My Second Favorite Store At The Mall

When conversations, both intellectual and your run of the mill small talk, head towards environmental degradation and/or loss of biodiversity, several buzzwords start flying around. (I don’t know why these topics would come up in everyday conversations, but they could.) Among these buzzwords, one reigns supreme: “Conservation.” It shows up like a store at the mall you go to because it has cool graphic tees and you “like the music” (i.e. Hot Topic). For an idea that gets thrown around quite a bit, there seems to be a very narrow realm that conservation covers. People know about, but only from the little experiences they’ve had with it or from what others say. Almost like a store that gets a bad rep from people who don’t visit it.

As a wannabe geography professor, I feel that it is my duty, nay my job, to use what I have learned to allow for a better understanding of what could be meant by “conservation.” Take, for instance, the Flint Hills that surround Manhattan, KS. While it could be argued that the area is heavily influenced my mankind, and indeed it is, if you look at the history of the area, you would find it surprisingly well taken care of.

The Flint Hills are in an environment that, at least before the vast majority was converted to farmland, would be called a tallgrass prairie. Defining features of prairies are large expanses of grassland and a deficit of trees. Now, for the shortgrass and mixed-grass prairies that dominate the Great Plains west of the Flint Hills, this environment exists due to the lack of available moisture. Trees can’t really survive, and the prairie grasses only due so thank to their extensive root systems. But these same climatic conditions do not occur in the tallgrass prairies. Trees can, and do in our present age, grow readily. So then, why were there so few trees when Europeans first described this area? It wasn't because the native tribes deforested the area; there is little evidence supporting the area as forested at the same time as human habitation. So what gives? There must be some reason found in nature for the prairies continued survival.

The answer is every Hot Topic shopping teens dream: fire. Every so often, a storm would come through after a dry period, and some errant lightning strike would start a wildfire. While there is the common preconception that fire is bad, it is the very lifeline for the tallgrass prairie. As the prairie fire sweeps through the land, it burns away the old grass stems. Now, tallgrasses have very deep roots, 10 ft. or more on average. So they are fine, and with the nutrients from the ashes added back to the soil, they can grow again very quickly. An added benefit from the fire is that any new saplings or other plant growth is destroyed in the process, allowing the prairie grasses to flourish, and allowing the soil to maintain its excellent fertility. The tribes that originally inhabited the Flint Hills recognized this, and there are records stating that they would regularly start fires to renew sections of the prairie, creating locales where game animals would want to head to. In much the same way, modern day ranchers burn their fields to allow for grasses to grow anew, creating prime grazing land for their cattle.

It is extremely rare nowadays for a wildfire to start, so humans have taken it on themselves to start and monitor them. Anthropogenic burns have been a part of the tallgrass prairie for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Remarkably, however, this isn’t thought of as conservation. The prairie isn’t protected except in a couple of places. Farms, roads, and buildings are all over the Flint Hills. But, you could argue this is one of the longest lasting conservation efforts in the world. While the effort is mostly for some self-serving reason, the landscape isn’t degrading as much as it would if the burns were not in place. So maybe conservation needs to take a page out of a farmer’s book. Using our resources in a responsible way is what matters, and even if that means doing something that might seem to hurt the environment, or put it squarely into mankind’s hands. Counterintuitive thinking may be hard to comprehend, but teenagers manage to do it. Why can’t we?

P.S. my favorite mall store is Barnes & Noble. I love books.