Midewin Tallgrass Prairie offers a new blueprint for conservation
I don’t know what a prairie looks like, yet I spent years living in the Midwest. But neither do you, even if you’re reading this, from the Midwest, right now. In fact, no one knows what a prairie really looks like because it has long been gone.
Gerald Heinrich also mourned for something long lost as a young kid growing up in proximity to the Joliet Arsenal in Elwood, Ill. The Arsenal opened in 1940 to manufacture ammunition and explosives for the U.S. military in World War II. Prior to that, the plains were home to small, agrarian communities with numerous small farmers. Every square mile, there were two to three families, Heinrich says, and prior to 1800, the land was “very much unsettled” by Europeans. At that junction, numerous Indigenous tribes had continuously settled or passed through the land for over 12,000 years. Over time, there were agricultural villages established in the region to till and cultivate the dense, dark soil beneath the tall, swaying tallgrasses.
