by Theo Witsell, Chief Ecologist for SGI
““One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.””
This quote has become truer and more meaningful for me with each passing year. I’ve spent the last 24 years working for government conservation agencies, both as an employee and as a contractor. In one capacity or another I’ve worked for several state agencies, most of the federal ones, and several prominent NGOs. My expertise is in the identification and protection of high-quality natural areas and rare and declining species. Yet I’ve spent this entire time watching unique sites and populations of rare species get destroyed, one after the other. Sure, we’ve had many successes, but it’s the failures that keep me up at night.
One of the biggest failures of the conservation community is that sites that are small, or isolated, or expensive (which are often the rarest and most critical) get sacrificed. In a justifiable effort to be efficient and effective, to get the biggest bang for the buck, most of the large conservation agencies and organizations prioritize large “resilient” landscapes in rural areas. This is a good strategy in many respects, but it comes at a cost: it only captures a portion of the biodiversity that needs saving.
FIGURE 1. Gone but not forgotten. Oklahoma Grass-pink Orchids (Calopogon oklahomensis) photographed in 2012 on a remnant of Massard Prairie in Fort Smith, Arkansas. This may have been the largest population of this globally rare species in the state, with thousands blooming in a good year. The site was destroyed in 2017 for a housing development. Photo by Craig Fraiser.
SGI Chief Botanist Alan Weakley made the excellent point in a talk recently that “we have to do biodiversity conservation where there is actual biodiversity.” This is a simple truth, but one that is often overlooked. Yes, we can protect (and attempt to restore) large tracts of, for example, degraded ranch land, and we should, but we must also protect the few small scraps of ancient prairie remnants or we won’t capture much of the biodiversity needed to restore larger areas.
An ecologist I heard speak once at a conference made the point that the federal system of conservation lands “has done a great job of protecting rock and ice,” meaning that the most rugged and inhospitable lands have been protected in large chunks – the land that was dirt cheap and wasn’t good for much in the way of human economic use. But what of the more accessible and productive ecosystems such as our deeper-soiled grasslands? They were largely destroyed or degraded by conversion to human use before a second thought was given to their conservation, or, even worse, they were written off in modern times as “too valuable to set aside.” Yet the tiny scraps that remain are priceless remnants of our natural heritage and are often the last refuges for the rarest elements of our biodiversity—at the natural community, species, and genetic levels
When we set out to film the SGI video in May of 2017 I was excited to show the team one of the highest quality prairie remnants I had ever seen. It was located on the south side of Fort Smith in western Arkansas. This prairie was ancient. . . thousands of years old. It supported the rarest and most hard-to-find species, and they were common on the site. I once walked among thousands of blooming Oklahoma Grass-pink Orchids (Calopogon oklahomensis) there, and it was the last prairie in the state known to support a population of the rare Queen’s Delight (Stillingia sylvatica).
I wasn’t prepared when we rolled up and saw bulldozers lined up and half the prairie scraped away, the Earth ripped open three feet deep to prepare the way for a street in a new subdivision. This site was, quite literally, the last of the least… an ark for some of our most precious biodiversity. And it was being destroyed forever. As the construction foreman told us “you better see it now, it’ll all be gone in 30 days.” And it was.
FIGURE 2. Portrait of an Oklahoma Grass-pink Orchid (Calopogon oklahomensis) photographed in 2012 on a remnant of Massard Prairie that was destroyed in 2017 for a housing development. Photo by Craig Fraiser.
FIGURE 3. Large clump of the Queen’s Delight (Stillingia sylvatica) in a remnant of Massard Prairie, destroyed in 2017 for a housing development. This was the last prairie in Arkansas known to support this rare species. Photo by Craig Fraiser.
This is the sad situation in much of the Southeast—that only fragments of many of these accessible and productive ecosystems are left, and they are often difficult and expensive to protect and manage. Yet if we want to save the biodiversity they contain, we have to figure out ways to protect and manage them. It is one of our biggest challenges, and one that we aren’t coming close to meeting.
These are the frustrating realities we carry with us when we go to make the case for meaningful conservation action to the government administrator who doesn’t understand why we need to buy this 40 acre tract here when we could buy 400 acres over there for the same price, or to the utilitarian voter who asks, “but what is that rare darter minnow good for?”, or to the elected official who says flatly, “but the government already owns too much land.” Protection of these sites and species requires us to think outside the box of traditional conservation strategies. We need diverse, and sometimes unconventional approaches.
FIGURE 4. ZONED COMMERCIAL. Another ancient remnant of Massard Prairie, on the southern edge of Fort Smith, Arkansas. This prairie, among the highest quality in the state, gets smaller and smaller each year and it is encroached by commercial development. Photo by Theo Witsell.
FIGURE 5. LAST OF THE LEAST. Large population of Barbara’s Buttons (Marshallia cespitosa var. cespitosa) in a very high-quality remnant of Massard Prairie, on the southern edge of Fort Smith, Arkansas. This prairie, the last in the state known to support this rare species, is unfortunately high dollar commercial real estate. Photo by Theo Witsell.
Conservation can be rewarding but it is also a frustrating enterprise that can be hard on its practitioners. Leopold clearly felt and understood this, and he gave us fair warning about it in his writings. But this is as it should be. The frustration we feel when we confront our failures can supply us with the energy, drive, and focus to succeed in the future (provided we can harness it and not let it distract us). I’m haunted by the ghosts of those Grass-pinks, and it’s their memory, along with the memories of a thousand other lives lost, that inspires the work of the Southeastern Grasslands Initiative.