Protecting the Prairie

The Green Glacier

HERE IN NORTHEAST KANSAS, we are at the rapidly intruding edge of what Oklahoma State University ecologist David Engle has called “the Green Glacier.” It’s a metaphor with some historical resonance. The prairies of the Great Plains formed in the wake of the last ice age, when retreating glaciers left sediment that mixed with dust and decaying matter to create a fecund topsoil from which arose one of Earth’s great grasslands, the American prairie.

In contrast to the European colonizer’s idea of a vast “nothing” in the middle of the country, the prairie is among the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world. Anchored by grasses and intermixed with thousands of species of forbs, there thrived before Western colonization cougars and wolves, bison and elk, prairie chickens and prairie dogs, meadowlarks and red-tailed hawks, kingsnakes, innumerable insects and pollinators—and the Indigenous tribes who cultivated and maintained this hunting and foraging paradise with seed and fire.

Imagine seeing all the way to the horizon in every direction, few trees in view but perhaps along a distant stream. Feel your hands in a soft grass, waist-high and moving in a strong south wind. Smell the sweetness of that grass, and behold the biggest sky on Earth save above the open sea. If this be nothing, then for me nothing be heaven.

On our land, precious glimpses of that ecosystem remain—evening primrose glowing yellow in the sun, the hatched egg of an ornate box turtle, a small meadow of milkweed. Such grasslands once covered the center third of the contiguous United States’ landmass: at the region’s eastern edge, the tallgrass prairie, which can grow ten feet high with roots that reach down twelve, even fifteen feet; in the middle, the mixed-grass prairie, shorter because of a drier environment; and in the arid West, the shortgrass prairie before the climate gives way to desert.

The first and major wave of their destruction was wrought more than a century ago not by trees but by farmers, who plowed through ancient root systems, planted monocultural row crops, and created the modern grain industry. Because the eastern grasslands were most arable, the tallgrass prairie of my home suffered the greatest blow; today, more than 96 percent is gone, making this the most threatened ecosystem in North America. Of the less than 4 percent that remains, most is located in the Kansas Flint Hills, where rocky outcroppings stopped the farmers’ plows. With only scant, patchy state legislation designated for protection or restoration, the tallgrass prairie faces extinction due to agriculture and development; rapidly spreading “woodies,” such as cedar trees; and an even more critical threat, according to Kansas State University biologist Jesse Nippert: clonal shrubs such as rough-leaved dogwood and smooth sumac, both of which are also present on our land and—unlike cedar—can’t be killed by cutting or burning.

Other plants choking out prairies include invasives such as the Asian legume sericea lespedeza, otherwise known as Chinese bush clover, introduced in the American South in the 1890s and recklessly promoted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in subsequent decades to stabilize soil eroded from overtilling, and the Bradford pear tree, bred for orderly suburban rows in the mid-twentieth century.

Eastern red cedars, however, though now enabled to invade, are native to these grasslands. They previously lived only in riparian areas though. Now, red cedars spread across the land like the fires, set by Indigenous people, that once prevented their advancement. The visual transformation from prairie to woodland is dramatic. Conifers transform to dark green the lands that for millennia appeared, during the prairie’s mature growth stage, as flat expanses and gentle hills of uninterrupted tawny. In this context, green is the problem, not the ideal. On our land, we look out from a hilltop and track our progress by the diminishment of that dark green.

What we call the eastern red cedar, Juniperus virginiana L., is a juniper tree shaped like a forty-foot cone, with branches from top to bottom covered in sharp needles, which are technically scaly leaves. Female trees are prolific with blue-green berries, which are technically cones. These number a thousand per cedar and are spread by birds who eat them.

The moderately soft wood of eastern red cedar trunks is naturally rot-resistant and antifungal—making for lovely deck boards, closet systems, hope chests. Andy built two wood sheds using cedar trunks as the posts; more ambitiously, we even took a trailer-load of logs to a nearby sawmill, hoping to build a deck, but the number of trees and labor required to produce enough deck boards made the idea impractical. At industrial scale, eastern red cedar is more laborious to process than other species and thus less commonly milled and more expensive to purchase.

Cedars have been spreading into grasslands for as long as Europeans and their descendants have been here breaking prairie sod; suppressing natural fire and fearing its controlled application; planting trees to re-create their ancestral vision of beauty; and turning millions of square miles into privately owned, fenced sections or public developments of urban and suburban pavement.

The red cedar’s threat to prime grazing areas, where grassland is more often referred to within the context of agricultural utility—“rangelands”—was first documented in the 1950s, when the Soil Conservation Service estimated 1.5 million acres of red cedar in the state of Oklahoma. Today, that agency—now the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS)—estimates that number at more than 9 million.

According to a 2022 Journal of Applied Ecology research paper, in the past three decades, tree cover has increased by 50 percent across the western United States. A 2013 study found that, in Kansas, full cedar woodlands—a closed canopy of interlocking conifers—increased at a rate equivalent to 2.3 percent per year over four decades. The NRCS’s Nebraska Great Plains Grassland Initiative suggests that almost 8 million acres of intact grasslands are at risk of being overtaken by woody encroachment.

All told, 62 percent of the North American grassland biome —tall-, mixed-, and short-grass prairie—has been lost, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior. Here at the eastern edge of that region, the supremely ravaged tallgrass prairie might be the first of those grasslands to completely disappear.

This is why, on our bit of land, we destroy trees.

When Tree Cover Causes Harm

WE DON’T JUST CUT THEM DOWN when they’re mature; we pull them out by the root when they sprout, or take loppers to them when they’re a little bigger. Most crucially, for a project of this scale, we burn them when they’re young.

Before European colonization, Native Americans set the immense prairie ablaze for a host of reasons; as a result, the grasslands thrived—and so did the bison who grazed upon them, and the peoples who hunted those bison. Thanks to the prairie’s impressive root system, after fire, new growth would soon emerge from the blackened earth, and herds of bison, who then numbered in the millions, would follow. These fires killed young cedar trees and preserved the grass and forbs from which tribes also obtained fibers, medicine, and nutrition.

European Americans did not just kill, cheat, and remove Indigenous peoples and their cultural burning practices from these lands. They did not just hunt to near extinction the large grazing mammals who ate young woody plants before they grew tall. They actively planted and cultivated the trees those people and bison held back. They planted cedars—I played among them on the struggling wheat farm where I grew up—in rows as shelterbelts against the powerful wind, and all manner of tree species to mitigate the open space and visible horizon that terrified them. More recently, the increasing carbon emissions their industrial society produced also contribute to woody encroachment as atmospheric carbon privileges trees over grasses. Researchers have found that a warming climate allows eastern red cedar, in particular, to outcompete nearby grasses in savannas where the two intermingle.

Though trees are often portrayed as the carbon-sequestering heroes of our climate-changed era, woodlands of oily, highly flammable cedars increase the chances of massive, unintentional fires fed by tall, dense biomass whose smoke actually increases atmospheric carbon. They destroy the superior carbon sink of grasslands, whose considerable underground biomass holds their carbon regardless of fire above ground.  They even contribute to global warming by darkening the color of a landscape that, as grassland, reflects away sunlight.

Intertwining with our warming climate is the matter of drought, which prairies mitigate as massive sponges that catch rainfall and prevent soil erosion. As red cedar multiply, they consume more water than grass but are also highly drought tolerant. Their dense canopies shade out the grasses beneath and, according to Nippert, shed scales that form a hydrophobic mat on the ground, slowing water infiltration. While we have witnessed the rise of creeks and dampening of wetlands at the lower end of our property when the encroaching trees are cut down, such results are not assured and depend on a number of variables. Decades of research by scientists at Kansas State on the Konza Prairie in the Flint Hills suggest that the impact of woody encroachment is now so profound and far-reaching that water availability is decreased at a regional scale.

The clearest and most devastating effect of the Green Glacier, though, is loss of habitat for native wildlife. Most grassland birds disappear from areas where eastern red cedars cover more than 10 percent of the landscape, due partly to the decline of plant species richness by an incredible 88 percent, according to one study. For birds such as prairie chickens, the very presence of trees—or other large objects, such as electricity poles, and even their shadows—causes them to leave. Few small mammals live among these generally inhospitable red cedars—typically none but the white-footed mouse where cedars form a closed canopy. Even the endangered burying beetle apparently declines.

A re-creation of something resembling pre-colonization conditions through fire and grazing prevents these troubles. In the tallgrass prairie, cattle ranchers are often grassland conservationists by default. Their livestock eat the grass, aerate the soil to allow penetration by water and oxygen, and fertilize the prairie with their manure and urine. For their part, the ranchers conduct controlled burns—the right frequency of which is the stuff of controversy even among scientists. These fires kill woodies and turn the air hazy through the Flint Hills of Kansas every spring and, when intended to knock back invasives such as sericea lespedeza, in late summer during a more vulnerable point in the plant’s growth cycle. Though some Flint Hills ranchers process meat locally and sell direct to consumers, many of the grass-fed cattle roving the open prairie will be sold into the barbaric industrial system of factory farms—whose feed supply comes from grain grown where tallgrass prairie was wiped out. Despite this terrible irony, free-range cattle act as a serviceable stand-in for the bison with whom the prairie coevolved.

For land stewards like us without ample acreage to graze large mammals or ample time to tend small ones, a reasonable mimic is well-timed mowing with our brush hog behind the old red Massey Ferguson tractor Andy inherited from his father. While this method does not achieve the benefit of hooves and manure, it knocks back vegetation as would grazing, prevents invasive species from going to seed, and decreases threats to native root systems.

Without efforts like these, according to a 2002 study by scientists at Kansas State University and Arizona State University, cedar will turn precious remaining tallgrass prairie into a closed canopy in forty years. Thus, woody encroachment—a threat to grasslands around the world—is the paramount concern for cattle ranchers here in the central United States.

Where cedar are not prevented from spreading, the cure proves costly beyond the agricultural industry. The Nebraska public school system, which receives funding from the state board of education’s land trust, lost $2,440,000 to cedar control from 2006 to 2016, according to the Prairie Project, a collaboration among faculty at Texas A&M, Oklahoma State University, and University of Nebraska. The cost to all of us is harder to quantify and dependent on the values and systems we use for measuring.

A Culture of Tree People

WOODY ENCROACHMENT into the American prairie is a product of modern realities, yes, but those realities were designed to the tastes of European colonizers who knew the ways of—and found comfort in—forests.

Their perspective is evident in our cultural notion that planting a tree is, always and without question, a very good thing. Arbor Day originated in the prairie state of Nebraska, where white settlers planted a million trees in one day in 1872. The state, where less than 2 percent of tallgrass prairie remains, now boasts the largest forest planted by hand in the Western Hemisphere.

Policy, as ever, reflects the biases of the powerful. In 1873, the Timber Culture Act gave homesteaders 160 more acres of free land if they planted trees on at least a quarter of the area. During the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, the Franklin Roosevelt administration created the Prairie States Forestry Project, which devoted $14 million to planting nearly twenty thousand miles of windbreaks to help stay the topsoil that destroyed prairie roots had previously anchored; the Department of Agriculture still subsidizes their planting.

Unchecked exaltation of trees is a lazy environmentalism that not only actively threatens grasslands by planting trees where they harm native habitat but also blinds us to the lack of policy efforts—surely no accident—to protect landscapes even more vulnerable than woodlands to agriculture and development. Though grasslands can be found within a number of national parks, they tend to be peripheral to other landscapes and attractions. The National Park Service does manage the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, in the heart of the Kansas Flint Hills, but the preserve is owned by The Nature Conservancy. Globally, according to that nonprofit, only 5 percent of remaining grasslands are protected.

There are, of course, no “good” or “bad” plants, and those that overtake grasslands will become native habitat over the course of millennia. But the cleverness of humans, and the scale at which we operate, makes us inordinately powerful co-creators with the earth. We owe some intention to the landscapes we shape and often destroy, even if indirectly. On this piece of land that my husband and I impact in the most direct ways, our intention is to ensure a welcoming home for native wildlife—threatened beings whose poignant struggle for habitat we witness daily, creatures of grass to whom we wish to be good neighbors.

The Prairie Abides

THE MOVEMENT TO CONSERVE grasslands, though lesser known than most environmental causes, is gaining momentum and support—sometimes in fraught places. In 2021, the NRCS launched its Great Plains Grassland Initiative, which supports landowners fighting woody encroachment in core rangeland areas—a ranching-centric model that befits the agency’s problematic placement under the USDA, whose aim is to preserve grazing strongholds of the same global beef industry that, in broader terms, causes immense damage across multiple environmental fronts. The initiative is a potential boon for native wildlife all the same. Meanwhile, for landowners seeking support in conservation efforts, regardless of their reasons and values, minimal available resources almost always entail agri-centric frameworks.

Government guidance and funding for landowners is all the more critical in states like mine with scant public spaces. In Kansas, 98 percent of the land is privately held, leaving prairie remnants at the mercy of a landowner’s knowledge and financial resources—or lack thereof.

Beyond agriculture, the region brims with concerned people we might call grasshuggers, who coalesce around local organizations such as the Grassland Heritage Foundation in eastern Kansas and state initiatives such as American Prairie, which aims to assemble a multimillion-acre preserve of shortgrass prairie in Montana. Nationally, The Nature Conservancy was among the first to protect prairie ecosystems in the American heartland and now does so globally—in Mongolia, for instance, where the government seeks to protect the eastern steppe, which at ten times the size of the African Serengeti is the world’s largest intact temperate grassland.

Technology is leveraged to help the cause, namely through satellite imagery that improves the ability to track the spread of woodies. Ultimately, though, such tools will be the product of culture and policy, which only change when people do. As Flint Hills native and longtime documenter of ranching and cowboy culture Jim Hoy once wrote in a social media post, poking at the long-running Smokey Bear Wildfire Prevention campaign, “Only you can prevent a forest!” (In recent years, the U.S. Forest Service has adjusted its research and message to acknowledge the importance of fire ecology.)

Because no such prevention happened for several decades on our land, our efforts amount to restoration rather than conservation—the former being, typically, costlier in every way. Where someone else didn’t protect an ancient ecosystem within his property lines, we give the days of our lives to restoring its semblance—an effort that will have a large impact well beyond these acres, which upon our arrival contained one of the densest cedar populations for miles.

I sometimes resent the work and the choices that brought us to it. Landownership, a fundamentally dubious concept, and the ability to live your values on that land, are functions of economic and in many cases racial privilege. They are also, in our case as small-scale land restorers, active choices that, at our rung on the socioeconomic ladder, entail some sacrifice and, unlike agriculture, offer no financial reward. Andy and I both have full-time jobs—he as a construction worker who toils with his body all week, making his time on the land with chain saw and tractor heroic in my eyes.

Though I grew up mostly in the countryside and feel at home here, I have enjoyed too the more common urban life, where stewardship is optional and small in scale, less likely to scar your body or your bank account. I doubt, though, we could do with our time and resources anything more satisfying—for both our primal wiring to touch the earth and for the mysterious human longing for meaning. The meaning that animates my life is a connection to this place—where my own farmer ancestors, poor white immigrants and beneficiaries of genocide and land theft, helped dismantle the ecosystem I now feel called to protect.

By the end of this year, we recently learned, the cedar cutting will finally be done. Though we are just outside the area that qualifies for the Great Plains Grassland Initiative, we’ve received financial support from NRCS through a program intended to increase monarch butterfly habitat. Those funds will allow us to hire the conscientious operator of a skid steer who has walked the land with us and understands our goals. With his help this fall, eleven acres of remaining cedar infestation will be cleared—leaving us with some epic brush piles to burn through the winter.

In areas where large machinery shouldn’t tread—our healthy native oak-hickory stand that tapers into the prairie restoration areas—Andy will be back at it with his saw once tick season subsides and summer heat dissipates. While most of his labor has been an unpaid gift to the earth, we now have another NRCS contract compensating us with a small payment per acre for timber stand improvement, removing troublesome species such as hackberry and—yep—eastern red cedar so that native woods on this land will thrive. We don’t hate trees, see: we just resist the myth that any tree is good anywhere.

Once the cedar have been cut and piled, it will take another two to three years of controlled burns to clear the brush piles and knock back the invasive sericea and bromegrass—with the help of carefully applied herbicide, which we’ve resisted using thus far but have finally accepted as a short-term ill to achieve a long-term good. From then on, we’ll maintain the restored prairie through fire, haying, and maybe someday a herd of goats.

After that epic reset, probably some snowy day in late 2027, we will finally begin to reintroduce what was lost.

Across the five acres where, as new land stewards, we foolishly allowed a bulldozer to disturb the soil, we will use a seed drill to put into the earth a mix of native grasses—big bluestem, little bluestem, switchgrass, Indian grass—with local seed supplied by an ecologist friend. Seeds for forbs like coneflower or compass plant will come later, once the grass has taken hold.

The rest of the prairie restoration area, where the skid steer does its work and the soil remains undisturbed, we’ll wait and see what comes up. There, we’ve been told, it’s not unlikely that the native seed bank will awaken as if from a decades-long slumber.

Whether by new seeds or old, native grass and wildflowers will reach out to north and south from our hilltop of hardwoods. The birds and bees of this place will light upon them, ravenous and needing a place to sleep. The turtles of this place will lay their eggs. We will shift into a state of maintenance, the good work of which is never done.