Goodbye, Knowles-Nelson

Last fall, I biked from my home in Madison, WI to the state APA conference in La Crosse. It was only 2 days and 160 miles each way, but it gave me a new connection to the place I call home. With the WI legislative session closed, and over $33 million in funding for the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program about to expire due to a failure of the legislature, I’m resharing that reflection.

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For the four days bookending this year’s APA-WI conference in La Crosse, I was glimpsing pieces of our state at 14 miles per hour. From a bike. In Chacos. With camping gear. For fun. I generally find biking to be a practice in mindfulness – there’s something about the silence and repetition that lets me clear my mind and just be. We all have a thing that takes us there.

But on that ride from (and back to) Madison, I had a lot of time to sit with our conference theme and let it really sink into me.

For all of you that were there, you know that this year’s conference theme was Bridging Connections: Laying the Foundation for the Future. But between biking into town and exploring sessions, I couldn’t help but reflect on how much of our future is directly tied to our past. Of how deep the foundations of the past really are. Whether it was the opening night tour in Hixon Forest led by Friends of the Blufflands (who are doing amazing restoration work on goat prairies and oak savannas), or sessions opening with evolutions of honoring the past, present, and future of Hoocąk and Dakota peoples rooted in the city, the past was present.

In a sharp reminder of that, I just so happened to stop into Pearl Street Books on my first night in town. A book jumped out at me – Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie – and when I got back to my hotel room, I found out it opened in the first few pages with a quote from Zebulon Pike’s 1810 journal:

“We crossed first a dry, flat prairie; when we arrived at the hills we ascended them, from which we had a most sublime and beautiful prospect. On the right, we saw the mountains which we passed in the morning and the prairie in their rear; like distant clouds, the mountains at the Prairie Le Crosse.”

Beautiful passage, yes. Complicated in broader context, also yes. More than just cementing the future city’s name, Pike’s journal is part of what caused a stir back East that helped support a political movement for homesteading the Midwest. Why we’re here now. A movement that led to forced displacement, land prospecting, internment, and heavy militarization (side note: Pike himself led the taking of land in Minnesota that would become Fort Snelling, and he is the government-recognized namesake of the island that is Bdóte – the meeting of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers where many Dakota believe the Creator sculpted the first people from the clay of Maka Ina/Mother Earth). And so much more – that’s far from a complete retelling. History is complex.

But throughout the week, I kept coming back to the idea that our foundations are partly – and strongly – laid here in our history. And it reinforced how critical it is to acknowledge and honor that history to fully bridge our present and future.

The bad news is, our past as written by the savannas, prairies, and old-growth forests is rapidly disappearing (if it isn’t already gone). But there’s hope! The route I took to bike to/from the conference was on or directly passed through no less than 38(!) Knowles-Nelson restoration and/or connection projects that are helping reintroduce people back to nature. And reintroduce the natural parts of nature back to nature. To help people find nothing but their own connections to the land that we’re on and the landscapes that we inhabit.

You’ll see in this newsletter that we’re looking for stories you have about those exact Knowles-Nelson projects that are making your community stronger. As is the typical cycle of things, the future funding of that program is, at this exact moment, uncertain. But as an organization, we want to be sure that we can at least uplift your stories of how this program supports the land we live on and people who live in partnership with it as funding is reauthorized.

So, before we step into a new year, my call is to not forget your past. Why you chose to do what you do and how it shapes you. And why you support what we do as an organization by being a member. Those are the connections that will bridge our collective futures across our communities (imo) – and APA-WI is here to support you in it.

I hope you find some space to get out into nature to do absolutely nothing over these next few weeks, whether it’s a bike ride through some prairies or something more personal to you. We might be surprised at what we can find in ourselves out there.