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Hello from the Prairie!
First, I know this year has been rough, but as someone who has spent a couple decades helping people become more unbreakable, please allow me to share a few things that might help if you or somebody you know is struggling:
- Treat each day as the accomplishment.
- Find something to be grateful for and say it out loud.
- Do one thing for people and/or our planet, because it is extremely energizing, takes us out of our immediate thoughts, provides needed help, and feels great. ("By taking care of others, we take care of ourselves.")
- Get outside and move that body – sun-lit vitamin D and oxygenated blood flow can layer in multiple therapeutic benefits.
- Oh, and eat (organic) plants as fuel and food for rejuvenation!
2020 in Review and Year-End Appeal
Despite Covid and the economic downturn, Great Plains Restoration Council has continued moving Ecological Health forward, working for our prairies, plains and waters as an interdependent health model that directly helps people, animals and native ecosystems live better lives.
We could not do this work without your support!
As you make your year-end financial giving plans, please consider donating to Great Plains Restoration Council today.
The Cares Act 2020 has given an added benefit for those who make donations and itemize on their tax return. You can deduct up to 100% of charitable cash contributions in 2020.
Fort Worth Prairie Park: This year we began a wildlife photography project at the Fort Worth Prairie Park area, to help show the world how full of life these remaining reaches of this 10,000-year-old native ecosystem are. The Fort Worth Prairie is one of the rarest ecosystems in North America. We've even discovered a rare nesting pair of Audubon's Crested Caracaras!
Audubon's Crested Caracara
Photo: Dan Spangler
We've been appointed to the Stakeholder Committee for the new Open Space Conservation Program in the City of Fort Worth. The City is looking at strategically applying funding toward conservation of remaining wildlands before it's too late.
Our goal: make the Fort Worth Prairie Park the largest public prairie in North Texas.
Fort Worth Prairie Coyote
Photo: Dan Spangler
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram recently ran this front-page article.
Shark Therapy™: On the national front: our Ecological Health programming expanded to Atlanta and South Florida, in partnership with West Atlanta Watershed Alliance and Gangstas to Growers/The Come Up Project, through our innovative new Shark Therapy™ initiative, where struggling people, particularly young, formerly incarcerated men of color, swim with sharks and become stronger and healthier as advocates for their own lives, other people, and the living, breathing world that gives us all life.
Zion and a Moon Jellyfish meeting up
In other news:
Janine Cavasar, a long-time pro bono business manager, came on payroll.
Ashley LaCamp, a financial adviser at Morgan Stanley, joined our Board of Directors.
James E. King Jr. came on as national project manager for Shark Therapy™.
And we revisited the outback Great Plains to check on its progress.
2021: Looking Ahead
In 2021, we will work to:
– Expand the Fort Worth Prairie Park area, currently at 944 acres, before the rest of this 10,000-year-old native ecosystem is lost to development.
– Provide a youth/young adult Fort Worth Prairie reseeding event in the Spring that helps boost the biodiversity of the first few acres in from the entrance, which is somewhat degraded, and gets the community out onto the Prairie.
Blue-gray Gnatcatcher on the Fort Worth Prairie Park area
Photo: Dan Spangler
– Contract with a culturally-connected tree-cutting service to work in partnership with our Restoration Not Incarceration™ program and mount a major tree and brush removal campaign where the native prairie has been choked out in the absence of historic bison and fire. This will cost $800 a day. By opening these ancestral grassland areas back up to full sunlight, we increase the amount of prairie.
Restoration on the prairie
– Present at Yale University's "Conference on Social and Ecological Infrastructure for Recidivism Reduction", Mar 18, 2021, 3:00 p.m.,New Haven, CT, USA (Viewable online.)
Yale University
– Host at least two Shark Therapy™ cohorts, perhaps more, as funding allows. Our ATL/South Florida crew is open to hosting groups who serve struggling people nationwide. (Groups may also join us on the Fort Worth Prairie.) Please contact us here. Participants will learn Tier 1 of Ecological Health. Hopefully, the U.S. finally passes a ban on the sale of shark fins. Remember, 274,000 sharks are killed every single day!
Anamarie Shreeves, Environmental Educator, West Atlanta Watershed Alliance, saying goodbye to a new friend.
– Continue using hands-on ecological social work, literature and the arts, communication, and media engagement to move our mission forward.
Will you please make a tax-deductible donation to Great Plains Restoration Council today, so we can continue this essential work that helps the planet and those who are struggling in life?
* * *
I've been doing a lot of thinking about our broken relationship with the natural world. This often extends to our relationships with each other, and even our own selves.
René Descartes, widely considered the father of Western modern philosophy, held that animals were automata. That is, they're no different than the mechanisms of a "clock, or other automaton"; hence their cries of pain (he performed live vivisections to prove his point) were no different than the squeakings of said clock.
Of course we know this not to be true.
Everywhere we look we can find trauma. Prairie is not lifeless dirt, oceans are not fishmeat factories and plastic dumps, and rainforests and their hundreds of billions of animals burned to death are not simply million-hectare tracts for industrial agribusiness. The atmosphere is not supposed to be an open sewer. And all people deserve lives free from pollution.
But everywhere we look we can find hope and hard work too that is building this new culture of caring.
All of our problems stem from a culture of separateness, and the Great Plains in its ecological collapse has been ground zero for that.
Silky Shark (most sharks we meet have hooks embedded in their bodies or other human-caused injuries)
When we do the hard community work of repairing those broken relationships between self, others, and the living, breathing natural world which gives us all life, which shares life and the exhilarating expressions of life (ever hear a prairie dog wake up and worship the morning sun, or a wild ocean fish – lit up like electricity – come look you right in the eye?) we suddenly find a whole new world of health and possibility opening up.
Black-tailed prairie dogs on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota, west of the Road to Red Shirt Table.
National Geographic recently reported that 1.5 million wild black-tailed prairie dogs were shot for target sport in a single year in South Dakota alone.
It's late, but not too late.
And here at GPRC we offer Ecological Health as a model. Protecting the Earth and our children's health and future is a matter of flesh and blood, culture and soul.
Excitingly, the United States is poised to join the global push of preserving "30 by 30" – aiming to protect 30% of the Earth's lands and waters by 2030.
As a supporter of Great Plains Restoration Council, we all get to do our part.
Scissor-tailed Flycatcher in flight over native Fort Worth Prairie.
Photo: Dan Spangler
We invite you to be an integral part of the change you care most about by giving as generously as possible to Great Plains Restoration Council during this year-end giving season.
Thanks as always for being part of this Ecological Health journey, where by taking care of the Earth, we take of ourselves.
Best wishes & best health for the holidays and New Year, from all of us out here in the land of sun, wind, grass and blue sky,
Jarid Manos
Founder & CEO
Great Plains Restoration Council
Oh and here's a pic I took of a late Fall prairie sunset at the Fort Worth Prairie Park – underwater, where it was still a little stormy below from recent rains, even though above the sky was now clear. 🙂
Year-end Fort Worth Prairie sunset underwater, after some stormy weather
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