Hope in the Unseen

Beware:  A philosophical tangle of a blog post follows.

Hope in the Unseen is a title of a book I read several years ago, and it seems the author might have derived the title from Hebrews 11:1, "Now faith is assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things not seen."  I have no wish to bring in religion, religious behavior, or even discuss the ways we humans explain our world (e.g. Science and the tangible world vs. Supernatural and the intangible world), but faith, in a sense, is indeed the topic.

In the book, this kid faces the kind of adversity that I, as a privileged middle-class white woman, will never completely understand. It's best if you read the summary here, or even better track down a copy and find a comfortable place to sit for awhile.  Suffice it to say that this kid's 'hope in the unseen' and mine are very, very different, but it's a concept I really like and have latched on to, albeit for different reasons than this particular protaganist.

Exhibit A:  I'm from the land of the tallgrass prairie, the creation, restoration, and/or management of which depends entirely on trusting in processes we can't always immediatley detect.


This past weekend I met up with a longtime friend of mine (we met when we were two...big shout-out to Sunflower Day Care) and went hiking through one of my favorite places: Konza Prairie Biological Station just outside of Manhattan, KS where I did my undergrad studies in Wildlife Bio and Anthropology.  Thanks to the Wildlife classes, I spent some quality time out in the Konza learning how to sample, collect, measure, identify, quantify, and all that good wholesome Science-y stuff.  I also remember taking an amazing nap in a clump of bluestem, watching the prairie chickens do their bizarre "dance," and thinking that it must really be awful to be a stream ecologist in the spring when the water is still quite frigid.

Brrrrr

Though not as protective as bluestem, this is still prime napping habitat

The Konza Station does some pretty amazing research on tallgrass ecosystems, like studying the effects of fire at different year intervals and cattle grazing vs. bison grazing on plants, mammals, birds, insects, and reptiles of the prairie.  When you consider the various combinations of flames, chomping and tearing teeth, and trampling hooves the seemingly monotonous prairie...

becomes an almost aggressive mosiac of habitats born out of some kind of destruction(s)...

Grasses and forbs and woody species, oh my!

The six mile hike ended up being a bit grueling, yet awesome in every sense of the word.  The weather was sunny and in the 40s, but with 30 mph wind roaring through the stark landscape we felt like we were in a very foreign place.  I hate to use a word like "lonely" to describe the Konza, considering it's the home of the aforementioned research projects, at least a dozen other hikers, and I was in the company of a good friend.  But it's going to happen.  I'm going to say it.

It's a lonely place

But not too lonely.

Prairies impress me. They're shaped by the most violent of forces: fire, extreme wind, drought, summer storms, unobstructed sun, and its components have adapted, survived and thrived.  It is a place of sacrifice. The very things that wipe the prairie grasses from the surface are the same forces that make the ecosystem viable and able to fight off, so to speak, other encroaching ecosystems.  The prairie is created by a certain amount of destruction. That same fire that destroyed the visible parts of the bluestem is the same fire that returned nutrients the soil, opened the way for sunlight, and cleared away any woody competition, allowing the roots that had been protected in the soil to send new shoots skyward.

Sadly, the vast majority of native tallgrass prairie has long since been plowed under or buried under pavement.  The estimates vary, but somewhere around 96% of the tallgrass prairie is gone.  So the Konza is pretty big deal when it comes to figuring out a way to restore the prairie (and all the nifty insects, birds, mammals, and reptiles that come with it).

But here's where things take a turn for the daring.  Remember all those destructive forces that make and remake the tallgrass?  Yeah, now imagine turning those into experiments.  As you walk along the public trails, you see markers that designate a certain plot of the Konza to a specific burn or grazing regimen, and sometimes a combination of those.  Researchers, in effect, destroy their plot by various methods to see if what they think will grow back actually will.  Cattle and bison have different grazing patterns, and it's interesting to see if those patterns make any difference, but the real show is of course, the fire.

Photo courtesty NPS (Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve)

Here's my point: researchers have SET FIRE to their experiment. BURNED it out of visible existence.  They did this because other research and past experience has told them that the grasses will come back, strong and healthy.  A charred piece of acreage on the hilltop does not look like it left survivors to the naked eye, but under the surface the root system remains, and with no blanket of dead leafy debris to smother it in cold and darkness and no trees to steal the sunlight, life returns to the surface.

Call me a romantic, but I would argue that ecologists have the strongest conviction in the unseen out of all of us.




Exhibit B:   Cerulean warblers are little migratory songbirds that breed in the spring and summer months up in the Driftless, and are listed as "Vulnerable" since its habitat is quickly being replaced by farms and cities. On guided hikes, and often in the middle of conversation, I would make people be still and listen to the Ceruleans' distinct zzzzzzzzzip song and ramble on about why they're worth saving and why the decline in their numbers is disconcerting. Here's the kicker: I've never actually seen a Cerulean. Ever. I hear them all the time up in the Driftless, but never laid eyes on one. They like the high tree tops, where even my Amazonian height fails my curious eyes.  I lobby for a thing I know only through indirect means.

I'm not alone.  Replace "Cerulean warbler" with any charismatic animal that's been used in environmental campaigns: whale, panda, cheetah, take your pick, and just try to tell me that the $20 you just donated is going to ensure that you will see a [insert endangered animal].  But you do it anyway (or can imagine that a fair amount of people do it).  Why?

Call it intrinsic value, aesthetic value, or even take your pick from the utilitarian values (that we should care for the environment for our own good), the point is that it happens.  Hope happens.

Anyone who has ever recycled, planted a tree, planted a flower, planted anything, donated to an environmental cause, taken their children outside, gone fishing, gone hunting, done anything that remotely resembles an environmentally-beneficial behavior is just guilty as hoping in the unseen as I am.  Hoping that somehow, our actions will help save a world we may never see.

What an amazing capacity we humans have, to act in a way that benefits a bird, a whale, a prairie, a future we'll never know.  A blind, yet hopeful, conviction.  And what a sadness when the opposite occurs, when we knowingly worsen a concern.  I have seen humanity do both, and my own experiences tell me the former is thankfully more common than the latter.


Metaphors are a-plenty in the Konza.

It's taken me a long time to sort out my thoughts on things unseen, and I have a feeling I will continue to do such sorting until the bitter end.  I like tangible, measurable, observable things, but after a few years in the conservation outreach game, I'm learning to trust and believe that the things I do are working in the way I hope they are...at least I do so for my sanity's sake, and because at this point another career path is unthinkable, so I might as well have faith in it. 

Simply put, I hope that one day there will be more views like this, even if I never get a chance to visit them.

For more pretty pictures of the Konza: http://www.flickr.com/photos/shamelesslyaimless/sets/72157629193373795/