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 Joel Sartore
If you plan for one year, plant rice. If you plan for 10 years,
plant trees. If you plan for 100 years, educate mankind.
Kuan-Tzu
There is a place in America where East and West merge together
as smoothly as one river flows into another. That place is called
the Great Plains. There is a river in America that gave sustenance
to perhaps a hundred thousand migrants who trudged westward in the
mid-nineteenth century along the Mormon and Oregon Trails. That
river is called the Platte. There is a vast region of sandy
grasslands in America that represents the largest area of dunes and
the grandest and least disturbed region of tallgrass prairies in
all of the Western Hemisphere. That region is called the Sandhills.
There is an underground reservoir in America that at maximum may be
close to 1,000 feet deep and provides the largest known potential
source of unpolluted water to be found anywhere. That reservoir is
called the Ogallala aquifer. There is a state in America that
offers unhindered vistas of the West, contains stores of vast
fossil deposits that shed light on our collective past, and boasts
an enlightened citizenry that has built an enviable human history
and looks confidently toward the future. That state is called
Nebraska.
Nebraska has now been a state for more than 130 years, and I
have lived within its borders for almost a third of that entire
period. During this time I have learned to love it and its wild
places even more than I have loved my native North Dakota. Yet it
has taken many years to discover its beauties, which are often
little known. I have increasingly realized that, even with my
access as a university professor to a variety of books, journals,
and other resources that are available to few others living in the
state, it is sometimes difficult or nearly impossible to extract
even rather simple information on a species or a habitat, to say
nothing of trying to understand an entire ecosystem. Furthermore,
many of these species and their habitats have literally disappeared
before our eyes in my lifetime, and others are in the process of
vanishing. Once they are gone, they are gone forever, and
tomorrow’s Nebraskans will be the poorer for it, even if they may
be unaware of their loss. It is hard to mourn something or some
creature that one has never been exposed to, but it is even harder
to refrain from mourning those whom we have come to know personally
and will see no more. There are no longer any wild elk to announce
the coming of each prairie autumn in eastern Nebraska with their
melancholic bugling calls. The great flocks of Eskimo curlews that
arrived each March after a long flight from the Argentine pampas
have been replaced by clouds of blackbirds and grackles. The sounds
of uncountable bison herds thundering over the Nebraska plains can
now only be heard in our imagination, as can the wail of prairie
wolves on a star-drenched night in the Sandhills. But the calls of
sandhill cranes still spill forth from our skies every spring, and
the rattling dances of sharp-tailed grouse on a frosty March
sunrise somehow bring to mind the lost cultures and nearly
forgotten traditions of the Pawnee, the Otoe, and the Dakota, who
knew these birds much better than most of us can ever hope to.
In talking with young schoolchildren and even with university
students, it is apparent to me that, rather than filling our
newspapers and magazines with unending news of scheduled athletic
events and their outcomes, we would do better to take note of when
the pasque flowers bloom or when the snow geese materialize each
spring and fall. Even more important, we should hope to gain some
sense of what the role of the pasque flower and the snow goose
might be in the greater scheme of things, whether it may be source
of pollen for some obscure insect or as a source of inspiration for
an equally obscure poet. We can never know the purpose of all
things in nature; it is often impossible in our short lifetimes to
understand our own individual roles and possible purpose for
living. Probably nonhumans don’t even ask themselves these
questions, so it is our human responsibility to try to fathom their
secrets, and, failing that, to act to preserve these natural
treasures long enough for future generations to ask these same
questions if they should care to do so.
By permission of the University of
Nebraska Press. © 2001 by the University of Nebraska Press.
Available wherever books are sold or from the University of
Nebraska Press, 800.526.2617, and on the Web at
nebraskapress.unl.edu.
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