A sign at the Comanche National Grasslands reads: “Anyone can love a mountain, but it takes soul to love a prairie.” Someone at the office told me that Teddy Roosevelt said that. Personally, I don’t believe it. TR did not count “soul” as a virtue, and the line has nothing of the rhythm or diction of his conservation or outdoors aphorisms.
The Forest Service is as diverse as the landscapes it manages—landscapes which are found from sea level to 14,500 feet, from 200 inches of precipitation a year to practically nothing at all. The agency manages trees that can grow four feet a year and trees that grow four feet every thousand years or so. The Forest Service manages rainforests (both temperate and tropical), glaciers, wetlands, mountains… and prairies. The latter is a bit of a puzzler, since prairies are sort of the antithesis of forest, the other side of the coin, as it were.
Four million acres of grassland came to be managed by the Forest Service as a result of “agricultural maladjustments,” in the words of New Deal/Progressive era agricultural technocrats. They were either the least productive, or the most badly used farmlands (or both)—mostly in the Great Plains—that started to literally come apart at the seams during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when billions of tons of soil were blown halfway across the country in storms that lasted weeks.
They are, as an employee at the Comanche Grassland office in southeastern Colorado told me, lands “that never should have seen a plow.” They were initially “land utilization projects,” lands purchased by the federal government from bankrupt farmers under (Franklin) Roosevelt’s national soil conservation program. They were passed around an alphabet soup of now mostly defunct New Deal bureaucracies until the found a home with the Forest Service in 1960. Like all national forest lands, they are managed under a multiple use mandate, used for grazing, minerals, recreation and more.
(The Great Plains National Grasslands are, an employee told me, “still a recovering landscape.”)
The major ecological challenge currently facing the grasslands is, just as it was in the 1930s, drought. Seven of the last nine years have been dry, very, dry.
The Great Plains is no place for tenderfeet. On Saturday Zella and I were caught in a truly spectacular thunderstorm hiking out to the Pawnee Buttes on the Pawnee Grassland in northeastern Colorado (managed by the Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest). The sky was cobalt blue with a few big puffy white clouds when I broke out my camera tripod and the big 6×7cm format camera and began serious contemplation of the buttes. Ten minutes after that a shadow fell on the short grass prairie and I felt a chill gust of wind. Ten minutes after that we were being pelted by walnut-sized chunks of hail. Zella jumped on the back of my legs as the first bolt of lightning touched down a quarter mile away and we slid on our butts down a steep embankment into three inches of muddy water in a gully that’d been bone dry thirty minutes before. I laughed to reassure Zella. She wasn’t buying it.
Ten minutes after that the sun broke through a light rain and a big rainbow grew out of the tops of one of the buttes (an image that won’t see the light of day until I get this huge bag of film developed. Boy are you guys in for a treat!).
Models of global warming in the Great Plains predict both more heat stress events—periods of 90+ degree heat that lasts for more than three days and damages stock and crops—and an increased frequency of high intensity rainfall.
These rapid climactic mood swings are a typical breeding ground for tornadoes. In 1999, a rash of F4 and F5 strength tornadoes struck the southern plains, causing a $1 billion in damages and killing 54 people. Recent flooding in the Midwest may also be a symptom of changing climate.
I have no idea what the management implications of these changes will be for the grasslands. Improvements in agricultural practices and erosion control will probably avert another 1930s style Dust Bowl. We think. But what other “agricultural maladjustments” are lurking behind the corner of changing weather? What role will the national grasslands, and the Forest Service play in helping society adapt?
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