Something Worth Saving

Joining the fight to restore the Cajun Prairie

by

I first became captivated by the Cajun Prairie in the spring of 2022, after hearing its history directly from the leaders of the fight to save it: Drs. Malcolm Vidrine and Charles Allen. For the rest of the growing season, until October hor even November when the last seeds were falling, I visited two of the region’s oldest prairie restorations every few weeks—at the ten-acre habitat in Eunice overseen by the Cajun Prairie Preservation Society, and Dr. Vidrine’s Cajun Prairie Gardens beside his home. There, I would gather seeds among the strange flowers and waving grasses, and walk through one of North America’s most forgotten habitats, an ecosystem that has been almost completely decimated over the last century.

I would marvel at how each plant is so clearly and uniquely itself, as easy to tell apart as people are, when you really look. But then there is also the prairie as a whole thing unto itself, all the plants coexisting with the dragonflies, butterflies, and other such parts of this great landscape. Reading Dr. Vidrine’s scientific and historic perspectives in his book The Cajun Prairie: A Natural History, I imagined the forgotten glories of this place’s past, held in its roots.

The Cajun Prairie was great in the days before its decline, spanning 2.4 million acres with its hundreds of species, all tuned to the slightest variation of soil, light, water, and disturbance so that every square foot was different in composition and appearance, but equal in strength and harmony. Vast herds of bison called this prairie home; packs of red wolves, flocks of birds and innumerable smaller animals. The whole region—the soil, the water, the air—was filled with harmonious and abundant life.  But those days are in the past. The ecosystem began disappearing in the 1880s with the rise of commercial farming, and as the prairie’s size dwindled, so also did its memory. It would likely all be gone today, if Drs. Vidrine and Allen hadn’t come across its meager remnants beside the railroad tracks in 1986. Then, the impossible reversal—the enduring work of saving the prairie from oblivion—began.

After the seed collecting season was over, I cast out what I had gathered into a field just outside of Iota.

With the spring came the time for growing cuttings and transplants, a process I learned under the mentorship of Dr. Vidrine. We propagated until the weather became too hot and dry. These plants would normally have grown and flowered quickly, but because of the previous summer’s drought, most of the growth was carried out in the root system, the deep foundation upon which the prairie rests.

All the while, I kept up my observations, my seed collecting. I continued to read books— exploring the prairie habitat, in all its delicate balance, through Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe’s ReWilding: The Radical New Science of Ecological Recovery and Enric Sala’s The Nature of Nature: Why We Need the Wild. They showed that a habitat is like an orchestra, composed of many different parts brought into harmony together, sometimes one taking the lead and now another, but all in their proper place. It could also be compared to an old-fashioned dance, in which all the members are so attuned to each other that even though they are individuals, the whole room dances as one. When one goes missing, there is a gap which can only be partially filled by the others, and when a new, unfamiliar member is brought in, discord and confusion follows—turning the dance, the habitat, into a riot.

Out of this work emerged a vision of what I hope to create: something beyond a yard prairie restoration, expanding into open fields, ditches, woodlands, ponds, whole sections of an orchestra. In them, I want as many as possible of the original species, calling back together all the scattered members of the lost dance for a resounding encore. I want to return the prairie to its home. And I want to make it my home.

To accomplish this, I am now seeding more prairie across my property, planting small groups of plants likely to spread more on their own, and I am even experimenting with grazing Gulf Coast native sheep, descendants of those brought over in the 1500s by the Spanish, in one of my restoration fields, to see how they might contribute to the cycle of life there.

From the first I heard of the disappearing Cajun Prairie, it has been a foregone conclusion that this shall be my work. The mission spoke to me so deeply because here was something which I had before found with such force only in books: a thing worth saving, a great cause. This thing once great and beautiful, now at the point of death, but fought for and perhaps saved at the eleventh hour by a small band of those who remember—it reminded me of epic stories like Tolkien’s Silmarillion, the Anglo-Saxon’s struggle against the Vikings, and the saga of the Cajuns. I heard in the prairie’s story not only of the dangers of losing it and the good in saving it, but after discovering the legacy of struggle and determination around this ongoing fight, I felt called to join in the long tradition of saving the lost good of the past.

cajunprairie.org