Dan's Writings
Earth Day - Forty-Seven Years Later
I remember the first Earth Day. It was such a wonderful idea, everyone pitches in to adjust the trajectory of mankind’s relationship to Earth and we wouldn’t have to face the destruction of our home. In those days most of us were thinking about recycling pop bottles, putting out bird feeders, stopping the dumping raw of sewage into our waterways, and picking up hamburger wrappers that were routinely slung out of the windows of really fast cars that got about eight miles to the gallon.
The Endless Prairie Wind
Now we move into spring. Both the Ides of March and the Vernal Equinox have passed. Dawn comes a little earlier each morning; the sun eases itself little-by-little northward in the eastern sunrise sky. The prairie winds blow and whistle and sometimes howl. But, if you are going to live on the prairie, you will live with the winds.
In Solidarity With Parkland, Florida
Like a lot of Americans, I have been paying close attention to the kids who survived the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. It’s very unlikely that I will ever experience anything like what those kids have gone through. But when I watch their faces as they stand up and speak truth to the legislators who hold the power and responsibility to see that our schools are safe and about the need for society to do something to protect them, I see something in their postures and in their eyes that is vaguely familiar.
Eclipse 2017
I had never seen a total, solar eclipse and didn’t think I had missed much. I mean, so something drifts in front of the sun and the landscape gets kinda dark for a few minutes. Heck, you don’t have to wait a hundred years to see something like that. I figured it had to be sort of like a dark, rogue cloud blowing across the face of the sun – happens every day.
The Dream Continues
When the Great Plains were young there were no humans to manage them. It was like one enormous ranch, managed on the single principal of natural selection. In those days the Great Plains changed so slowly that, for all practical purposes, they were in stasis - perpetually beautiful and wild.
Education by Bull Boat
At Wild Idea we do everything in our power to see that all the parts of the buffalo are put to good use. That’s why I was so interested in the telephone call I got from Doctor Craig Spencer, biology professor at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
How Buffalo Taught Me to be a Responsible Capitalist
I belong to the Baby Boomer Generation and if you are a Millennial, Gen-X, or Gen-Z person, I owe you an apology. My cohorts and I are the ones that didn’t adequately stand up to the forces of ignorance and greed that are killing everything that is wild. But we were the first generation that understood that what humans were doing to wild things was suicidal. We are culpable for knuckling under in the face of the power behind that insanity and I’m sorry for the part I played in that tragedy.
As one travels…
As one travels the center of our country the effort to conserve and restore the diversity and natural systems of the American Great Plains is evident. Conservation groups, government agencies, and individuals are hard at work on a thousand projects; from habitat restoration, to reintroduction of endangered species, to watershed protection, to base-line science that will help us understand what needs to be done. I see these efforts everywhere I go and I marvel at the array of fronts on which lovers of the “Big Open” are working.
We live in a land…
We live in a land of accidental monuments. Mostly they were erected in the beginning of the last century and were not intended to mark the passage of great events. They were intended to be the beginnings of something. They dot the landscape in the form of leaning or tumbled down buildings surrounded by tree groves dying of thirst. Sometimes there are moldering corrals of rotten boards brought in by trains that no longer run. Sometimes the county road that once led to them is still passable. Sometimes those roads have been over taken by what was pushed aside to construct them. Often there is only a depression that marks the root cellar where precious vegetables were stored for the few years that the dream survived.