Another Savanna Post, or What Did We Have and What Have We Done With It?

And yet again another exciting post from Jim McCormac over at Ohio Birds and Biodiversity.

http://jimmccormac.blogspot.com/2012/07/pearl-king-savanna.html

His post is a look at the Pearl King Savanna, one of last remaining oak savannas in Ohio.  In all honesty though, some of its grass cover is extensive enough to consider it as something of a prairie; a few of his excellent photographs reveal that the horizon is quite distant.  Perhaps this is because of the surrounding farmland.  Though this adjacent agricultural space is very much a landscape of our creation, it is important to remember that it is there because the settlers who poured into the region found such open and "barren" land an attractive place to start plowing and planting.  What could be more pleasant to an immigrant farmer than land that nature has already cleared, and left rich soils to enjoy as well?  The Ohio Valley and Great Lakes were settled relatively fast not only because they had the one thing those living east of the Appalachians craved the most, space, but also because the open landscape only added to the concept.

This had me wondering just how much of the Nearwest and even parts of the interior eastern seaboard used to have savannas and prairies.  Wildfire regimes, both historical and conjectured modern, seem to indicate that they could have been very widespread.  These days, we still have many pine barrens from Long Island southward into southern Florida which have probably survived or renewed themselves because of undesirable soils and/or changing employment patterns.  If the climate and natural processes could support "barrens" in coastal regions, surely they could do they same where they were not entirely different back in the interior valleys of the Appalachians and the lakeplains of Lake Ontario and Erie.  Buffalo, for instance, once thrived in the valleys of Virginia and, you guessed it, the area around Buffalo, NY.  The early colonists and settlers, both French and English, reported the majestic herds in such areas.  They were less thorough in reporting about the landscapes they were found in, except where they found towering forests.

Perhaps this was because nature provided inspiration when the migrants found roadblocks such as mountains and great rivers and lakes.  The scale of the continent's unspoiled lands inspired whole schools of painting that highlighted such expanses, particularly in the work of the Hudson River School.  Such lands also provided inspiration for the birth of the natural romantics like Thoreau and Emerson, and the conservation movement which they spawned.  In contrast, however, little fuss was made about lands that were either convenient, like prairies and savannas, or roadblocks that did not serve to inspire (at least in that era) such as swamps, dry plains, and deserts.  The most striking historical portraits we have of such desires would be in  our conserved lands.  With the exception of swamps set aside for bird refuges, most of the early saved lands were mountains and dramatic valleys.  The Everglades, again in contrast, were viewed as undesirable (despite being one of the most amazing bird habitats in the entire world), and were even being targeted for drainage and destruction by the same people that were promoting conservation elsewhere!

There we have it.  A mountain or large lake could not be moved out of the way, and served as a reminder of the forces that were greater than humanity that could not be tamed.  A grassland?  Well, that would be something more akin to a field that nature had left wild and was just begging to have cultivated for more "useful purposes".  A swamp?  Yuck!  Why would the settlers make a mention out of something they could instead just transform into a monument of expanding civilization, a monument which would leave a much better record and legacy of who they were and why they came there?  Nature was just starting to become appreciated for its own sake back in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and well over a century would go by wherein civilization was still hailed as the primary triumph of man's dominion over creation.

What did we have?  What have we done with it?  Thankfully, we have people like Jim to show us a glimpse of an answer to these questions.  That in mind, let's keep exploring!