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A new-old way to manage your land
An open letter to landowners
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| Dear Friends,
I’d like to tell you about a significant development in land management. It could change the way you see your land, whether you own a city lot or a place in the country. It goes back to the native landscapes that greeted the first European explorers to the American continent---the prairies, the woodlands, the savannas, the wetlands and other ecosystems that evolved over thousands of years. |
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| Settlers, being settlers, availed themselves of these rich natural resources in building America. They plowed the prairies, drained the wetlands, cleared the savannas and cut over the hardwood and softwood forests. As a result, most of these original native landscapes have disappeared or have been seriously degraded.
With their demise it became apparent that these landscapes provided enormous environmental benefits. The prairies built the rich soils on which our agriculture depends; the wetlands captured runoff; the forests provided a host of renewable raw materials. The ecosystems also supported an intricate web of essential life from microbes to wildflowers, birds and other wildlife. Concerns over the loss of these benefits spawned a new conservation movement led by scientists such as Aldo Leopold, whose land ethic redefined man’s relationship with the natural world. The work by Leopold and other leaders fostered efforts to restore the diversity and functionality of degraded land. The discipline of restoration ecology grew out of these efforts. Nature preserves hold wonderful examples of restoration work, as do private lands. Now this new but timeless method of land management and stewardship is inching its way into the mainstream. And that's a significant development. It means that almost anyone who owns a piece of land can practice ecological restoration---from planting a mix of native grasses and wildflowers in one’s back yard to establishing trees along a river bank. We can’t go back to the world that greeted settlers nearly 200 years ago. But we can use those native landscapes as models to have our land deliver a host of valuable ecological goods and services, such as sequestering carbon, filtering pollutants and regulating storm-water runoff. Or to put it another way: to have our land create the biodiversity that supports a healthy community of life, of which we are a part. Six years ago, I launched Woodlands & Prairies Magazine, a unique quarterly magazine dedicated to this idea. Mrs. Woods, the magazine’s soul mate, has more details. Please read on. Rollie Henkes, Editor and Publisher, Woodlands & Prairies Magazine Wood River Farm, 222 Burger Rd., Monona, IA 52519 rhenkes@neitel.net |
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Woodlands & Prairies Magazine is published four times a year by Wood River Communications. © by Wood River Communications. Reproduction prohibited without written consent. |
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