the place

Kansas City, Missouri: National Ecosystem Restoration Conference.

I live and work in California. But I grew up in and near Chicago, in Illinois, known among other things as "the prairie state." It's an out of date descriptive term, because there really isn't much prairie left there. Most of it, in fact almost all of it, was gone by 1930. Plowed, ditched, drained, later paved in some places. They... those who came before me... took very nearly all of it. I may never forgive them.

I had to come to a place not too far from where I am today, only an hour or two west of here in Kansas, to really see prairie. In the flint hills, at Konza Prairie, I was finally able to stand atop a hill, use my hands to screen the power lines to left and right from my view, and see grassland all the way to the horizon. I was there in late summer, when the grass had taken on hues of rust and amber in addition to the usual shades of yellow and green.

Today I need to use my imagination to see that grassland, because I'm in the heart of the city and won't likely have time to go very far. Once though, this was prairie, the western edge of the tallgrass. Trees would have lined the riparian borders, but mostly it would have been open.

That temporal perspective is important, because the prairie itself has always been dynamic. In dry years, fires burned more often, carried into more places, and the trees fell back. In wet years, the woods encroached a little into the grassland. Later, just a short time ago in the long-term picture, humans changed everything.

Now, a few of us are trying to put some of it back. That's why we're here this week.