/tags/essay/ Recent content in essay on Rootstalk Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Wed, 03 Nov 2021 08:25:58 +0000 /past-issues/volume-iv-issue-1/evans-volume-iv-issue-1/ Wed, 03 Nov 2021 08:25:58 +0000 /past-issues/volume-iv-issue-1/evans-volume-iv-issue-1/ Toledo, Iowa’s Wieting Theatre Opera House opened for the first time in September of 1912. It measured just 50 by 100 feet and had elaborate murals on the walls to the left and right of the grand stage. The stage was masked by a hand-painted tapestry that hung down and brushed the wood floor beneath it. The building itself has seen many changes during the century since its opening, but throughout its history it has provided Toledo with a warm environment where the community has been able to experience the arts and enjoy time spent with one another. /past-issues/volume-iv-issue-2/manoylov-peaches-meet-corn/ Thu, 30 Sep 2021 20:37:23 +0000 /past-issues/volume-iv-issue-2/manoylov-peaches-meet-corn/ As a Georgia native, I thought the Midwest meant corn and cows and people who said “baggy” as “bayggy.” It wasn’t until my first year in Iowa that I realized how charming the sleepy little state could be. At sixteen years old, a junior in high school, I set out for Iowa Lakeside Laboratory in Milford, Iowa for a conservation biology class. The field station was established in 1909, and the stone cabin classrooms bore evidence of a century of weathering. /past-issues/volume-v-issue-1/worthless-rocks/ Mon, 26 Oct 2020 18:24:44 +0000 /past-issues/volume-v-issue-1/worthless-rocks/ I’m an archaeologist, so I get calls occasionally: someone has an artifact they want me to look at. Usually it’s an ‘arrowhead’ they have just found, or a collection made over the years or inherited from granddad. I don’t encourage people to collect artifacts without documenting location, because this removes them from the site and diminishes the chances that they can tell us anything about past people. Nevertheless, I try not to sound too self-righteous about archaeological ethics when I talk to a friendly member of the public. /past-issues/volume-v-issue-1/on-the-changing-nature-of-the-obituary/ Thu, 06 Aug 2020 15:59:41 +0000 /past-issues/volume-v-issue-1/on-the-changing-nature-of-the-obituary/ I spied the tee-shirt amidst a plethora of choices online one evening while looking for a gag gift for one of our adult children. I’ve never been much of a tee-shirt person myself, believing that one’s chest and back serve higher purposes than sending messages via a cotton sandwich board. Although, to be honest, I did buy myself a t-shirt the first day of each of my 17 RAGBRAIs. They’ve become badges of accomplishment albeit a little ragged from the wear. /past-issues/volume-v-issue-1/extraction-roots-energy-plains/ Thu, 06 Aug 2020 15:55:03 +0000 /past-issues/volume-v-issue-1/extraction-roots-energy-plains/ People in exile are experts on roots and energy. They know how much energy is needed to extract roots, how much energy is needed to stay uprooted, and, because a state of uprootedness is unsustainable over the long run, how much to sink roots deep into the ground again. I remember standing in North Dakota and looking toward the horizon. One can actually see Earth as a globe - the slight curve of the horizon, where the winds come from that bend the grass and the few trees, and where the clouds gather that sweep overhead, only to disappear again and make way for the blue sky. /past-issues/volume-v-issue-1/my-integrated-life-pt-1/ Thu, 06 Aug 2020 05:05:14 +0000 /past-issues/volume-v-issue-1/my-integrated-life-pt-1/ Born in the Midwest at nearly the exact middle of the 20th Century, Dartanyan Brown has been front-and-center for many of American culture’s most defining struggles, particularly the Civil Rights movement and the advent of revolutions in music and technology. Where many people content themselves with one career, Brown has had at least four: in journalism, in musical performance, in the tech sector and in education. Through it all, he has continued to forge ahead with an optimism and openness to connection that he learned in a family guided by a strong maternal grandmother who grew up in an integrated Iowa town where she “didn’t know nothin’ ‘bout no segregation! /past-issues/volume-v-issue-2/boyce/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-v-issue-2/boyce/ Bryan Boyce was a middle schooler when he spent a typical summer with his brother and his friends in a cabin in Minnesota. They would spend whole days swimming out in the lake, waging squirt gun wars against each other, and walking downtown to buy Little Debbie snacks. However, this time of childhood bliss was interrupted one day when a girl quietly pulled Boyce aside and conspiratorially whispered, “Hey, do you realize we are the only normal people here? /past-issues/volume-iv-issue-1/bernal/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-iv-issue-1/bernal/ For two weeks this past summer, I had a farm of my very own. This is the story of what those weeks were like for me: my everyday routine, its trials, and my growth. A family that I babysit for in the small town of Grinnell, Iowa, went away on vacation for two weeks and asked me to take care of their house while they were gone. It’s on a hill outside of town that includes acres of land in the back, a small barn with goats, dogs and cats, and a chicken coop. /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-2/cain/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-2/cain/ Humans have always shared. It’s in our nature to share. Sharing creates and sustains relationships and enhances knowledge, it protects us from ignorance. It’s powerful. It confirms identity. It helps reach goals, increases competence, and brings rewards. And knowledge sharing, not just germplasm sharing, is going to be the other major feature here. Knowledge sharing is a fundamental process of civilization, it is central to learning, it deepens identity, and it creates community… And sharing knowledge and information about the genetic diversity in our seed banks can help farmers and breeders to enhance the sustainability and resilience of our agricultural systems. /past-issues/volume-iv-issue-1/moffett/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-iv-issue-1/moffett/ This is a story of a misspent youth, of wrong turns taken, of love misdirected and unwise romance. It is a tale of mistakes made and made again, of experiments with exotic plants and strange substances and foolish choices—and serious addiction. This is a ballad of unnatural behavior and of lost roots, but more than anything else, it’s the story of an approach to a long-sought goal: Nirvana. This is the story of how I found grass: pleasure in grass, euphoria in grass, contentment in grass. /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-1/wiewiora/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-1/wiewiora/ On Fridays, the café at Frederiksen Court in Ames, Iowa, offers one dollar off all Starbucks drinks. I use the café as my need-to-pee location on the bus route I drive. My CARDINAL bus cycles around the volleyball courts and picnic tables in the grassy median of Freddy Court’s several dozen dorm buildings, and then loops around Iowa State’s central campus. The route is shaped like a figure eight, but riding the wheel doesn’t feel like infinity. /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-2/neems/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-2/neems/ The address, 3418 Osage Street South West, nestled in the hills between Johnny Meier’s ramshackle farmhouse and Old Man’s Creek, is my place. A hobby farm dedicated to sustainability amidst the industrialized conventional fields of Iowa corn. It is not my home, nor any of my relative’s, but it is the Iowa farm where I have attended summer camp—Country Camp—every year since I was seven. It is here that I learned to be enchanted by the treasure of potatoes dug from their home beneath the soil, invisible to the onlooker. /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-1/saunders/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-1/saunders/ Though Ken Saunders numbers hiking and nature study among his primary interests, nature photography is his passion. Photography, in his mind, dovetails with all his other interests. Saunders got his first camera, a Kodak 104 Instamatic, when he was around seven years old. This camera used a 126 film cartridge and featured a connector for the new (at the time) flashcube. The 104 retailed for $15.95 when launched in 1963. Kodak sold 60 million of the various models of “Instamatic” cameras in the 1960s and 1970s. /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-1/queathem/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-1/queathem/ As quite literally the largest problem of our time, climate change’s sheer enormity can make it seem an insurmountable subject. In the words of Naomi Klein, this changes everything. How can an author who loves nature avoid this topic with a clear conscience? And yet, how can she hope to face this juggernaut undaunted? My high school English teacher, Michael Niflis, whose opinion I greatly respected, could not imagine how any intelligent person could look at the world around us without considering depression a rational perspective – and yet, if we choose to believe we cannot change the world, we acquiesce to our own impotence, which is a moral failure. /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-2/moffett/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-2/moffett/ It was nine o’clock, breakup time for Wade MacPherson’s Wednesday breakfast group at the South of the Tracks Cafe, an unlikely mixture of two of his retired faculty colleagues, two hunting buddies, and another guy who had sat down with them a couple of years ago and joined them almost every Wednesday since. Conversation was always spirited, laced with arguments over inconsequential matters. But on this morning they had come as close to angry disagreement as he could remember. /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-2/shukla/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-2/shukla/ “For some years … he had felt the need to …supply himself, by measurement and delimitation, with spaces which were hardly more than “forms on paper” but which, for a short while at least, enabled him to construct himself and make himself invulnerable.” Peter Handke, “The Long Way Round” My recent drawings of organic objects were inspired by traditions of trompe l’oeil painting, natural history and scientific illustration. I work from specimens, sketching and photographing to compose a larger image. /past-issues/volume-ii-issue-1/editor/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-ii-issue-1/editor/ Emma Thomasch When I decided to attend college in Iowa, I received many questions about why I had chosen to go so far from home, why I would attend college in such a small town “in the middle of nowhere,” and what there was in Iowa that I preferred to schools elsewhere. At the time, I didn’t know how to answer—as a New Yorker, I was uncertain enough of my own decision to spend four years in the middle of cornfields without having to justify it to anyone else. /past-issues/volume-v-issue-2/behar/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-v-issue-2/behar/ With growing interest in providing habitat for pollinators and a concern over the loss of native plants in our landscape, many landowners want to transform fallow or savannah land from non-native or single species grasslands to diverse native grasses and flowering plants—ultimately restoring native prairies. Because native prairie grasses and flowering forb plants have very small seeds, the planting area needs to be bare to ensure good seed-to-soil contact. Most prairie planting recommendations encourage the use of herbicide in preparing this seed bed. /past-issues/volume-ii-issue-1/farewell-richard/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-ii-issue-1/farewell-richard/ Until his untimely death from ALS in November, 2015, Richard Fyffe had served as Librarian of the College since coming to Grinnell ten years ago. Richard worked tirelessly to enhance library operations at the College and build a strong staff of professionals and support personnel, and his contributions in this area have been publicly recognized by Grinnell College President Raynard Kington and Dean of the College Michael Latham on several occasions. /past-issues/volume-v-issue-2/brew/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-v-issue-2/brew/ Seventeen years ago, working at my former employer, German automaker BMW AG, I was feeling like it was time for a change. I had spent the greater part of my professional career overseas in automotive design, and BMW had been very good to me. I’d had assignments in the UK for BMW subsidiary Rolls-Royce, and I had recently returned to the USA to gain experience running a studio in California. But returning to Germany at the end of this time to run the 3, 5 or 7-series studio didn’t feel like the step I wanted to take, and I started to look at what was going on outside automotive design. /past-issues/volume-ii-issue-1/kirschenmann/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-ii-issue-1/kirschenmann/ …the way was blazed for treating the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as one great subject, calling for a boldly revised point of view and entirely fresh investigation. Sir Albert Howard, The Soil and Health (1947) Defining Sustainability As most everyone interested in sustainability knows by now, the concept has been appropriated by numerous entities and used in various ways, often to achieve different objectives. In his introductory chapter to the excellent 2013 edition of the Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World report, Robert Engelman coined the term “sustainababble” to reflect this “cacophonous profusion of uses of the word sustainable to mean anything from environmentally better to cool. /past-issues/volume-iv-issue-1/freeberg/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-iv-issue-1/freeberg/ “The world is not a rectilinear world, it is a curvilinear world. The heavenly bodies go in a curve because that is the natural way.” George Bernard Shaw As a teenager, I served a reluctant apprenticeship to my father in his mid-life career change from farm equipment salesman to home builder. I learned the use of tools and materials on dozens of simple ranch homes, using plans drafted by dad on spiral notebook pages. /volume-viii-issue-1/henry/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /volume-viii-issue-1/henry/ My father has left me 118 acres of pastureland, just north of the once-prosperous town of Havensville, Kansas, where my parents met and courted. I am not sure what to do with my new holdings. I never thought much about what I would inherit from my parents, though I knew they owned their own home as well as a farm in Missouri, plus two properties in Kansas. I’ve known most of my adult life that when they died, I would own half of their land and my sister, Kit, would own the other half. /past-issues/volume-v-issue-2/brandt/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-v-issue-2/brandt/ Since the middle of the 19th century, farm families in the Midwest have aspired to improve their situation through education. Our current school system, and frankly our society as a whole, is based on the premise that if you work hard enough you can achieve what you set your mind to. This belief may provide people with hope—it suggests individuals control their destiny—but embedded in the rhetoric is the subtext that failure to succeed must mean personal inadequacy. /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-1/haldy/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-1/haldy/ Since June 15, 1983, I’ve had the good fortune to serve as the Executive Director of the Amana Heritage Society, a local non-profit historical society in Amana, Iowa. I was born and raised in Middle Amana and live in the house of my childhood. Having done my graduate work in history at the University of Iowa I am doubly fortunate to be a historian in and of my own home town. /past-issues/volume-vii-issue-2/ross/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-vii-issue-2/ross/ In 1945, at Iowa’s State Training School for Boys in Eldora, Iowa, seventeen-year-old Robert Miller shoveled coal all day long as punishment for an alleged escape plot. When he tried to quit working because the oppressive August temperature had drained his strength, guards at the school tried to force him to continue and, when he refused, the guards beat him to death 1 with an iron rod taken from a “harness tug. /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-2/aschittino/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-2/aschittino/ I worked just over two months on Mustard Seed Community Farm. as an “agro-ecology intern”. I think the full two months was in order to allow outdoor rural Iowa to deprogram me from the alienated technology-saturated life I had been leading, and to get me acquainted with the more raw conditions of living. The farm’s setting is quite a bit more rural than Grinnell, about twelve miles north of Ames which is a city of about 60,000 (although over half are Iowa State students who migrate with the academic cycle) Both Nate and Alice, who are the primary owners and operators of the farm, have part-time jobs at a cooperative in Ames, and they could drive me to town on weekends. /past-issues/volume-v-issue-2/brown/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-v-issue-2/brown/ In Volume V, Issue 1 of Rootstalk1, Dartanyan Brown told the first of three installments in a remarkable story. A native Iowan and African American, born in the Midwest at nearly the exact middle of the 20th Century, he was front-and-center for many of American culture’s most defining struggles, particularly the Civil Rights movement and the advent of revolutions in music and technology. Where many people content themselves with one career, Brown has had at least four: in journalism, in musical performance, in the tech sector and in education. /past-issues/volume-vi-issue-1/brown/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-vi-issue-1/brown/ console.log("Debugging in figure_azure.html. PID: grinnell_28564_OBJ.jpg"); console.log('Debugging in figure_azure.html. width: '); console.log('Debugging in figure_azure.html. height: '); console.log('Debugging in figure_azure.html. maxwidth: 200'); console.log('Debugging in figure_azure.html. alt: '); console.log('Debugging in figure_azure.html. caption: Dartanyan Brown and the members of the Drake University Jazz Band in 1974. He is seated front row center with his bass. Future wife Marcia Miget is at the end of the second row, on the right, holding her saxophone and flute. /past-issues/volume-ii-issue-1/moffett-1/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-ii-issue-1/moffett-1/ My husband Sandy works with a small, committed group which purchased and is restoring to prairie a tract of land in southern Iowa. They call these rugged 700 acres Pleasant Grove, a name I find inappropriate. It’s too large to be a grove and too rough to be pleasant. Though appreciative of its deer, wild turkey, and blackberries, I am put off by the labor this land requires—planting, mowing, burning—and by its size. /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-2/fellows/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-2/fellows/ American culture tends to disparage nostalgia. To hold a pronounced affection for things and ways of the past is seen as simple-minded at best, reactionary at worst, and frankly rather un-American. This nation has always seen itself as the land of the forward-looking, a nation of promising frontiers and fresh beginnings, grand opportunities, inventive entrepreneurs and new machinery. To participate fully in the mainstream flow of American life today, one must live always on the cusp of tomorrow. /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-2/hanson/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-2/hanson/ There are battles which never make the news, at home or abroad. Yet, they are as deep and hard-fought as any you will find. The battles are over the will of the people, the dictates of a distant capital, and the struggle to maintain a sense of place in a dynamic world. In a constitutional democracy, there is an obligation to follow the law. But when some laws hurt or threaten, is there an equal mandate to resist? /past-issues/volume-v-issue-2/mcbee/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-v-issue-2/mcbee/ I drove slowly up the gravel road in northern Iowa and approached, for the first time in forty years, the one-acre site where our small rural country school had once stood, one that had proudly carried the name Liberty #6. I’d been told nothing was there any longer, but I still felt a deep need to visit the place. The eight-year education I had received there was by far the most important and relevant of my life, much more so than high school, college, and beyond. /past-issues/volume-vi-issue-1/andelson/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-vi-issue-1/andelson/ In response to the pandemic the Iowa Board of Health, like those in the surrounding states, placed the entire state under quarantine. Public gathering places closed, including schools, theaters, and churches. Face masks became part of being dressed appropriately when interacting with others in public spaces, although some, including public officials, resisted wearing them. Businesses slowed down or shuttered. People self-consciously stopped shaking hands. Doctors and nurses felt overwhelmed and often unequipped to deal with the crisis. /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-2/publisher/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-2/publisher/ Welcome to the Spring 2017 issue of Rootstalk: A Prairie Journal of Culture, Science, and the Arts, published by Grinnell College’s Center for Prairie Studies. This issue, like all of our spring issues to date, was produced through the joint efforts of students in a class—Humanities/Social Studies 295: Journal Publishing—co-taught by Mark Baechtel and myself. Our students in the class acted as an editorial board, soliciting and generating content, and editing the content once it came in. /past-issues/volume-ii-issue-1/lahay/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-ii-issue-1/lahay/ I’ve always had a cat, both as a child and as an adult. I never cared much for dogs and was quite nervous around large breeds. So when my husband said he wanted to get a dog, my only requirement was that we get a puppy to ease the transition for me and my cat. We did what many people do—we started looking at the pet ads in our local newspaper. /past-issues/volume-iv-issue-1/jackson/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-iv-issue-1/jackson/ In the winter of 1995-1996 the overwintering colonies of monarch butterflies in the Oyamel fir forests of Michoacan, Mexico, measured almost 20 hectares. On almost 50 acres of forest, each branch of each tree was loaded with layer upon layer of butterflies. Over the next 20 years, the size of the overwintering colonies fluctuated widely around a mean of six hectares. Then in the mid-2000s the colonies began to shrink, hitting an all-time low of 0. /past-issues/volume-ii-issue-1/mcilrath/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-ii-issue-1/mcilrath/ I don’t know what’s got me thinking about Shorty Tinkle. I suppose it’s this hip. It gets to hurting me if I sleep on it too long. It wakes me, and then I have to lie on my back. I prop myself up on pillows because the stomach acid bothers me, too, and between this hip and the stomach acid, I can’t get back to sleep. So I lie there thinking about things, running them over in my mind. /past-issues/volume-iv-issue-1/publisher/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-iv-issue-1/publisher/ In the last ten months I have devoted countless hours of my time to a tiny piece of real estate on the southeast edge of the Grinnell College campus. There was not much there ten months ago: a few crab apple trees on the south side, a few pines on the north side, a large walnut tree on the west side, and a forlorn looking lawn in the middle, about six-tenths of an acre. /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-1/lee/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-1/lee/ Mason City is a mid-sized Midwest rural community in North Central Iowa. Its population in the 2010 census was 28,052. Although our town has grown into a significant retail center for North Iowa, and there has been great buzz around the world in regards to our architectural and cultural history, Mason City has fallen on hard times. From the early 1900’s to about 1980, it was a growing city with great industry and retail. /past-issues/volume-ii-issue-1/heath/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-ii-issue-1/heath/ On Wednesdays, when Shirley Springer’s dad closed the front door of the drugstore in Garwin, Iowa, at midnight and turned off the lights, Shirley went across to the Bowery, an open air pavilion, and danced ‘til one in the morning. When Kenny Hofer and the Midwesterners were playing, as many as 700 people paid 75 cents to go through the swinging gate to the dance floor. A bandshell held the band and seats ringed the floor with a short fence surrounding it all. /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-2/rosburg/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-2/rosburg/ The North American grasslands stretch across the vast interior of the continent, occupying nearly 1.4 million square miles. We in the Midwest are proud of our section of the biome – the tallgrass prairie, which spreads from Manitoba south through the center of the continent to the Texas Gulf Coast, and reaches from Iowa eastward to Ohio and southern Ontario (Fig. 1). Like all biomes across the world, and other grasslands, the prairie was a product of climate, soils and the organisms that thrived in its environment. /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-2/maher/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-2/maher/ An eager crowd of about 80 guests packed the seats and floor space of the Grinnell Arts Center’s Loft Theater on January 27 to see Iowa-turned-Minneapolis band, The Pines, perform from its latest album, Above the Prairie. The band had been invited to Grinnell by both the Grinnell Area Arts Council and the Center for Prairie Studies, to perform in the town. Tickets were sold out more than a week before the show. /past-issues/volume-ii-issue-1/mutel/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-ii-issue-1/mutel/ When I was a youngster, my grandmother perched me on her knee and fed me stories about her childhood on a Wisconsin farm in the late 1800s. She and her sisters strolled in nearby woodlands in springtime, gathering bundles of wildflowers and wild herbs to bring home to their mother. Her son, my father, filled me with descriptions of his own 1930s rambles across Wisconsin farm fields—where he and his teenaged buddies startled large flocks of feeding larks who rose to trill from the heavens. /past-issues/volume-v-issue-2/snodgrass/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-v-issue-2/snodgrass/ We reconstruct or “restore” prairies to learn about the ecosystems that built our soils, to control erosion, and to support native insects and pollinators. But how are prairies reconstructed? First, a note on semantics: We often refer to the process of planting native prairie species on land that has been used previously for crops or grazing as prairie restoration. Instead, I will refer to this process as prairie reconstruction. This is in order to emphasize the magnitude of what we lost when we lost our native prairies. /past-issues/volume-v-issue-2/goodnature/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-v-issue-2/goodnature/ As a long-time teacher of humanities and American studies at Albert Lea High Schooland Riverland Community College in Minnesota, I loved introducing students to Thoreau and his works. When I took a graduate course on Thoreau, I already knew that he had spent most of his life in and around his home town of Concord, Massachusetts, and that his experiment in living a simple and deliberate life in the woods at Walden Pond had influenced conservationist movements around the world. /past-issues/volume-ii-issue-1/whittaker/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-ii-issue-1/whittaker/ The giant trucks crowding past me on I-35 ignore the turtle plodding down the shoulder. Under their wheels, the unfortunate reptile that tries to cross the freeway is no more than a sickening crunch on the way from Tulsa to Des Moines. As a card-carrying “I brake for wildlife” reptile-lover, I feel obliged to rescue turtles when I can stop safely, but I have begun to wonder about the implications of my kindly impulses. /past-issues/volume-vii-issue-2/kouchi/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-vii-issue-2/kouchi/ In March 2019, devastating floods hit the Missouri River floodplain and lasted for almost an entire year. Corey McIntosh and his wife, Tina Popson, who farm along the Missouri in western Iowa, were displaced by the flooding and had to leave their family farm to seek shelter. Mr. McIntosh’s great-grandparents purchased that land in the early 1940s, and the family has been farming it ever since. Since long before the ‘40s, flooding has been a part of the history of the Missouri, but in recent years flooding has become more frequent and stronger. /past-issues/volume-v-issue-2/moffett/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-v-issue-2/moffett/ Why else drive twohundredseventyfive miles on gym-floor-flat I-80 through corn farms, wind farms, and “mixed precipitation”? Why else find ourselves somewhere near Gibbon, Nebraska? Why else the south plain of the great Platte River meandering like veins on hand-back, three bridges to cross, “a mile wide and an inch deep” so said Edgar Nye1? Why else this black mud-graveled road, slurping into a sunset creeping under clouds on this rain-all-day March nineteenth? /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-1/gray/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-iii-issue-1/gray/ To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few. Emily Dickinson Many people are interested in gardening, beautifying their lawns, and environmental conservancy; however, it can be unclear how to combine these different interests for the purpose of increasing the number and diversity of native pollinators. In the spirit of the “National Strategy,” I designed and led a community engagement project which immersed locally-minded plant-enthusiasts from my Ohio community in wildflower prairie improvement.