ONE—A Landscape Transformed
Ecosystems and Natural Resources in the Midwest
The Midwest comprises one of the most productive yet highly modified landscapes on Earth. The Mississippi River drains over a million square miles, approaching 40 percent of the land area of the continental United States. This basin lies at the heart of the Midwest, noted for blazing hot summers and bitterly cold winters. It is a land flown over and overlooked, yet the region produces a substantial percentage of the U.S. agricultural product and boasts industrial and urban areas as well. Historic landscape transformations in the Midwest have profoundly shaped its ecosystems and how they function. One of the most significant changes has been a simplification and homogenization of the landscape. Since World War II, land use has intensified, and developments in natural resource conservation are a mix of successes and seemingly intractable problems. This essay discusses fundamental transformations in the midwestern landscape, associated natural resources including wildlife, policy trends, and efforts to restore ecosystems and make agriculture more sustainable. Its focus is mainly on the extensive grassland and prairie habitats of the Midwest, discussing what we have lost and what we are trying to put back.
Four fundamental characteristics stand out regarding midwestern ecosystems and natural resources: varied habitats, water issues, working landscapes, and a scarcity of public lands. Varied habitats are the product of a distinctly temperate and humid environment driven by weather systems originating from the meeting of three air masses from the Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific, and the Arctic. The moist air from the Gulf of Mexico provides the humidity and precipitation potential, while a central location in the continent produces wide annual temperature variations and relatively quick short-term swings in temperature. Much of the Midwest’s regional identity comes from the native habitat types found in the region, including the large low-lying riverine systems, diverse forests, prairies, and wetland prairies. Issues relating to water resources, ranging from aridity to flooding, comprise a common thread for the region, whether on the shores of Lake Erie or at the 100th meridian in South Dakota. The majority of the Midwest consists of a working agricultural landscape. For the most part, the land is intensively farmed, although the Midwest also has major urban centers such as Chicago. Finally, another distinguishing characteristic of the Midwest is the relative paucity of federal lands, especially compared to the American West. The U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the National Park Service do not have as large a presence as in the West. The vast majority of the midwestern landscape remains in private hands, and thus significant advances in natural resource conservation will occur only with the cooperation of private landholders. Scientists are seeking to enhance biodiversity within the context of a working agricultural landscape.1
Agriculture and Natural Resources
In the years after World War II an industrial model of agriculture based on the substitution of capital for labor, specialization, and reliance on expertise gained general acceptance in the Midwest. While farmers were urged to adopt an industrial model as early as the 1920s, the widespread adoption of industrial techniques did not occur until after the crises of the Great Depression and the Second World War had passed. By the early 1970s, the use of pesticides and artificial fertilizers, feed additives in raising livestock, ever-grander machinery working larger fields, and mechanized dairy parlors, feedlots, and confinement buildings became the new standards for the automation of growing food. Significantly, the use of technology replaced human labor as it expanded production.2
In contrast to the industrial ethos, reformers have offered alternative ways of knowing and living in the Midwest. Agricultural reformers raised the issue of sustainability as early as 1868, when University of Illinois agronomist Cyril G. Hopkins discussed the idea of permanent agriculture. From the 1930s onward, agricultural reformers linked a maturing science of ecology to ethics, farming techniques, and the maintainance of rural communities.3 Many important leaders of conservation came from the Midwest, including Aldo Leopold, who suggested the idea of “biotic farming,” which “would include wild plants and animals with tame ones as expressions of fertility.”4 Recent contributors to rethinking agriculture include Wes Jackson, of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. Jackson explores the potential for agricultural systems utilizing perennial polycultures (a variety of species), in marked contrast to today’s common practice of planting single species of annuals in vast fields.5
Our common understandings of biological systems have changed enormously since 1945. Particularly since the late 1960s and early 1970s, new views from scientists working in a variety of fields including landscape ecology and sustainable agriculture have informed opinion, practice, and public policy. The old view of stasis, equilibrium, and continuity in natural systems has yielded to an understanding of change and perturbation as the normal state of affairs in nature. The shift is reflected in changing metaphors, from a vision of the balance of nature to an interpretation centering on flux.6 Today, ecologists discuss equilibrium in terms of resistance to change and in terms of resiliency (the capacity of the system to recover from disturbance).7
The unpredictability that ecologists embrace is the antithesis of the goals of an agricultural economy, in which most actors prefer steady and predictable conditions. The larger question for society is how humans can create productive agricultural systems that coexist alongside or within the inherent variability of natural systems. In the view of Laura Jackson and Dana Jackson, the postwar trend toward industrialized agriculture “is an unacceptable, unaffordable sacrifice” that is unnecessary to feed the world or to keep farmers in business.8 Agricultural land, they argue, does not have to be a sacrifice zone where nature is shoved aside to make room for a land dedicated solely to producing the maximum possible product. Nature needs to be restored within the working agricultural landscape. “Sustainable agriculture” is the rubric used by many academics and practitioners looking to link environmental concerns and agriculture.
Continuing to practice the prevailing model of industrial agriculture may have unpredicted and substantial costs. Ecologist Sandra Steingraber contracted cancer and then investigated the link between cancer and environmental risks, which she described in her book Living Downstream. Steingraber explained how DDT applied more than 25 years ago on her family farm in central Illinois can still be measured in the soil, reminding us of the ubiquitous presence of chemicals within our own habitat and the long-term consequences of technological choices. Questions remain about the toxicity and long-term human health effects of chemicals that are widely dispersed across the Midwest and North America.9
The people of the nineteenth century who plowed midwestern prairies, felled midwestern forests, and drained wetlands followed their vision of a land of great promise, a rich landscape put to productive use. During the twentieth century, industrial agriculture and cityscapes as well expanded across most of the readily available nooks and crannies (biologists would call these edges and margins). Recently, ecologists and reformers have articulated a goal of a restored landscape to complement the traditional image of economic bounty in the land. This new vision of restored landscape functions, sustainable agriculture, and a healthy land and economy is no less hopeful than the outlook Euro-Americans brought to the region in the nineteenth century.10
The Simplified Landscape
While the rural Midwest appears to remain agrarian and pastoral, a heavy human imprint is ubiquitous.11 Conversion to agricultural use is one of the predominant historical human influences in the Midwest. That transformation changed the fundamental ways the landscape works. Scientists describe ecosystems in terms of composition, structure, and function. Composition refers to the various elements of a system. Structure can be thought of in physical terms, such as layers of tree canopies and the height of grasses and shrubs. Modification of composition and structure leads to changes in function, or how wildlife, water, nutrients, and energy move through the landscape.
Extensive anthropogenic (human-caused) changes in midwestern landscapes occurred prior to and continued after World War II. From North Dakota’s Prairie Pothole Region to Wisconsin’s cutover lands, from Nebraska to the Ohio Valley, human activities have changed vegetation types and wildlife assemblages. The systematic pattern of one-mile-square farm roads so visibly present on the landscape, writes historian Curt Meine, came directly from the Land Ordinance of 1785 and a Jeffersonian rationality. A regular network of drainage tiles underlies vast areas of farmland. This grid of human development physically pervades the midwestern landscape, shaping ecosystems, hydrology, and wildlife populations.12 Scientists examining the history of land use in northwestern Wisconsin’s lower St. Croix River valley note two distinct periods of rapid change. The first occurred from 1850 to 1880, when trappers, loggers, and farmers each prospered under a successive economic boom, modifying the landscape in the course of their economic pursuits. The second period of rapid change in the St. Croix came after 1940 as urban and suburban development altered the landscape.13 Significantly, maintaining those landscape modifications in their re-formed condition required a constant input of time and resources. The working agricultural and rural landscape of the Midwest is, in a fundamental sense, continually rebuilt.14
A simplification of the landscape is the most telling trend of the rural Midwest since World War II. The intensification of agricultural practices, including the introduction of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, ever-larger equipment and debt loads, biotech crops, and re-engineered irrigation and drainage systems shaped environmental outcomes and a landscape legacy.15 Whether or not the end was consciously in mind, farmers intensified production agriculture and created a more simplified and homogeneous landscape.
Before 1945, the typical midwestern farm grew six to eight crops to feed several kinds of livestock and to maintain soil fertility and manage pests. After the war, with widespread use of fertilizers and a growing reliance on two main commodities (corn and soybeans), hay and pasture acreage declined. In Iowa, sod crops (small grains and hay) declined from about 10 million acres in 1950 to around 3 million acres by 1999, while row crops such as corn and soybeans expanded from about 10 million acres in 1940 to about 23 million acres in 1999. In Bremer County, Iowa, land area in prairie hay and tame hay in 1940 comprised 11.5 percent of land area, while pasture amounted to almost 31 percent. By 1997, prairie hay amounted to 0.0 percent, tame hay 4.3 percent, and pasture 5.3 percent, while conservation reserve and cover crops comprised 3.5 percent of total farmed land.16
Beginning in the 1950s, the industrialized approach to raising crops and animals meant a rapid increase in corn...