Grasslands Heritage Foundation

Ethnographic Fieldwork, 2009-2013

Tags: Applied Social Science Research, Non-profit engagement and outreach, Membership building, education and awareness, environmental activism

From 2009 to 2013, I was embedded with the Grasslands Heritage Foundation as an ethnographer, conducting participant observation and interviews with volunteers and prairie restoration professionals, to understand the meanings, values, and motivations behind the prairie restoration movement in the Great Plains of North America. With the permission of the GHF Board and the University of Kansas Human Subjects Committee, I shadowed their land manager, Frank Norman (Norman Ecological Services, Inc.) and worked alongside restorationists primarily at Snyder Prairie Preserve, near Topeka, conducting invasive species mitigation, controlled burns, and other various management activities. The experience not only enabled me to expand my already robust knowledge and practice of ecological restoration - in particular with prescribed fire - but also helped me learn more about what drives both professionals and volunteers to do this work. By understanding the often romantic, identity-based attachments to landscapes that drive environmental volunteers and professionals, my hope was to help increase volunteership and participation in nonprofit environmental activism and restoration practice.

My research with GHF was instrumental in providing primary sources to my dissertation research, and to providing some practical grounding to an otherwise theoretical and philosophy search for meaning in the prairie landscape. But, more importantly, my intention in unpacking what the prairie means to these Prairie People was to hopefully crack the code, so to speak, of what drives environmental activism, and in so doing, get more people interested in restoring prairies, and restoring native ecosystems where ever they live. To that end, I put my money where my mouth was (or, as they would put it: put my theory where the sun don’t shine!), and went to work: I engaged with KU Environs, the student environmental group at the University of Kansas, attending several of their business meetings and social events, eventually planning several events where KU students could get real experience doing the nitty gritty work of environmental activism - invasive species control and seed collecting!