Strung Out Episode 204: THE REWILDING OF THE NACHUSA GRASSLANDS.

This is part of an ongoing project into the idea of rewilding: removing areas of semi-settlement in return to a legacy area....with very little human involvement.  It's the secret of how our planet will be able to remain a bit wild.   

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to Strung Out, the podcast that looks at life through the lens of an artist. Your host is the artist, writer, and musician, Martin Lawrence McCormack. Now here's Marty. Hey there, great to have you with us, and happy Memorial Day to those of you that celebrated around the world. I'm Martin Lawrence McCormack, and this is Strung Out.

[00:00:27] Summer is here in the Northern Hemisphere, and I had a great day yesterday, preparing some film for the Mr. Marty Show, and it's a topic that I've talked about several times. On Strung Out, and, uh, even talking with Annie last night, maybe I'm going to spend this off into a new, uh, film project. Um, but what that is about is rewilding, and in particular, rewilding prairie.

[00:01:04] In the United States, and, uh, I've got my little cup of coffee, so settle in for an informative and fun podcast here, uh, as we talk about, uh, rewilding on Strung Out. What is rewilding? Well, for those of you that live in any part of the world where there's been human habitation for a while, but yet there's still the vestiges of, of wilderness.

[00:01:38] And what I mean by vestiges is like mountains, uh, like the highlands in Scotland, um, uh, streams, things like that, that have been maybe kept in private holdings. Uh, Scotland's a great example because they're first and foremost in the rewilding project. There's a lot of private enterprises. And some public ones that are working to put together sizable tracts of land that they want to return back to wilderness.

[00:02:13] This is an exciting thing. And yesterday I got to see it firsthand. Um, going out for the first time, bringing my daughter and her friend and her friend's mom to see 4, 000 acres of land. Uh, outside of Lee and Ogle County, Illinois, um, there, that's about two hours west of Chicago near Dixon. It's land that's run by the Nature Conservancy, and it's called the Nachuza Grasslands.

[00:02:44] And I've been wanting to see this for some time because, unlike, uh, there's Midewin, uh, which is a tall grass prairie, uh, uh, grassland that's being restored by, um, the, uh, United States, um, Department of the Interior. This is a private holding. The Nature Conservancy is, uh, a group of like minded people that, uh, kind of, uh, banded under the Aldo Leopold idea.

[00:03:15] Of protecting the earth, bringing, getting back to nature, restoring wilderness, uh, keeping man, uh, out of wilderness and letting wilderness do its own thing. So that's, that's kind of the, the idea of nature conservancy and the, with one big caveat is that this is all privately funded. The positive thing about that is, is they don't have a lot of, um, red tape to cut through.

[00:03:45] The negative part about it is when purchasing land, you're purchasing it for top dollar. And I'm going to continue to pursue, not only the Nature Conservancy, but, uh, to do a trip down to Midewin, uh, because those are the two largest projects I'm aware of in the state of Illinois. If I can find more, I'll report to you.

[00:04:07] Why Is it so important to rewild these parts of Illinois, Illinois, once upon a time had over 22 million acres of tall grass prairie. Now we're down to less than 1%. And of that 1%, so few of it is in contiguous patches. A lot of the prairie was left from, um, places where, uh, there would be like prairie cemeteries.

[00:04:40] You'll pioneer cemeteries and, uh, instead of planting Kentucky bluegrass in those cemeteries, they just let them go. Now the people were planted in the prairie, uh, they're buried out there in the 1850s, 1860s, when there's still remnants of prairie left. Tall grass prairie exists for the most part, east of the Mississippi.

[00:05:08] Once you kind of get midway into Iowa. It peters out because the elevation starts rising and what you get then is you get, uh, short grass prairie, high plains. All that land is conducive, uh, uh, for farming. And when the European settlers came, that's what they did. They turned it all into farmland. So, Nechuza, going there, what was really cool about it was that the Nature Conservancy has introduced a herd of about 190 bison.

[00:05:48] And these are bison that you can see from the road. These are bison that, uh, are well fenced in, but they're also on about half the land that the Nature Conservancy currently has, and they're wild. They come from, uh, herds that have been maintained wild that are genetically pure bison. Genetically pure bison means that there are no cow genomes in the DNA.

[00:06:21] For a little while in the late 1890s, there was an attempt by ranchers to infuse cattle with, um, with bison DNA and vice versa. Bison are much better at adapting to, uh, the northern climes than European cattle. Um, they can stop Uh, giving birth during a blizzard, for example. And, uh, they can delay that until better weather.

[00:06:55] A lot of things. Uh, heartier. Able to eat, uh, better. Uh, able to forage better. So, uh, there was a pollution of some sort. With the, the genomes of these bison. Um, and, uh, there's been a lot of effort to bring it back. From time to time, you see articles that crop up about this. And, uh, I'm going to put on my reading glasses and just read a little bit to you.

[00:07:21] About, uh, an article that came from Outdoor Life. And, uh, what This article, you probably can Google it. It's under the title. After more than a century of conservation efforts, why can't we recover America's Buffalo? Well, that's a supposition that the bison have not been, um, recovered. So you have to ask yourself, what, what Uh, recovery means and again, looking at a small parcel of land of which 4, 000 acres really is in the state of Illinois.

[00:07:58] Remember, 22 million acres of Illinois was tall grass prairie. And. In just a tiny corner of Ogle and Lee County, there's 4, 000 acres. It's not a lot. And you're going to need a lot more than that to, to, as this article wants to do, bring back bison to, uh, uh, a sustainable level as a wild species.

[00:08:30] So, Let's, let's talk for a little bit, uh, before I go off on too many tangents. Uh, let me just read a little bit from this, this article. So, uh, so we can talk about it. Um, part of this article just talks about, uh, back in the olden days, Hornaday, who was with the Smithsonian, was trying to, uh, uh, preserve, uh, this, the last great, you know, uh, specimen of the buffalo.

[00:08:56] It must've been crazy to see in less than 20 years. All this bison be wiped out by anybody that was scientifically inclined. It must have been horrible. But, uh, that's what happened is that they wiped out, uh, the bison down. Um, and so that's, you know, he, he, uh, Hornaday's, uh, expedition went out to Montana.

[00:09:24] And, uh, I think now you can see, uh, at the Lewis and Clark Museum, I want to say. In Montana, his specimens from the Smithsonian, they were there and, uh, he, he shot a bull, a cow, and a calf, and they were the last, uh, he preserved them, uh, just so people in the future could see them. Um, all this is covered also in the American Buffalo, um, David Burns.

[00:09:51] I mean, Ken Burns, uh, he, he does a great documentary about that, but, um, let's, let's talk about what, what's going on here. Okay. So this is what they say, our failure to recover bison. It's never as obvious as when we reflect on our successes. The wildlife conservation community recovered white tailed deer and pronghorn antelope, wild turkeys and American elk, not to mention smallmouth bass and sandhill cranes.

[00:10:22] We not only didn't let Canada geese go extinct, but we preserved wetlands for them. If you need evidence of the success of professional wildlife management, consider that most of the world's bird species are in steep decline. The notable exception? North American waterfowl and wetland birds that have abundant habitat and advocates thanks to investments by hunters and wildlife agencies.

[00:10:48] Why bison in the same self congratulating terms? Well, Nechusa Prairie is a good example. Nechusa Grasslands is a good example of, of why you can't, um, because a large species like bison, a free roaming species, needs a lot of land, and in order for that to happen in Illinois, you would have to purchase and, uh, expand the land.

[00:11:24] The range of, uh, uh, the, the bison range rewild a large portion. And we're talking, you know, not thousands of acres, but millions of acres of land. Is it possible? Yeah, it would be possible. Is it exciting? Hell yeah. I wish we could do it. And, and for the future of our, our, uh, future generations and, uh, the reasons why.

[00:11:58] Became evident to me when I visited Nechuza Grasslands, a rewilded place. And, uh, I'm going to continue with that after this break on a Memorial Day issue of Stronghold. Hello, this is Polly Chase presenting artwork by Martin McCormick. This painting, titled Dude, features a mountain range that holds a special place in Marty's heart.

[00:12:28] On the canvas, which measures 20 by 24, we see the Tetons rising in the hazy distance of a view from an abandoned dude ranch just outside Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Near Marty's parents old place, the cool blues and violets of the background complement the buttery yellow foreground. These colors pass the viewer's attention back and forth along the horizontal plane, while the decaying Model T sinks into that scrubby landscape from which the majestic peaks punch upward along the vertical plane.

[00:13:07] It's a quiet yet very moving scene. scene, both artistically and emotionally. It pulls the imagination into a human story waiting to be told, one witnessed by rock that is millions of years old. To explore this painting and more of Marty's artwork, go to martin. mccormick. com. Dot com.

[00:14:19] Let's,

[00:15:29] let's go.

[00:18:30] And we're back. So the cool thing about Nchu Grasslands. Is that they purchased some land in a part of Illinois that has limestone bluffs, sort of what you see in the driftless area of a little further north and west where the glaciers have missed, but yet you also see evidence of glacial activity. Some small, uh, canes, some, uh, some, uh, till, uh, rock deposits that have been left in the area.

[00:19:09] You also see evidence of oak savanna, bur oak, um, savanna. These were the predominant trees that existed in Illinois 1810.

[00:19:25] It was around these areas that the tallgrass prairie grew. A lot of the Native American tribes managed this landscape. They did so by burning and, um, what it created was what the French called La Belle Prairie, which was the open parkland. And it looked like that you had these trees with, uh, undergrowth underneath them, but daylight streaming through, you had these grasslands lush and abundant and many different kinds of flowers and such.

[00:20:04] And you had the animal species that were roaming free. So Nachusa, in purchasing this land, purchased some extremely rare land to build around. One of the positive things is, for that part of Illinois, being so close to the urban center of Chicago, is that it's all farmland. Uh, the Rock River, uh, runs just a little bit to the west of it, and so it's well watered.

[00:20:37] It also has, um, uh, not been, uh, overdeveloped. You go about an hour east and you're starting to hit Aurora, you're starting to hit, um, the town of Rochelle would probably be your first example of where industry has sunk its claws into, um, uh, that area. You know, um, it's, it's a, the interstates bisect there as well as the railway.

[00:21:07] So, um, so there's a little bit of hope. That maybe Nachusa could expand its grasslands. That takes the collective will of those people that, uh, a huge entity like this is purchasing around. Will we see that sort of thing happen? I highly doubt it, uh, as much as I would love to see it. Um, it's gonna take somebody that has a lot of money to, to make it happen.

[00:21:38] You're also going to have to, um, Displace. Uh, farms, towns, things like that. And Illinois, uh, is a very, uh, lush state. Very fertile, very good for farming. So, it would take, it would take an amazing incentive to get it to, to move. Um, you know, to, to revert. But, here's the cool thing about it. Is, right now, when you walk around Nechusa, you look over at the private holdings.

[00:22:14] And finally, you can see on those private holdings, what they looked like when they were wild, because you're walking in those areas that are wild. And that's very exciting. Uh, right across the street from the visitor center, there is a farmer that has a herd of Angus cattle. And when you look at that farm, you realize it wouldn't take a lot to restore this back to its natural state.

[00:22:47] And that The settlement of this area was not so damaging and dramatic to the fact that the landscape, unlike Rochelle, unlike going in east toward Chicago, it's been altered forever. So the, the manpower, the effort to revert it back Is, is there, uh, and it's not going to take a lot of manpower. So, the choice there then lies upon, uh, the collective will of people that have farmland, that want to see something beautiful happen with it for future generations, and the purchasing power of a private organization like Nachuza Grasslands.

[00:23:34] My hope is that they can do it. So you have this herd of Buffalo, this, uh, that's right outside Chicago. You also have it down at Midewin and, um, uh, they, uh, are wonderful in the sense that the proximity to the city is, it's not that far. You also have then this opportunity for the state of Illinois, if they were able to put together enough land for Nachusa, you could have the makings of the first.

[00:24:08] Bonafide Tallgrass Prairie National Park, and that would be a huge boon for Illinois. Um, imagine the population center, not only of Chicago, but Rockford, Milwaukee, the Twin Cities, and St. Louis. Being able to visit something that isn't 20 hours away like Yellowstone. So, does it have the kind of beauty that Yellowstone has?

[00:24:42] Yes. Surprisingly, yeah, it's um, it's a different kind of beauty. It's, it's, again, the, the prairie, that parkland that I saw, it was the first time I really got to see it. And I grew up on a farm, so I, I, I had areas around me where I, I, the, the Midwest looked wild to me. But, It was fallow land. It wasn't rewilded land.

[00:25:10] And that's the point I want to make about rewilding. Why it's so exciting is that it's the idea of bringing in the native species, taking out the invasive species, and bringing in the, um, major, uh, Animal element that made the whole prairies work and that is the bison and a genetically pure bison at that.

[00:25:36] So if we can't do it in Illinois, where can we do it? And after this short little break, I'll tell you about where it's being done and why if you have some money to spare, you should send some money to this organization as well. And you are watching and listening to Strung Out.

[00:26:02] Hello, Polly Chase presenting artwork by Martin McCormick. There are many reasons to buy art. You might choose a piece for a financial investment, or to put the finishing touch on interior decoration. You could buy work because it speaks to you. Or you are a friend of the artist. And then there is art that you buy for the sheer fun of it.

[00:26:26] These pop art portraits in the Man and Dog series definitely fall into the fun category. Each acrylic on canvas measures 12 by 9. They can be purchased individually or as a complete set of four. They are a playful testament to a companionship that stands the test of time and a vast wardrobe. Check out this painting and more of Marty's artwork on martinmccormick.

[00:26:53] com. You can also email me with your interests at martyfineart at gmail. com.

[00:27:05] All right, and we're back. I want to read to you a little bit about an area where we might be able to pull this off on such a scale that, um, we could have the American version of the Serengeti. And if this happens, it'll be a game changer for the American bison, the wild species. Right now, the largest. A bit of land that we have for the bison would be like Yellowstone National Park.

[00:27:41] That's a very big area. It's like the size of Rhode Island. Okay. But there is an attempt in Montana to put together federal, tribal, and private land into a preserve of about 5 million square acres, I believe it is. Um, And that would be 5, 000 square miles. Let me get that right. 5, 000 square mile land base with 1.

[00:28:13] 1 million acres Federal Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Reserve. So if you get on the map and you can look up the Charles M. Russell Wildlife Center, it's, it's not too far from the Fort Peck Reservoir and Great Falls, Montana. If you're out in that part of Montana, eastern Montana, that's, uh, again, kind of the high plains.

[00:28:35] It's a different kind of prairie, um, uh, from the tall grass that we have here in the Midwest, but it is rural enough that, um, people, if the land was purchased and this was put together, we would have something the size of the state of Connecticut, that landmass would be large enough. To maintain a roving herd of bison at, uh, the size of a pre European, uh, uh, intrusion, if you will.

[00:29:16] It also would be able to bring in other predators, uh, the grizzly, the wolf, um, bring in other species of animals like, uh, the elk and the pronghorn antelope in open areas that, again, would not be, uh, Intruded upon by mankind, we would relinquish these lands to rewild them. It's very exciting. It's called the American Prairie Preserve.

[00:29:47] And I wanna, I just wanna read a little bit from here. Allison Fox is the CEO of American Prairie. And, uh, She says American Prairie's guiding vision is based on a document developed by landscape ecologists called the Vermejo Statement, which posits that a contiguous block zone of at least 5 million acres on the Northern Plains is the minimum space required to make a measurable impact in native prairie restoration.

[00:30:20] With free roaming bison as the main catalyst, For ecological change and she goes on to say that, you know, you have to look at the bison there. It's not the American bison preserve. It's the Prairie Reserve. Why is it important to bring back the, this, these plants? Um, because they, they grow so well there, first of all, and, uh, that we can do it.

[00:30:50] We, we're, we're not that far gone yet where we, we could bring back something to its wild state again. rewild an area. Um, she says, uh, that the American Prairie is not a bison project, according to this article, but bison are critical agents of our group's restoration efforts. And I quote, they're grazing patterns.

[00:31:17] They're wallowing, how they use riparian systems, how they die on the landscape, all have ecological impacts. We want them back on the landscape as a keystone species, ultimately to bring back all the native plants. And to restore, uh, not only the native plants, but to restore the animals and bring back this area of the Great Plains to pre colonization standards.

[00:31:50] The, the, this is the size of the state of Connecticut, roughly, which is exciting, I think. Um, of course they're getting pushback, uh, the reason why they're getting pushback is the, uh, uh, cattle industry that's out there. Um, They don't want to relinquish those lands that have been in their families for a long time.

[00:32:11] And, um, you know, the cattle industry is a big industry. Um, so what you have to understand is that, uh, that what it's going to take is money and willpower and, um, goodwill as well to convince, uh, some of these long term, long range cattle families that they should give up. Uh, their land, uh, in order to bring something bigger and better to future generations, because we can, and maybe the children, the grandchildren of this area, um, you know, can, you know, also participate in this project, but from an eco tourism standpoint, they might not necessarily have to stop living on their land, but what they could do is just change the nature of their business.

[00:33:12] And I wouldn't be surprised if the American prairie, uh, reserve is trying that with, uh, some of these families. Getting them to think in the idea of ecotourism, getting them to think in the idea of, um, ranching, not from the standpoint of their own private herd, but maybe a major bison herd. Who knows? Uh, that remains to be seen.

[00:33:35] A little more exploration on my part to find out, and I hope someday I can talk to one of the trustees with the American Prairie Reserve to talk about it. But for us in the Midwest, uh, again, in Illinois specifically, In this part of the Midwest, which is true tall grass prairie habitat, we have Nachusa grasslands and we have the restoration efforts at Midewin, which are on the land of the former, uh, Joliet Arsenal.

[00:34:09] They're pretty far apart, but wouldn't it be wonderful if somehow we in the state of Illinois, maybe we couldn't get together 5 million acres of land, but we certainly could get together A million acres, we could maybe get even two million acres of land together and create a mini biosphere of tall grass prairie as a national park, wilded back to the state before European colonization of Illinois, restoring not only water quality, but land quality, wildflowers.

[00:34:52] Bring in the keystone species, the bison, bring in the keystone species, the elk, and all the animals that were here and maintain it as a national park that would be for the benefit and the enjoyment of all. It would change this area radically and for the better, I think. So, that's why I'm excited about rewilding and that's why from time to time I talk about it.

[00:35:20] I encourage you to support the Nature Conservancy. Um, at some point I will talk to somebody from Nechusa and interview them and get a little more of an understanding of what's going on there. So I'll be reporting back on it. But I just wanted to share what I did on my weekend for Memorial Day. And let's not forget the people that sacrificed and gave their lives in order for us to pursue such pleasures as me walking along the tall grass prairie at Nechusa grasslands.

[00:35:52] I really had a great time and I hard, highly recommend that you go and do it. So that's it for now. And, uh, I hope to get back with some more interviews with artists. And, uh, also I'm going to be talking about the upcoming album, Red or Blue, uh, starting to present that in a little more depth as we go along.

[00:36:12] So until next week, have a great week and bye bye. Thank you for listening. For more information about this show or a transcript, visit martinmccormack. com. While there, sign up for our newsletter. See you next time on Strung Out.

[00:36:37] There's no sense at all. A swan song wasn't part of the deal, was no good at all. Givin no choice, givin no ste