Grief, Loss, and Restoration on America's Last Prairie

Abstract

Grief, Loss, and Restoration on America's Last Prairie John O'Keefe (bio) Sometime in the mid-1990s I took my family on a camping trip to Fort Robinson in the northwestern corner of Nebraska. On the way home we decided to take an alternative route back to Omaha, turning south on what in retrospect was probably Nebraska Highway 27. Within minutes of turning, we found ourselves in the middle of an implausible expanse of grass and sky, rolling seemingly endlessly in every direction. As a child of the East Coast, I felt that we were driving across an ocean, riding up and down undulating swells, which, while stable and unmoving, seemed to possess the energy of water. "What is this place?" I remember thinking, in somewhat stunned reverence. "Where are we?" It turns out we were in the Sandhills. As we drove along, I resolved that I would one day come back. It took me more than twenty years. Life often takes us down unexpected paths. In the space between my first encounter with the Sandhills and my eventual return, I built my career as a theology professor at Creighton University, raised a family, and slowly, over time, changed from a coastal resident to an inhabitant of the Great Plains. In the early years of the first decade of the 21st century, I had an ecological awakening and found my intellectual interests shifting from the study of ancient Christianity to the study of the newly emerging field of eco-theology. Along the way, a failed bid at academic administration opened an unexpected opportunity to merge my life-long hobbyist dabbling in photography and filmmaking with my theological training. Thus, in the summer of 2016, after learning how to make documentaries from very talented teachers, something inside said, "It's time to go back, this time as a filmmaker." The Sandhills is (most people refer to the Sandhills in the singular) one of the last intact prairies on earth. Recently, two scholars at the University of Nebraska published a study assessing the health of the world's grasslands (Schlotz and Twidell 2022). The study begins with a series of declarative sentences that deliver, quite unsentimentally, some very bad news: • Grasslands are the most imperiled terrestrial ecosystem on the planet. • Grasslands have experienced a far greater rate of global conversion than forests, yet forestry conservation is far ahead in terms of global advocacy and action to maintain large and intact forested regions. • Grasslands have relatively little federal or international protection, corresponding to the least amount of safe operating space to anthropogenic pressures driving global change. • Grassland biodiversity is the most threatened especially endemic avian diversity which has been the most severely affected with more than 60% already lost since the 1970s in North American grasslands. • Yet, grasslands play an important role in carbon sequestration mitigating the effects of climate change. Consequently, the ecosystem services unique to grasslands, particularly those beyond agricultural production are threatened, especially those ecosystem services that are scale-dependent and require large regional connectivity. The article goes on to assess the health of the remaining grasslands and their locations. There are seven such places left, representing a tiny fraction of their former expanse. One of these is the Sandhills of Nebraska, which the authors describe as "the most intact temperate grassland region in the world." [End Page 1] When I first moved to Nebraska, I knew nothing about grasslands and their significance. My chance encounter with the Sandhills began to change that. I found myself reading about prairies and learning the names of some of the most import grasses such as switchgrass, little bluestem, and big bluestem. The work of Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry, and Wes Jackson all provided intellectual context for my gradual realization that while I lived in an actual place called Nebraska, I also inhabited a mythic Nebraska, or more specifically, a mythic prairie. The tallgrass prairies that stunned Lewis and Clark, that Willa Cather described so lyrically, and that Laura Ingalls Wilder made iconic in the American imagination, have all been destroyed. They now exist mostly in our minds. When my friends from the East Coast jokingly asked me, "How's it going out...