We can only imagine what the great prairies and the Great Lakes were like two centuries ago. We do know Illinois once was an ocean of tall grass, home to countless Henslow’s sparrows and regal fritillary butterflies. On the north were vast inland seas of fresh water, filled with numberless blue pike and whitefish. Now those seemingly endless grasslands are gone, the lakes depleted.
In his 1999 book, The Condor’s Shadow: The Loss and Recovery of Wildlife in America, ecologist David Wilcove details the destruction of these and other wild places, the subsequent disappearance or decline of the species that once thrived in them, and our chances for restoring such degraded ecosystems.
In one sense, the story of the tallgrass prairie is simple. Less than 2,500 pristine acres remain in Illinois of what, at the beginning of the 19th century, had totaled some 22 million acres. What happened? The short of it is that such fertile ground proved too tempting to the plow. And the row crops that began, some 30 years ago, to dominate what was left of this rural landscape proved inhospitable to grassland birds, butterflies and flowers. The larger grazing mammals were hard-pressed, too, hunted to near-extinction or driven into shrinking remnants of earlier ranges.
The story of the Great Lakes is more complex. Because the ecology of the lakes is so varied, it must be told in five chapters. “Spanning more than 750 miles from east to west, and covering an area of 94,000 square miles,” Wilcove writes, “these five water bodies constitute the greatest expanse of fresh waters on the surface of the planet, equal to 18 percent of the world’s supply of fresh water. They are also among the most damaged aquatic ecosystems in the nation.”
Among the culprits, Wilcove argues, are commercial overfishing, which began around 1820, pollution and the invasive species that are wreaking havoc on native stock.
The stories of the prairie and lake ecosystems of the Midwest are echoed in the stories of other American ecosystems, from the Pacific Northwest to the Eastern coastline. But they are stories that cover time as well as space. The 19th and early 20th centuries in particular spanned an era of exploitation, including the mindless extirpation of species. The western-advancing settlers felled forests, plowed, then paved land, despoiled lakes and rivers, and fouled the air.
Yet we have learned much in 200 years. In the final quarter of the 20th century, we moved to protect native species, preserve wild places, clean water and air. We are still learning.
Wilcove suggests as much. We realize, he writes, that species and ecosystems, including forests and grasslands, differ in their resilience to change.
“It’s not simply the total amount of habitat that determines which species thrive and which decline; it’s how that habitat is distributed across the landscape.”
Songbirds, for instance, including those of Illinois, are vulnerable in fragmented forest tracts because predators tend to hunt along the edges of that ecosystem. This is true, as well, for the grassland birds.
We also have gained knowledge, hard-won though it is, about how intensively we should manage protected habitats. The evolving policies on controlling fires and species populations in Yellowstone National Park are a case in point.
And we have garnered experience in species restoration programs. The release of the California condor back into the wild is one of the more inspiring examples of such an effort by scientists and conservationists.
Most important, we have begun to move from exploitation of the nation’s resources to stewardship.
“We are,” Wilcove writes, “for better or worse, the guardians of a significant share of the nation’s flora and fauna. The extent of that responsibility grows with every species added to the endangered list and with every foreign plant or animal that gains a foothold in this country due to our negligence or stupidity.”
Peggy Boyer Long can be reached at Peggyboy@aol.com.
Illinois Issues, July/August 2003