
million acres of savanna,
grassland and flowers — the
big bluestem, purple and
yellow coneflower, blazing
star and the compass plant
that helped settlers find their way. What was here in the 1950s, when the state launched
construction of its part of the Interstate Highway system,
was little more than scattered parcels of a once-vast prairie,
less than 1 percent of the state's native ecology.
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It would, perhaps, be too much to say that Illinois' road
building agency has edged that percentage back up in any
real sense. True prairies, as Leopold argues, are reliant on
long horizons. Yet for the past three decades, Gouveia and
his team have managed to steadily increase the introduction
of native species to the state's highway rest stops,
interchanges and roadbanks, hedged as they are by the
more practical concerns of the modern motoring public.
What began as an experimental plot of native grasses
along I-57 and I-64 south of Mt. Vernon has now spread to
some 6,000 acres of grasses and flowers. Initially, Gouveia
says, the agency was looking for a cheap, aggressive groundcover requiring next to no maintenance.
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But it hasn't been an easy row to hoe. These days "back to
the prairie" landscaping has sprouted on every other suburban lawn. But in 1969, the effort to plant native species was
so new it was difficult to find
sources for the plants. Illinois
officials had to go to Kansas
to get started. Even at that,
seeds were poor, planting
tools primitive.
But, like every gardener at
the height of summer, Gouveia recommends a look at
one of his more successful
efforts, the Mackinaw Dells
rest area. Go west on 1-74
between Bloomington and
Peoria, he suggests. By late
July, "it was pretty prime."
Gouveia started planting that
region in the early 1970s and has added to it ever since.
Even at a fast-track minimum, a quality native planting
requires a good three to five years of benign neglect. And
what Aldo Leopold called "perception of natural processes"
is slow-growing, too. "Education, I fear, is learning to see one
thing by going blind to another," he wrote. Indeed, shortly
before the State Fair, workers mowed down native species
along roadways in the Springfield area. Gouveia, who prides
himself on taking "the middle ground," can only sigh.
Beyond the requirements of safety, he says, "there are
personal preferences." To some, these are weeds.
Peggy Boyer Long
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reality of ecological function, the
more you tend to see humanity as
imbedded in nature, a part of the web,
mutually dependent on the whole.
For Leopold, this raised a paramount ethical issue. If we are part and
parcel of the natural whole, can we
claim the right to govern the behavior
of everything? Does nature have rights?
Leopold said yes, decidedly. We are
"ordinary citizens" of the biotic community, no different from the bluestem
and the blue jays. Our ethical behavior
must reflect our responsibilities to all of
nature. Everything has the right to survival, growth, prosperity of its own
kind. No thought has ever been more
chilling to a real estate agent, to a
politician 's heart. Not pour concrete?
Why ever not?
Having practically stamped the
prairies out of existence, we are now
haunted by Leopold's question. Have
we done right? In our determination
and our vision and our greed, have we
denied nature its rightful possessions?
Have we gone too far?
The little postage stamp prairies
along the highways burn dutifully on
cue. We will give back this much at
least. Not enough to sustain a true
prairie ecology, but enough to assuage
our collective conscience. In summer, a
few native grasses waver in the breeze,
a few coneflowers bob their purple
heads. A crow perches, watching us
speed on our way, knowing more than
we suspect. The prairie reserves are
just a little more than museums. They
are an accusation.
Illinois Issues September 1999 23