The MN wildflower blog

After posting a recommendation on our Wildflower Facebook page of a local oak savanna remnant (Helen Allison SNA in northern Anoka county) that provides some wonderful  views of the broader landscape of just a century or more back, a fan made this comment:

“but we really don’t know. I often wonder, driving through the county – what was it really like, 200 years ago?” – Arne

Here is my response:

Arne – I have to disagree.  While it should be obvious we cannot experience the past in the present, we can increasingly “know” it in great detail. Scientific  study and it’s tools, such as the launching of the Hubble space telescope in 1990 have pealed back billions of years of history for our knowledge and understanding of the entire Universe in far greater depth than could have been imagined even 50 years ago. Likewise the ancient study of plants – botany – continues to inform our “knowing” the world around us – past, present and future.

We do have enough accumulated  records and data to know what types of plant communities existed and what plants made up those plant communities thousands, even millions  of years ago let alone just two hundred years ago. While becoming exceedingly rare in this period of exponential  environmental change we still have remnants of those communities here and there for our study, understanding and appreciation. That’s fairly accurate “knowing” just through historical documentation. When you visit a place like Helen Allison where that plant community that existed 200 years ago is still remarkably intact you can literally know it by seeing it with your own eyes. That “knowing” is far more meaningful when you are able to discriminate between native species from those that have invaded much of what little remains of the “natural” landscape in just the past 50 years and seeing they are not there (at least not yet).

There are swales and hollows at Helen Allison that nearly completely obscure any vision of the modern age. What we will never know is what it was like to step out of that hollow and have the knowledge that the vision extends beyond the horizon. To know and appreciate that you will need to apply both your own unique human imagination and your uniquely Human Spirituality that the study of native plant species inherently evokes.

Aldo Leopold’s words of just sixty some years ago were perhaps prophetic when he suggested; “It might be wise to prohibit at once all teaching of real botany and real history, lest some future citizen suffer qualms about the floristic price of his good life.” With today’s revival in interest and popular study of botany, native species and their histories, the questions cannot help but be asked; what is it we once had, what we have lost, what we are losing and what are we getting in return for those losses? That at least portions of society might experience some cultural angst in this matter is long overdue.

While all of history is the story of change over time – as provided for the evolution of species itself, until some 200 years ago, this change in Minnesota’s (and most of the World’s) landscape was so incremental over time that those who viewed the land back then could only envision it as timeless, regardless of how they imagined utilizing the resources of the land to secure their children’s future.

What they could never have seen that we can so clearly see today is how quickly so many of those “timeless” resources disappeared in just a mere 200 years with the majority of those losses within just the last several decades. What we know that they could never know was how severely and quickly, human activities can change the entire surface of the planet and its future. They could only look upon the landscape as a source of hope for their children’s future and it appeared to be theirs for the taking. Unless you are in complete self denial, I don’t see how you can look at the landscape today, with even a little amount of informed knowledge of the state of things without feeling at least a little bit of concern and trepidation for the future.

In this age of unprecedented “knowledge”, never before has the security of our children’s future been in such grave doubt.

Petyer