Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
been able to acquire more and better tools for harvesting seeds, processing, and plant-
ing, and to acquire our Griffith Prairie property, which includes excellent buildings to
house equipment and huge piles of seed. Ensuing from this capacity-building Envi-
ronmental Trust grant we began to do extensive contract work still in process today,
which has developed into a significant service niche benefiting state and federal agen-
cies and nongovernmental organizations. Since its inception Prairie Plains has
pushed the physical limits of a small staff. Restoration is no exception as we have
planted more than seventy sites, including six thousand acres of high-diversity prairie
in thirty Nebraska counties, often with only two or three people doing the majority of
the harvesting. Progressing from tiny sites in 1980 to many hundreds of acres each
year, on individual sites from a couple to five hundred acres in size, we have recorded
a geographic information system (GIS) database of planting sites and species lists,
learned basic floristic information and compiled a Global Positioning System (GPS)
database of roadside species occurrences in eastern Nebraska, developed higher effi-
ciencies of harvest, and informed and involved many people in the restoration pro-
cess. Once again our core values of thrift, resourcefulness, adaptability, and service
have led to success.
Educational Program
In my estimation it is not enough to acquire natural areas and conduct stewardship
and restoration activities on these properties. The reasons to do conservation work are
ultimately defined within a human context and, as such, education is necessary to
promote and sustain conservation activity by deepening its values within the cultural
fabric of society. Because nature education is time consuming and demands focused
attention, effective teaching methods, and good outdoor locations, it is often left to
others. This was true in 1980; it is still relatively true today even though there have
been significant gains in thirty years. The result is that, despite abundant verbalization
and writing regarding its critical importance, such as Richard Louv's
Last Child in the
Woods
, few schools and few organizations do it at all, much less effectively (see chap.
21, this volume). Most institutions that customarily do nature education, for example,
nature centers and a few public schools with motivated teachers, rarely do so within a
real-world context in conjunction with natural and working lands preservation, man-
agement, and restoration activities.
We have endeavored to re-create in others an awakening to nature that Jan and I
experienced in our own formal education and in the process of rediscovering our roots
in the prairie. Education was a major aspect of our thought processes before discover-
ing the concept of restoration. Seeing what others were doing at the Morton and Uni-
versity of Wisconsin arboreta only strengthened our belief that we should become
more involved with outdoor education along the Platte River in central Nebraska,
since very little nature-based education was going on in rural Nebraska in 1980.
Subsequently, education, like restoration, became a pillar in the Prairie Plains mis-
sion. Over the years we have led many hikes on Prairie Plains lands and other natural
areas in central Nebraska. These attracted a fairly limited audience but were fun and
