Nature, History, and Art

The essay below was slightly adapted from the one recently published in the book that accompanies the Chicago Botanic Garden exhibit of “Picturing the Prairie” paintings by Philip Juras. The exhibition runs through September 12.  See Endnotes. 

 

Tallgrass Roots and the Genealogy of a New Culture

by Stephen Packard

Philip Juras and I share a need and a hope. Like Philip, when I stand in a scrap of ancient prairie, I’m transfixed by the colors, sounds, and complexity around me – a link to a beautifully rich past – but at the same time a thrill that we humans, at long last, have begun to recognize nature for the treasure it is. It feels like the beginning of a grand quest. Thinking I came for beauty, or revery, or discovery, I soon find myself pulling white sweet clover. The prairies now need us; they need invasive-weed pulling. They need our reverence; they need paintings; they need for us to share the vision that people and nature can have a rich future together. 

 

I felt this painting changing me.
Late Afternoon on the Grand Prairie of Illinois c. 1491

The Old World retains nothing like these ecological gems; in Europe, original nature on rich soils was long ago replaced by cultivation and habitation. Here in the New World, fertile landscapes that had for millennia been managed by indigenous people – and supported both humans and biodiverse nature – fell victim to intensive farming around the same time that universities were being founded. Thus, starting in the late 1800s, scientists were able to begin studying the biosphere while there was still some original nature left. Soon, visionaries realized that we are stewards of ancient, complex, yet vulnerable ecosystems. 

In writings beginning tentatively in 1898, Henry Cowles at the University of Chicago helped define for the world what an ecosystem is and how it functions. Others noticed we were losing the last prairies and, just in time, started the long process of creating institutions to save what remained. It began to dawn on some that we conservationists are critical to the survival of the biodiversity of our planet. Learning and taking initiative were and are crucial. It was through their spirit that this book came to be. 

Eco-prophet Aldo Leopold wrote in 1937, “Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language." 

Yet culture, values, aesthetics, and ethics develop slowly. In 1957, May T. Watts of the Morton Arboretum published Reading the Landscape: An Adventure in Ecology about Midwestern wetlands, farms, prairies, and woods. By popular demand, she would later write Reading the Landscape of America and Reading the Landscape of Europe. In her important work, awareness and principles that the world sorely needed were beginning to emerge. But when Watts celebrated nature, it was not the lonely, introverted nature of Thoreau. It was a nature of people and participation. In 1958, Watts penned a prophetic letter to her student Barbara Turner, thanking her for a tour of “a neighborhood woods” in Long Grove, Illinois. Watts wrote Turner:

 

What a memorable afternoon … Yours is the sort of community that one meets in books but seldom in real life. It is good to see you bound together by woods and a stream and rolling hills and a common interest in these things, rather than by roads, and telephones and committees. We enjoyed every minute, from the fire and sherry to the last look at your birds and hills and homes.

 

Turner would later donate that high-quality oak woodland to The Nature Conservancy, which was coming into existence at the same time. The Conservancy would later permanently dedicate it into the Illinois Nature Preserve System (which did not then yet exist). These two women were leaders in the building of conservation culture. These were not the stern “environmentalists” who protested pollution or chained themselves to trees. They would come later, after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published in 1962, and were much needed then. But Turner and Watts already had a longer view:  that of a community of appreciation and support for natural ecosystems which, to be successful, must be happy and rewarding enough to grow sustainably, from generation to generation. 

Night Fire on the Grand Prairie of Illinois - 1491

             In 1972, Northeastern Illinois University professor Robert F. Betz published a nine-page essay under the humble title “What is a Prairie?” He knew that he had to start with the basics. Dr. Betz pointed out that the word “prairie” did not refer to vacant lots between houses, as he had heard the word used throughout his Chicago childhood. It did not, he wrote, refer to a cow pasture or “the open land of our western states.” He described the prairie’s rarity, complexity, and beauty, but his words would have made little impact by themselves. When they introduced a book of photographs, The Prairie: Swell and Swale by photographer Torkel Korling, they took on a profound power. The book’s sixty-four pages of exquisite full-page, jewel-like photographic portraits stunned me and many others, especially when Betz pointed out that the last few prairie remnants were still being lost.  It would, he warned, be “immoral to destroy … the biological world from which mankind arose.” Thus began what Betz and others referred to as “Prairie Fever.” 

Fevers, fads, and “all-the-rage” moments may contribute to culture, but the last prairies were still, one by one, passing into oblivion. Yet Midwestern conservationists were about to take a series of big steps that would influence people around the world. 

In the 1950s, George Fell, a private citizen from Rockford, raised hue and cry among the few ready to listen, calling for action. Nationally, he organized The Nature Conservancy, destined to become a planetary exemplar and powerhouse of natural land acquisition. At home, he organized an approach, soon to be copied by state after state, to save the little fragments of nature, one by one. The best surviving prairie remnants were to be found in few-acre patches along railroad rights-of-way and in semi-abandoned settler cemeteries, where they had been long ignored; now they were being noticed.

 

During the painting of the flora of Grigsby Prairie

Birth of a Collaboration

There were not remotely enough resources to do what was needed in any single agency, so Fell devised a private/public collaboration that included governments at all levels. His Illinois Nature Preserves System initially had few resources and no staff. But the 1963 Nature Preserves law allowed any person, corporation, or agency to dedicate rare high-quality ecosystems, which then would be permanently protected by state government from development, roads, or any kind of human destruction. The idea caught on. People, villages, and park districts began enrolling their most precious properties. To run this effort, Fell established the Natural Land Institute and raised funds and hired staff. 

Another huge step taken in the 1970s was the creation of the Illinois Natural Areas Inventory, a first-of-its-kind effort to survey the whole state and discover where those last remnant ecosystems survived. It identified 610 prairies, fens, bogs, forests, and ponds. We learned that 7/100^ths of 1% of the state survived as relatively original nature. All the rest was cornfields, strip mines, cities, and degraded wildlands. Of the prairie, we learned, less than 1/100^th of 1% survived.

            By 1978, the Nature Preserves System included sixty-eight preserves, owned by eighteen agencies, including three tallgrass prairies, and permanently protected 17,149.5 acres from ecological degradation. Fewer than ten of those revered acres were black-soil prairie – the agriculturally richest, and formerly most abundant. 

Personally, I somehow learned of these developments by reading obscure “Two-year Reports” issued by the Nature Preserve Commission and the Betz and Korling book. I began to devote every spare hour to prairie volunteering. Then, almost miraculously, I was awarded my life’s first honorable full-time job by the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission. I started saving and restoring remnants, which is how I met Barbara Turner and her woods.

            There was at that time no “savanna fever” or “oak woodland fever.” The Inventory had done an outstanding job of articulating prairie preservation priorities, in part because of decades of creative study by Dr. Betz. It did less well on oak savannas and woodlands, the other major Illinois ecosystems. 

            When I first encountered Barbara Turner’s precious Nature Preserve woodland, I was disappointed. When I asked her to show me some of the rare plants listed for the site, she couldn’t find them. It puzzled and disturbed her; but she was happy that someone cared. In time we would find that Turner’s woods needed help. It needed people and new principles. But they would not come quickly. 

            Early clues had emerged in the 1940s, when Aldo Leopold and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin were asked to advise on the creation of an arboretum. Rather than adopting the standard practice — bringing in tree species from around the world — the Madison folks decided to restore regional ecosystems. In the early years, all their planting attempts failed to thrive. But in the case of the prairie, someone ultimately decided to violate principles of the day by burning it. 

            The dramatic surge of quality in what soon became recognized as the world’s first ecosystem restoration — and the first depending on fire — was analyzed in scientific journals and dramatized in Walt Disney’s documentary The Vanishing Prairie. When Betz later searched for and discovered nearly invisible remnant prairie plants in the mowed lawns of old cemeteries, he used science and the Disney film to convince local cemetery association boards to stop mowing and allow him to burn there. These little remnant prairies then visibly recovered diversity and health. 

            Initially, the Illinois Nature Preserves System sought to protect land from people. No hunting, no fishing, no timber harvesting; no gathering of mushrooms, berries, nuts, or anything; the principle was: “We’ve destroyed almost everything! Leave it alone!” But for the prairies — after great debate described later by Betz as bitter and painful in the extreme — approval was given to burn. Knowledge and minds were evolving. 

 

The inspiration for the painting Fultz Hill Prairie is a dizzying climb to the top of a cliff over the Mississippi River floodplain.
Link to painting

Discovering What Nature Needs

During this time, a few of us noticed that high-quality oak savannas and woodlands were losing acreage and quality, much like the prairies. When we cautiously burned the wooded edges of the prairies, we saw biodiversity recovering there too. I remembered Barbara Turner failing to find rare plants, including the endangered cream vetchling. At the time, she told me, with embarrassment, that she could indeed show me the vetchling and some of the other species, but she’d have to take me to a part of the preserve she had been avoiding — where she’d been violating Nature Preserve rules by mowing a small area for school-class gatherings. It turned out that “Leave it alone!” meant increasing shade. As trees and shrubs grew denser, most of the woods had gotten too dark for many of its original species. The edge of the area Turner had kept open held the last of some species and was also the only place to find the oaks reproducing. 

It began to be clear that nature needed more help than we thought. Under modern conditions, a few invasive species proliferate like cancer and replace the diverse natural ones. Changes of hydrology, water pollution, and air-quality all may require mitigations. Most Illinois ecosystems need fire. In many preserves, the high-quality acres of grassland, woodland, or wetland are surrounded with “buffer” land, which may protect the core from salt spray, herbicide drift, or the shade of tall buildings. But the buffers may harbor unnatural densities of invasives, predators, and parasites that thrive near edges. On the positive side, they may offer opportunities to expand the core. That may be crucial in the long run, because many plant and especially animal species will not survive over time in small populations. Larger habitats and populations are more sustainable. Thus arose in nature preservation the unexpected need for restoration.

            Aldo Leopold had done a bit of restoration himself. By today’s standards, his efforts were primitive; but he thought deeply about the matter. He wrote: 

Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a good shovel.

            By 1980, the Illinois Nature Preserves System consisted of seventy-nine preserves, including thirteen tallgrass prairies. But in that year, the system and George Fell were dealt a massive blow. With all their dedication and urgency, they had thought they possessed more power than they did. Suddenly, as George Fell perceived it, bureaucrats, politicians, and those opposed to preserve restrictions conspired to get the Nature Preserves Commission’s budget zeroed out by the Illinois legislature. The entire system seemed to be in danger. 

             It’s a long story, but one result was that The Nature Conservancy hired many Nature Preserve staff, including me, and I finally got a “yes” to a proposal I’d been making for some time. While staff capacity was slowly being rebuilt, the Commission and the Conservancy would jointly sponsor a new force, the Volunteer Stewardship Network, to provide emergency care. Within a year, sixty preserves had volunteer groups. Before long, hundreds of preserves were benefitting from thousands of stewards comprising another global first — a statewide community that May T. Watts would have commended.

The site that inspired the painting "Galloping Hill" is a comfortable walk from the Penny Road parking lot in the Spring Creek Forest Preserves.
Link to painting

            Over time, as Nature Preserve staff was being rebuilt, these stewards were mentored by the best experts. They read books, attended classes, wrote newsletters, gave interviews to reporters, organized conferences — building a “culture of conservation.” They mended fences, cut brush, pulled weeds, helped with or led burns, installed signage; whatever was most needed. 

            Speaking of fences, during the 1990s some restoration opponents got media coverage by criticizing the science and ethics of ecosystem management – and the very concept of participating in nature – arguing that “Leave nature alone!” was a better policy. Realizing that a consensus of expertise was needed, we took time to organize the Chicago Region Biodiversity Council (known popularly as “Chicago Wilderness”). Uniting all government, university, and not-for-profit conservationists, an authoritative Biodiversity Recovery Plan was assembled and approved in 1999. Some critics continued to complain, but now they were opposing one of the most impressive assemblages of conservation expertise on the planet, and they lost credibility. 

Chicago Wilderness demonstrated that diverse human community is needed to keep nature recovering, expanding, and thriving. Skills and interests vary among the staff and stewardship volunteers, thankfully. Among the core constituency of volunteers, some show up on winter weekends to cut acres of brush. They burn it in bonfires, but keep warm mostly through muscle work and fellowship. Big machines could do such work, but caring people do it with less stress on the ecosystem. And these events are an entrance to the community. Other people turn out every fall to harvest rare seeds, regularly invoking hunter-gatherer images and values. Some people learn to distinguish obscure species, monitor them, and inform the team of positive or concerning changes we might otherwise miss. Some become expert at recruiting, chain sawing, safe herbicide application, or controlled burn leadership. Some are adept at fostering collaboration between the volunteers and agency staff. In this massive effort, multiple roles and expertise are key. 

Some of the roles are more unusual. We never expected sex with plants to become a thing. But it turned out that on many sites the Federal Endangered prairie white-fringed orchid was failing to produce seed because of lack of co-adapted and highly specialized pollinators. How could we restore enough orchids to attract and rebuild hawk moth populations? Illinois Department of Natural Resources biologist Marlin Bowles taught us hand pollination. This process is so intimate, intricate, and sticky that some people find it embarrassing, at first. But scores enact this sweet rite annually, and moth and orchid numbers are on the rebound.   

Many people find that the biota call out to us, that we are needed. It’s a feeling that E. O. Wilson named “biophilia”: a sense of affection for the diversity of life. Henry Thoreau had written of this in his diary on October 10, 1858: “The simplest and most lumpish fungus has a peculiar interest to us …  (it) betrays a life akin to my own. It is a successful poem in its kind.” 

            In my neighborhood in Northbrook, Illinois, we began learning to be stewards in 1977. Now, patches of restored Cook County Forest Preserve prairie, savanna, wetland, and woodland sprawl over 700 acres, attracting staff attention and a growing volunteer community. For five years as student, volunteer, and leader, Eriko Kojima has recruited, inspired, and taught one of the planet’s most ambitious seed-gathering communities. In 2020, some 130 volunteers—despite having to work within the limits of Covid social distancing—harvested local genotype seeds of 330 mostly uncommon or rare species, adding up to 490 gallons of seed mixes. The result is annually increasing quality for hundreds of acres. 

When several monitors noticed that the part-sun plant community between savanna and open woodland failed to thrive, Sai Ramakrishna – for seven years a volunteer and leader – took up the challenge and devised alternate seed mixes and strategies to test. This work is physically and intellectually demanding—and rewarding. As stewards observe entire ecosystems rising or falling based on what we can accomplish, we find this dedication self-motivating – and stick with it for life.

            Barbara Turner remained an active and passionate steward until her death at age 100 in 2020. She had learned from May Watts in the 1950s, who had learned from Henry Chandler Cowles, who wrote his first influential work in 1898. What Barbara left us in the Reed-Turner Woodland Nature Preserve now depends on us. 

Such an ethic for the planet is urgently needed by the Earth’s people. Some predict coming apocalyptic hellscapes and act as if they were inevitable. But is that the best we can do? Biodiversity conservationists act with hope, creativity, and grit. Our good results motivate us to do more. Planetary health deserves celebration and growing commitment everywhere.

            Today the Illinois Nature Preserves System includes more than 600 sites totaling more than one hundred thousand precious acres. But constituency and funding have not kept pace. In 2015, some preserves were degrading from neglect, and a new five-year strategic plan warned that the system faced “dire economic, political and landscape issues.” As of 2019, the Nature Preserves System had received few of the recommended resources and had lacked a director and other senior staff for four years. Volunteer stewards took the initiative and, with the support of many professionals, launched Friends of Illinois Nature Preserves. The new not-for-profit group began organizing on-the-ground stewardship, constituency-building, and policy initiatives. In October 2020, a new Governor’s administration finally approved the hiring of the long-needed Nature Preserves director and agreed to provide more support. This is promising. But there will be ups and downs. The story of biodiversity conservation for the tallgrass region is still in its early stages.

 

I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever ‘written’ . . . It evolves in the minds of a thinking community.  

Aldo Leopold, The Land Ethic: A Sand County Almanac.

 

He meant, of course, minds, bodies, and actions. Thoreau. Cowles. Watts. Leopold. Turner. Ramakrishna. Kojima. And so many people, now and through generations ahead, will determine our Earth’s and biodiversity’s future. 

            Following Robert Betz with his teaching and Torkel Korling with his photographs, Philip Juras has offered the world compelling art in this book. But the work was not finished when the paint dried. Dear reader and viewer, that work is ours as well. What generations accomplish depends not only on the film director, composer, parent, teacher, scientists, artist, land protector, or musician; it depends too on the actions of the people who receive their gifts. It depends upon all of us. When we succeed, a sustainable world of greater harmony and true richness will be our legacy. 

 

Endnotes

Early on, this paragraph was cut:

 

“Increasingly, professional staff and stewards know how to adapt management of precious sites based on the monitoring of plant and animal populations. But what about micro-organisms? We do sometimes spread soil that we understand contains bacterial species required to restore new populations of certain plant species. But symbiotic biota too small for easy monitoring are a crucial part of the ecosystem, including symbionts, disease and predatory micro-organisms – as population regulators and promoters of genetic evolution. A few people are learning to understand and monitor them too. The genes of fungi, plants, animals and micro-organisms are massive resource-banks for health, agriculture and industry. Major crops regularly are threatened with extinction by disease … until scientists find in nature the antidote for some disastrous pest. Most medicines and many critical components of industry come directly or indirectly from nature. Also, our spirits want nature. Thus, we let extinction reduce this planet’s biodiversity at our peril.”

  

Okay, it was cut. Understandably. But now, as an awkward endnote, it’s restored. 

 

And the exhibit:

Philip’s paintings are compellingly displayed at the Chicago Botanic Garden through September 12, 2021 . 

 

You can find photos, video, and an interview of Philip Juras by Wendy Paulson at: 

https://www.chicagobotanic.org/picturing_prairie

 

Little digital representations don’t capture the impact of the real art. For that, you need to stand in the presence of the paintings. 

 

Unexpected Covid warning: even if you’re a member, you can’t drive into the Botanic Garden these days without pre-registering, so that crowds can achieve a semblance of social distance. You must pre-register.

For more powerful art by Philip Juras (and the ability to order his book) go to:

www.philipjuras.com

Also - beneath every painting are compelling written details and quotations. The website deserves study by people in love with (or perhaps just interested in) tallgrass prairie and savanna.

Acknowledgements 

The original of this essay was edited for Philip’s book by John Harris, with additional edits by Philip Juras and Beth Gavrilles. For this version, I started with their combined edit, messed with it some more, and asked advice from stewards, Eriko Kojima, Christos Ecomomou, and Kathy Garness. I suppose we seven are rightly the final authors of this version. 

The beautifully done exhibit at the Garden was sponsored by the Chicago Botanic Garden, the Field Museum, the Forest Preserves of Cook County, the Nature Conservancy, and Openlands.