Say­ing “This com­pares with any trea­sure any­where in the world,”:

Gov. Kath­leen Sebe­lius and the Nature Con­ser­van­cy on Fri­day announced the dona­tion of a con­ser­va­tion ease­ment encom­pass­ing 10,000 acres [of tall­grass prairie in the Flint Hills].

The tall­grass prairie once stretched in a giant sea of grass from Alber­ta down to Texas, a con­tin­u­ous swath of grass across the con­ti­nent. Pio­neers describe hav­ing to stand in their stir­rups to see over the grass. Giant herds of bison migrat­ed across it, with native peo­ple and the prairie wolves trail­ing the herds. 

A prairie lives in its roots, with more bio­mass below ground than above, and that’s how the prairie sur­vived the fires that swept across it. Every few years, the prairie burned, and any woody invaders went up in smoke. But the grass­roots sur­vived, and each spring the prairie grew back.

It was­n’t John Deere start­ed sell­ing farm­ers a pol­ished steel plow that the prairie’s roots gave way. Plow­ing through that mat of roots destroyed the prairie through much of its range. Today, the Flint Hills region, most­ly in Kansas, is the largest unplowed chunk of tall­grass prairie. Prairy Erth by William Least Heat-Moon is a great treat­ment of the heart of the Flint Hills.

His­tor­i­cal­ly, the Flint Hills sur­vived because of their soil. The chert (not flint) that studs the soil blocked plows, so the area was used for ranch­ing. Graz­ing cat­tle aren’t quite the same as bison, but close enough that the uplands of the Flint Hills retain a lot of the char­ac­ter of the old prairie. The low­lands have enough top­soil for plow­ing, so the fer­tile areas where big bluestem once stood taller than a man on horse­back are gone for now.

The Z Bar Ranch/Tallgrass Prairie Nation­al Pre­serve is the only Nation­al Park admin­is­tered land in Kansas, and the only fed­er­al park designed to pro­tect that ecosys­tem. The Nature Con­ser­van­cy admin­is­ters the Kon­za Prairie along with Kansas State Uni­ver­si­ty and is work­ing to expand the tall­grass prairie pro­tect­ed from devel­op­ment by 70,000 acres.

A Nature Conservancy/Kansas Bio­log­i­cal Sur­vey assess­ment found that only 4% of the his­toric tall­grass prairie still exists, 80% of it in Kansas. That real­iza­tion lead to a broad­er effort to pre­serve not just indi­vid­ual species, but habi­tat over all. That’s a great and vital approach to con­ser­va­tion, one I hope more groups and agen­cies start to take very seri­ous­ly. I’ve argued before for an “endan­gered habi­tat act” (rec­og­niz­ing the polit­i­cal prob­lems which would block such an effort), and admin­is­tra­tive pol­i­cy is one way to estab­lish the need­ed pro­tec­tion with­out pass­ing a new law.

The chal­lenges to the Flint Hills are man­i­fold. The beau­ty of the area makes it an attrac­tive site for hous­ing devel­op­ment, though it isn’t quite com­mut­ing dis­tance to any­place just yet. It also is some of the best land for wind farm devel­op­ment, and that cre­ates an awk­ward clash with­in the envi­ron­men­tal com­mu­ni­ty. Peo­ple who want to see more wind pow­er are push­ing for coun­ty and state rules that would encour­age wind farm­ing in the Flint Hills, while oth­ers want bad­ly to pro­tect that his­toric relict for pos­ter­i­ty, free of visu­al pol­lu­tion from turbines.

I’m sid­ing with the wind farms on this one. I’ve pre­vi­ous­ly sug­gest­ed the idea of a visu­al pre­serve, per­haps cen­tered on the Nation­al Park, so that there will be a part of the Flint Hills where a per­son can stand next to an old one-room school­house and see what the set­tlers saw. But we can’t block sus­tain­able indus­tries, indus­tries that can give fam­i­ly farms a lit­tle sup­port through tough times, to keep the Hills exact­ly as they were.