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Preservation and Restoration
(Saturday, 19 July 2008) Written by greeniac40021
Before I moved to Illinois, I had never seen a real prairie. I heard about them from time to time, but I mostly had a weird, skewed idea about what a prairie was. In my head there was some region in middle America filled with grasses and rolling hills and nothing else. This scene also included cowboys, native Americans and teepees, covered wagons, Laura Ingalls Wilder along with her whole family, as well as large herds of galloping bison. Needless to say, I was pretty wrong about a lot of things.

I visited a prairie for the first time when someone from the environmental club invited me to go on a restoration workday at one of the nearby Cook County forest preserves. Standing in the middle of a prairie was amazing. The plants were beautiful and diverse, birds flew overhead and I could hear the wind rustle through the grasses.

But not all of the prairie was like this. A large part of it had been overrun by an invasive species, buckthorn, that crowded out the native grasses and flowers and took away habitat from native animals. Every weekend, volunteers diligently worked to restore the little prairie that Illinois has left, in some effort to preserve some of our nation's natural history and native wild lands. There are less than 1 percent of the United States' tall grass prairies left, and the ones that are left are in special preserves or parks. However, because of invasive plants, lack of natural fires, and increasing development, even these prairies are being threatened.

Restoration and preservation of our natural wildlands is important, and will never succeed without the help of volunteers and activists. Not only are we preserving our natural heritage for our children and grandchildren to see, but we are also preserving the habitats for thousands of plants and animals, many of which are already faced with extinction.

A famous scientist, James Lovelock, pioneered the Gaia Hypothesis. According to Lovelock, Earth is like an organism, with complex processes and everything in it operating to create the world as we know it. In the same way that a human body needs all of its parts to function, Lovelock proposed that Earth functions the way it does because of the interactions and relationships of all of its parts.

In an effort to protect and preserve our wild lands and all of Earth's ecosystems, volunteers have been working hard to undo some of the damage that has already been done. There are lots of ways for you to get involved. Try searching the internet for a local restoration group in your area.
If you live in Chicago and are interested in prairie restoration, try looking up the North Branch Restoration Group (www.northbranchrestoration.org)

Otherwise, try contacting local environmental groups and finding ways that you can help preserve America's natural wildlands.


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Comments (3)
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1. 29-07-2008 07:34
You're right, it would take a lot of education to make this type of ecosystem management appealing to the trees' human neighbors. Perhaps it would be a good idea to require landlords in the area to provide some certain level of education about why periodic fires will be necessary. However, this might make property values go down a lot, because hearing that you will have planned fires in your neighborhood will make that neighborhood quite a bit less desirable for many people.  
 
Perhaps landlords could frame this type of education in the context of the increasingly popular environmental movement, reminding tenants that they will be allowing for nature to run its course without having to ever worry about the safety of their homes. Still, in this contemporary paranoid culture, I wonder if people would listen to landlords and educators who say, "Don't worry about the fire we'll be setting in your backyard."
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greeniac121212
2. 21-07-2008 18:19
You're right- the need for fire can come into conflict with individuals living around prairie or woodland areas. Of course, human safety always comes first, but I believe it's possible to have both restoration and ecosystem management and healthy communities. Controlled burns are heavily regulated and, for the most part, very safe. I think the greater problem is a general distrust of ecosystem management and ignorance about ecological systems. If the public were made more aware of what is at stake, perhaps preserving and restoring threatened ecosystems would be easier.
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greeniac40021
3. 21-07-2008 05:41
"Lack of Natural Fires"
The first time I ever took an environmental science class, I was pretty shocked to hear that fires could be a good thing for the preservation of natural ecosystems. Thank you for bringing up this issue in your blog entry. The problem is: How can we build up human communities and then expect the humans to vacate when it's time for one of the periodic natural fires to occur? Any ideas on how we could create a sustainable system that would work for both human communities and prairie plant communities? I've wondered about this for quite some time.
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greeniac121212

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