Reflections on the Great Plains
Michael Forsberg recently completed “Great Plains: America’s Lingering Wild” after crisscrossing 100,000 miles of the Plains from Canada to Mexico. The book explores the wildlife, habitats and conservation challenges of our grasslands with essays by South Dakota writer and rancher Dan O’Brien, former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser and writer and geographer Dr. David Wishart. The book will be released this fall and is published by the University of Chicago Press.
Niobrara river sunrise—click. One-half second. Bobcat walking along a game trail at sundown—click. One-sixtieth of a second. Bison at night in a lightning storm—click. Fifty-eight seconds.
One evening after the rest of my family was asleep, I turned to the computer, a calculator, and with my shaky memory of sixth-grade math, began adding up the recorded shutter speeds from each of the 180 photos that appear in my book “Great Plains: America’s Lingering Wild.” Two hours later I had an answer— 10 seconds. To be honest, I am not quite sure why I wanted to do this other than, lately, I have been thinking a lot about time.
It is these 10 seconds that represent a several-year journey trying to put a face to the wildlife and native landscapes that still survive in this million-square-mile region that many of us call home. Today, North America’s Great Plains is an altered and fragmented natural landscape. It has been called the continent’s most endangered ecosystem. As a photographer, my goal was to try and stitch this ecosystem back together in pictures, shed light on complex
conservation challenges and build appreciation for the wild that still remains in this often-overlooked heartland. Since that night I have kept wondering: Are those 10 seconds enough time to make a case?
As photographers, we think a lot about time. Our craft is to capture time in a box. But in book projects like this one, time turns the tables and captures you. There is planning time and research time, field time and waiting time, travel time, making time, buying time, deadline time, time is money, time away, family time, lost time, other people’s time, historic time, here-and-now time, future time, running out of time.
Time follows you like a constant shadow. It consumes you. Looking forward at the beginning of a project, time can seem endless. Looking back after you are finished, you wonder where all the time has gone, as if you had little time at all.
For years, this book had just been a distant dream. But the timing was never right to go at it full throttle until the summer of 2005, when time freed up, proposals were written, funding was found and creative support fell together. By fall, I was hitting the road, following a schedule that would keep me gone six months a year for the next three-plus years. I had to be done by the end of 2008. It would be a race against time.
On paper, I was going to go everywhere in these vast Great Plains. No stone or piece of prairie sod would be left unturned. But when I showed my field schedule to those close to me, they would smile, call it “ambitious,” then wish me well. I know their well wishes were genuine, but deep down inside I knew they thought I was nuts. I was going to struggle with time. They were right.
Time was a constant battle in the field. It’s easy to lay out a schedule in the comfort of your office or while driving down the freedom of the open road with not a care in the world. You figure in early May you will work sage grouse on their strutting grounds in eastern Wyoming, then slip up to northwestern South Dakota to photograph golden eagles at the nest, then slide over to North Dakota to catch ducks hatching chicks in the Missouri Coteau. You make the phone calls, get permissions, pack your bags and hit the road. But rarely does anything go as planned.
In Wyoming, the sage grouse are strutting but the pickup isn’t starting because the alternator went and took three days to get fixed. In South Dakota, the eagles decided to use another nest site this year, tucked under a dark ledge on an adjacent cliff, far out of photography range. In North Dakota, the ducks are hatching, but constant heavy rains make it nearly impossible to photograph in the field. But all those things come with the job. After 15 years of doing this for a living, you come to expect the unexpected. You learn to adapt, improvise and overcome.
What’s more difficult to overcome is when you get a lump in your throat when your daughter races you down the end of the block as you leave and you realize you will be home just two weeks in the next two months. It’s no big deal when you are single and your address is a P.O. box. But now, more hours in the field means less hours at home as a husband and father.
You rationalize being gone by promising your family to never miss birthdays or anniversaries, swim meets or school band performances, Mother’s or Father’s Day, Thanksgiving or Christmas. You find yourself delaying your trip a day after spending three days getting completely packed just because you don’t want to leave. You drive everywhere knowing that even if you are as far away as Medicine Hat, Alberta, you can still be home from anywhere in less than 24 hours. Sometimes, you leave from a field location early, spending only a week rather than two photographing in a certain place, knowing that if you stayed you would probably make even better pictures, but saying that what you got has to be good enough. It’s time to get home.
When the fieldwork officially ended in late 2008, I had traveled roughly 100,000 miles to 12 states in the U.S. and three provinces in Canada and Mexico. I had taken over 30,000 images of everything from tiny native minnows to mountain lions. Although I was not able to go to every place I had planned, I was able to photograph most of the subjects I had hoped to cover. And sometimes my wife, Patty, and our girls, Elsa and Emme, were able to come along, too.
Then we began a race against another deadline. During the next six months, writers and editors finished and shaped text, images were selected, layouts were forged, facts were checked, captions were written and rewritten, maps were created, and a publisher and printer were brought on board. By mid-May it was done and out the door. Just in the nick of time.
The books arrived in mid-September. When I gave one to a close friend of mine a few days ago, he asked me a point-blank question: After all this, he said, as he held up the book in his hand, has time run out on the Great Plains as an ecosystem?
Good question. Over the span of this project I have learned that the Great Plains and its natural processes need large landscapes over which to function, yet as an ecosystem it has been chopped off at the knees in the last century. In many places today it is in disrepair. The effects of our actions, whether from our lack of knowledge or our indifference or greed, have resulted in depleted aquifers, invasive species, drastic loss of habitat, losses of wildlife populations or loss of species altogether—and the list goes on.
On the one hand, I told him, I fear that we are in danger of losing a natural heritage that we have barely gotten to know or completely understand. I worry that today in a more urbanized world, further removed from the land, we increasingly gauge its value only by what can be extracted from it for profit rather than by realizing the intrinsic value of the land itself.
On the other hand, if there is one thing we can count on as a constant in the Great Plains, it is change. Humankind has changed this natural landscape more in the last 150 years than it has throughout the rest of its human history, and it hasn’t always been pretty. But humans, for better and for worse, are part of the ecosystem, too, and we also have great capacity for restoration, recovery and renewal. Here on the Plains I have seen it firsthand.
As we move forward, the Great Plains will continue to be a working landscape that helps feed the world and will increasingly be called upon to help fuel our energy needs. But will we as a culture also decide to find equal value and virtue in protecting and restoring our Plains’ rich natural heritage, its amazing natural diversity and all the ecosystem services that its nature provides? In the long view, can the Great Plains function as working wilderness?
The contents of this book, and its 10 seconds of photographs, are not sufficient enough to answer these questions, but perhaps it is a sufficient start to a conversation. Time is short. Let’s not waste it.
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