“At first the Euroamerican settlers could not fathom the tallgrass prairie. Stepping into it from cropland-speckled woodlands to the east, they entered a land of sky and horizon, wind and light, flower and scent, a surging sea of grasses that staggered the imagination. The prairie grasslands seemed to stretch on forever, a landscape that promised no enclosure, only intensity and exposure…”

So writes Cornelia (Connie) Mutel in her book, The Emerald Horizon: The History of Nature in Iowa, a modern classic of natural history. Mutel has spent her life chronicling the fantastic and beleaguered landscape of her home state, and the place that she knows and loves like no other. Her life’s work- seven books written or edited, all on different aspects of Iowa’s natural history- could be viewed as a requiem: only 0.1% of the native tallgrass prairies remain in Iowa, over 97% of its’ once wildly biodiverse landscapes have been converted to human use, agricultural runoff and toxic spills have poisoned over half of the state’s waterways and thousands of its residents’ wells, the draining of wetlands causes massive, budget-breaking floods, topsoil loss is at crisis level. The current model of Iowa’s agriculture does not work for anyone, and there seems to be no political will to change it.

But Connie Mutel, a writer steeped in the understanding of time, nature, and change, does not believe in requiems. We discuss her latest and perhaps most important work, Tending Iowa’s Land: Pathways to a Sustainable Future, where she brings together a diverse selection of expert voices from across Iowa, all focused on the very possible and very practical goal of fixing that which is broken, and restoring the miracle that is Iowa.

 

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The Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring is brought you by Backcountry Hunters & Anglers and presented by Silencer Central, with additional support from Decked, Dometic, and Filson. 

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