I N T RODUC T ION

The land belongs to the future . . . thats the way it seems to me

. . . I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brothers
children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the
people who love it and understand it are the people who own it
for a little while.
W I L L A C AT H E R , O P IO N E E R S !

W I T H H I S envoys in Paris negotiating to purchase Louisiana,

Thomas Jefferson implored his friend and fellow farmer James Monroe to join them, to secure our rights and interest in the Mississippi
River and surrounding territories. On the event of this mission, the
president wrote in January 1803, depends the future destinies of this
Republic.
Jeffersons imminent concern was possible war with France, but
his words would prove prophetic across centuries. The Mississippi
River watershedan immense funnel spun of 7,000 tributaries reaching from the Rockies to the Appalachians and draining 40 percent of
the continental United Statesis central to the American story. The
third largest in the world (behind only the Amazon and the Congo),
this basin holds most of the nations natural wealth and produces
most of its minerals and food: metals and coal from its mountains,
meat from its northern grasslands, grains and beans from its central

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plains, fish and black oil from its delta. The connectivity provided
by its thousands of miles of waterwayslinking the heartland to the
rest of the nation and the worldhas been critical to Americas rise
and reign as a global economic power. The nations politics, too, have
been crucially shaped in these middle reaches, for two hundred years
the place to sort out such fundamental questions of democracy as the
proper balance between federal and local authority. Most important
have been the values born here: on this iconic terrainthese mountain majesties, fruited plains, shining seasexplorers and cowboys,
pioneers and riverboat captains, forged the American identity. It is not
by chance that the Mississippi provided the setting for two of Americas founding journeys: Lewis and Clarks up from St. Louis to the
Missouri headwaters and across the whole of the Louisiana Purchase
Jefferson sent them to explore, and Huck Finns down the river, to
freedom and an understanding of the common human purpose.
America depends on these grand working landscapes, and they in
turn depend on a small number of people: the families who live by harvesting their bounty. Farmers and ranchers make up just 1 percent of
the U.S. population but manage two-thirds of the nations land; agriculture has greater impacts on water, land and terrestrial biodiversity
than any other human enterprise. Thats true everywhere, making this
region a model for the world. Half of Earths ice-free land is in pasture
or farms. Crops now cover an area the size of South America and livestock graze an expanse as big as Africa; together they use 70 percent
of all fresh water. Fishermen have an equally enormous impact, harvesting 90 million metric tons of fish annuallyequivalent, as author
Paul Greenberg calculates to pulling the human weight of China out
of the sea every year.
As these productive landscapes grow increasingly precarious
overgrazed, overtilled, overfished; threatened by invasive species, development, ill-conceived feats of engineering, and extreme weatherit
is the families who run the tractors and barges and fishing boats who

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are stepping up to save them. Theirs are the most consequential efforts
to restore Americas grasslands, wildlife, soils, rivers, wetlands and
fisheriesthe vast, rich bounty that shaped our national character
and sustains our way of life.
In the still half-wild frontier of the northern Rockies, near the
headwaters of the Missouri 4,000 miles upstream from the Miss
issippis mouth, Montana cowboy Dusty Crary has gathered an
improbable band of longtime enemiescattlemen, fishermen, federal
land managers, outfitters, hikers, hunters, environmentaliststo protect the epic ranches and untamed wilderness and elk and grizzlies
and trout they all love. On the Kansas prairie, Justin Knopf is using
industrial-scale farming to restore depleted soils cultivated by his
family since homestead days. On the Mississippi itself and its sultry
delta, Canal Barge CEO Merritt Lanescion of an old aristocratic
Southern familyhas joined an unprecedentedly ambitious effort to
reestablish the rivers natural land-building functions, to protect his
mariners and New Orleans. On the Louisiana bayou, Sandy Nguyen
is fighting to rescue the estuaries that harbor the shrimp and oysters
and crabs her community relies on. And in the deep blue waters of
the Gulf of Mexico, beyond the rivers mouth, commercial fisherman
Wayne Werner is tangling with fisheries regulators to bring back red
snapper and keep his and his buddies small businesses afloat. The
challenges they face are nearly as daunting as those met by their forebears when they settled the frontier, founded companies in the depths
of the Depression, or fled war and Communism in tiny fishing boats
adrift on vast seas. But like those ancestors, they draw on deep reservoirs of courage, ingenuity, optimism and resolve.
All are conservationists because their livelihoods and communities will live or die with these ecosystems, but also because they love
these land- and river- and seascapes where natures elemental forces
remain vivid in their beauty and danger; where lives of self-creation,
self-reliance and liberty remain possible; where the ideas of home and

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homeland remain strong. All bear a sense of moral responsibility to

both the future and the past, a determination to pass on to their children and grandchildren a heritage often generations deep: the family
memories imprinted on this land, the seasonal rhythms and traditions
built around the bounty they reap. Many acknowledge something
sacred herelarger than human understanding or will, a gift to be
tended and revered.
Those imperatives arent new but continue a long (if presently
obscured) American tradition. Teddy Roosevelt called conservation a
great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety
and continuance of the nation. Frank Capra animated that belief in his
boy ranger Jefferson Smith, a big-eyed patriot gone to Washington to
fight for a place he loves, the prairies, wind leaning on the tall grass, cattle
moving down the slope against the sun, a place where boys can learn
something about nature and American ideals. Richard Nixon created
the EPA and signed more major environmental laws than any president
before or since, including the Endangered Species Act, which the Senate passed 920 and the House by a vote of 355 to 4. Ronald Reagan
signed the Montreal Protocol, the first global agreement to protect the
atmosphere. What is a conservative after all but one who conserves? he
asked in a 1984 speech. And we want to protect and conserve the land
on which we liveour countryside, our rivers and mountains, our plains
and meadows and forests. This is our patrimony.
Linked by those traditional values, these conservation heroes are
caring for their families and resources and communities not by digging
into ideological trenches or warring to protect their own narrow interests but by coming together like neighbors used to do when raising
barns or bringing in the wheatand often with people very different
from themselves. Their fortunes, they know, are entirely intertwined,
not least by the river itself. Wayne Werner and Justin Knopf both
recognize that the red snapper harvest depends on water quality in the
Gulf and therefore on choices Justin makes about fertilizing his wheat

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a thousand miles upstream. Still physically connected to the earth and

weather and the complex web of life, they have come to see diversity
as paramount for survival: a diversity of grasses and grazers and predators, of seeds and crops and soil microbes and pollinators, of water and
mud, fresh and salt, andmost cruciallyof people.
What is new are the alliances they are forging with nature, recognizing there too an irreducible interdependency, and discovering that
in emulating nature or hitching a ride on her immense forces they
can create more safety and wealth for people. So Justin farms like the
prairie: keeping his soils sheltered under living plants and messy mats
of fallen stalks and leaves to sustain their hidden microbial universe,
knowing those bacteria and fungi care for his crops in ways no one can
yet understand, let alone improve upon. So Merritt and partners recognize the muddy Mississippis power to build storm protection and
fish nurseries beyond engineers wildest imaginings. As Canal Barge
captain John Belcher has learned in nearly forty years on the Mississippi, Theres only so long you can levee the world out.
Their collaborations with other species and geologic forces overturn the tragic zero-sum story: that meeting human needs invariably
requires sacrificing nature, and vice versa. These ranchers, farmers and
fishermen havent just figured out how to minimize the damage, leave
a lighter mark on the land. Their productive work has itself become
the path to restoration: Dustys livestock the curative for stripped
grasslands and invasive weeds; Justins commodity crops the tonic for
soil health. Which is not to say they have found the perfect way to fish
or farm; they would be the first to acknowledge that there is no such
ideal. Rather, their heroism lies in the depth of their commitment to
consider the largest implications of what they do, across geographic
and generational lines; to forever dig deeper, listen harder, weigh each
choice for the impact it will have on their neighbors and all of life,
challenge themselves to do better as they understand more and the
world changes around them.

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In that work, and their view of the world, they turn out to have
little in common with the cartoon versions of heartland citizens regularly trotted out to serve this or that political end. Dusty, Justin, Merritt, Sandy, Wayne and their many partners tell a far more interesting
story about what real Americans care about and believe.