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On December 13, 2021, the City of Fort Worth acquired 275 acres in the endangered Fort Worth Prairie ecosystem at a cost of $6,750,000.
This is the first major public purchase for parkland and conservation in the Fort Worth Prairie Ecosystem. It brings the current total in the Fort Worth Prairie protection zone to 2,691 acres, when added to protection areas on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers federal lands of the Upper Trinity River/Benbrook Lake watershed (where we have an MOU as a restoration and community education/engagement partner).
While land prices of unprotected Fort Worth Prairie are obviously costly and rising, this new acquisition brings back into public ownership the riparian and archaeological public lands of the original Fort Worth Prairie Park that were lost when the State of Texas disbursed and sold off the main, nearly 2,000-acre, tract of wild prairie for development.
All this land behind Lorenzo and Kalule represents the new 275 acre $6,750,000 acquisition in the endangered Fort Worth Prairie ecosystem by the City of Fort Worth.
Still needed:
Now we need to expand conservation onto the adjacent higher-elevation open grassland plains, which remain unprotected, where encroaching development is jeopardizing not only ancient native plant biodiversity but long-term survival of birds and other wildlife, especially those who use these open prairies for nesting, refueling, rest and renewal on their continental migrations north and south. The Fort Worth Prairie is also important to clean water, public health, climate resilience, and wellness.
If what's left of this wild ecosystem is destroyed and converted to rooftops and parking lots, where will the migrating grassland nesting birds and Monarch butterflies go?
Monarch butterfly.
Most of the current protected areas are bottomlands, riparian areas, and swale prairie, which serve as the backbone of a larger ecological reserve that can total several thousand acres.
The slopes of the new acquisition are filled with wildflowers in the Spring.
Great Plains Restoration Council has spent years building an Ecological Health culture for the Fort Worth Prairie and beyond. Progress is growing. My team and I thank you for your support.
As 2021 draws to a close, will you please consider making a charitable, tax-deductible donation to help GPRC continue our effective work for the Prairie and Ecological Health education and programming?
Background:
The Fort Worth Prairie is one of the most endangered ecosystems in North America. Original, old-growth Fort Worth Prairie is 10,000 years old yet can be bulldozed in a day.
The Fort Worth Prairie is a beautiful prairie wildland rich in wildlife, native grasses, wildflowers, and multicultural history from Indigenous Caddo and Wichita folks to visiting Kiowa and Comanches who traveled from the west to frontier Anglo settlers to Black folks journeying across the prairie on the Southern Underground Railroad to Mexico.
CREDIT: NPR
With your help, we will continue working to build the largest public prairie in North Texas.
Our goal is a 5,000-acre Fort Worth Prairie Park.
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Broader impact for rewilding on the outback of the Southern Great Plains:
The Fort Worth Prairie Park is on the backdoor of 8 million people and easily accessible. It will not only protect part of an irreplaceable landscape, but also strategically serve as a resource to help people personally experience the magic and importance of wild prairie, thus building awareness and support for much larger Great Plains rewilding projects hundreds of miles west in the outback Southern Great Plains, such as the work our partner Southern Plains Land Trust is doing to bring back buffalo, prairie dogs, elk, pronghorn antelope and many others.
This ol' Grandma Buffalo was maybe taking a little too much liking to me. (But I'm glad she gets to roam on the ever-growing Southern Plains Land Trust preserve in southeast Colorado, 200 miles NW of Amarillo, TX..)
Urban wildlands are the new front in wildlands conservation.
Over the last 15 years, GPRC has invested in the long game, because even in Fort Worth, once known as "Queen City of the Prairie", the general public largely didn't know what prairie was. That's how much America, including Texas, has lost.
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Our contribution to the new conservation culture:
After 15 years of community-wide engagement for the Fort Worth Prairie Park, nearly 10 years of youth work, numerous front-page news stories, Op-Eds, official editorials by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Editorial Board, an Emmy-nominated NBC-5 news story, lots of other media, visits from people from 6 different states, creation, and implementation of the national Ecological Health education initiative, and more, our efforts have contributed to a conservation culture that has established itself in Fort Worth and now has the attention of City leaders and the general public.
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Restoration Not Incarceration™ green jobs, Ecological Health education, and nature-based work therapy via prairie restoration:
Through our partnership with Tarrant County Youth Advocate Program and others, in 2021 we began extensive prairie restoration on the trailhead and front section of the main federal lands by employing formerly incarcerated youth to help remove brush and trees that are encroaching in the absence of bison and fire, while providing them with Ecological Health education skills that help them become more unbreakable through critical thinking, stamina, processing and adaptation, wellness, and more to bolster their re-entry back into society.
GPRC looks forward to expanding this nature-based work therapy in 2022.
As you know Restoration Not Incarceration™ work weeks on the prairie cost $1,000 a day.
We do conservation through people, and each helps the other become healthier.
We could not have gotten this far without your donations.
Even once-common grassland birds like our very-melodious Meadowlarks are rapidly declining nationwide due to loss of wild prairies.
I also want to personally thank our literary arts patrons and donors. Employing a "work and words" strategy, we've been able to passionately connect people with the natural world through human stories that reach people where they're at, anchored in experiencing the expressions of our world in new ways.
My first book Ghetto Plainsman helped raise over $600,000 for Great Plains Restoration Council's important work, and continues to raise awareness, support and money. Now, I have recently completed the collection of short stories The Sun and the Water, and (after 11 years) am within a few weeks of also delivering to my agent Marie Brown an American literary novel, Her Blue Watered Streets, about a father and a daughter raising each other in this rough, beautiful, at times violent and uncertain wild world.
Art moves culture and culture moves social change.
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Why I care:
Protecting the Earth and wildlife and our children's health and future is a sacred duty.
I started Great Plains Restoration Council over 20 years ago because I was awestruck and inspired by Professors Frank and Deborah Popper's Buffalo Commons thesis, and how the Great Plains' rebirth could serve as a model and metaphor for great healing and people working together in the new millennium.
Unfortunately, I soon realized the hard realities on the ground meant that we were not going to rewild the Great Plains overnight, that it really was going to be a long game where we had to build a culture of caring from the ground up.
America had largely left the Great Plains for dead. Flyover country. Lifeless monoculture amber waves of grain and overgrazed grasslands. Bristling wires, poisoned prairie dogs, and ghosts of Indian people and buffalo long gone.
Many times, people looked at this urban man of color who knows the outback Plains like the back of his hand like he was crazy. Sometimes the reaction was even violent.
But I have never stopped insisting that protecting and restoring the Great Plains is a model and metaphor for our entire country, that conservation must be done through people, and that we must ensure that people of all colors, cultures and communities have the opportunity to be loved by – and in turn love – wild prairie.
In our world of duress, we can still survive and thrive, and the prairie (and the ocean too) show us how.
There is no place like open country, a place of constantly unfolding expressions that change your life.
So, our long game plan is paying off, and we have major expansion planned for our work for 2022.
During this giving season, please donate as generously as you can to Great Plains Restoration Council.
As another Winter Solstice comes again, bringing "the returning of the light" for those of us down here on Earth in the Northern Hemisphere, my team and I (and my amazing little 2-year-old son Zayd Elias) wish you a safe, happy, healthy holidays and New Year.
Thank you again for all your support, from all of us out here in the land of sun, wind, grass and blue sky. We are honored to do this work in partnership with you.
21 December 2021
Jarid Manos
Founder & CEO
Great Plains Restoration Council
Jarid & Zayd
Shop at smile.amazon.com to support GPRC. Simply SELECT Great Plains Restoration Council after clicking the link.
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