[♪♪♪♪♪] -"Gone."

That is the word, my friends, that I want you to think about today as we gather here to mourn.

"Gone."

Think about the finality of that word.

[♪♪♪♪♪] Grasslands, hands down, are the most endangered ecosystems on the planet, not just here in the United States, but worldwide.

I mean, they're far more endangered than tropical rainforests, more endangered than, you know, Tundra, more endangered than all kinds of ecosystems that often get sort of worldwide recognition.

[♪♪♪♪♪] There's no way to really know how much grassland we've lost.

I mean, at least it's a very safe estimate to say we've lost 90 percent across all types of grasslands.

[♪♪♪♪♪] But then there are certain kinds of grasslands which we know we've lost more of than any.

[♪♪♪♪♪] If you want to salvage what's left, or if you want to rebuild from what's left, you've got to look to those little bitty scraps that remain on the landscape.

[♪♪♪♪♪] I'm Dr. Dwayne Estes.

Some people call me "The Prairie Preacher."

[♪♪♪♪♪] Coming home to a pretty unstable, you know, childhood home, I naturally gravitated to the outdoors.

I took to the woods every chance I'd get.

[♪♪♪♪♪] [birds chirping] I'd come home after riding Bus 22, my school bus, and first thing I'd do is eat a bowl of cereal, watch The Andy Griffith Show, and then immediately take out, and I'd be gone till the dark, until Mama would call me home for suppertime.

[♪♪♪♪♪] It was that love of the outdoors which led to me sort of discovering nature, and that I like plants.

And that sort of naturally would lead to me, over the course of my life, to the path that I'm on now.

I went into a career in botany.

[♪♪♪♪♪] Nature is my nurturer.

That's kind of a hard word for me to say, but, you know, it nurtured me, growing up, and it provided sort of a safe place.

It provided my education, you know, and I think it was a very powerful experience for me.

[♪♪♪♪♪] I think growing up, I kind of had a small world.

You know, I had one mother, a live-in stepdad, if you want to call it that.

I had one grandparent, a small nucleus of cousins that I saw occasionally, and a few aunts and uncles.

But I didn't really have any friends, you know, as a kid growing up.

And I look at my kids today and I'm like, "Oh my, they're so lucky, you know, they've got lots of friends and stuff."

And I grew up very much sort of as a kid of solitude, and I don't know why that happened, but I came to rely so much on nature that nature became a great friend to me in many ways.

[♪♪♪♪♪] It's where I went to sort of seek refuge from the world.

It's where I eventually began to sort of study without knowing it.

I was, you know, trying to learn my trees.

And I became so intimately familiar with it, and so at ease with it, and developed such a passion and a love for it that later on, when I became a professional, I wanted to devote my life to doing everything I could to protecting that nature that I had come to love.

[♪♪♪♪♪] [sniffling] [♪♪♪♪♪] Everything I do traces back to that.

I mean, every single aspect of my life is grounded in those experiences from when I was, you know, age 10-17, growing up in the country.

A common misconception is that, "Oh yeah, I've got grass on my place.

I've got a grassy field out there.

I've got a grassland you can go look at."

But native grasslands differ from sort of the mundane field and pastures that you might drive by every day in some really key ways.

What do you know about grass?

-Not a whole lot.

I mean, maybe just seeing it out when I've traveled different places, you know, got a lot of grass around.

-I know cows like it, and that it's green.

-You know, we need grass.

Grass is very needed.

I think they help the trees.

Grass is very important.

-I think it helps the-- it helps the weeds.

-I know that grass is green, it can grow tall, and I need to mow it.

-It makes our athletic fields look nice.

-I'm very unfamiliar with any issues around grasslands other than it's part of our environment, and probably should take care of part of it, but not at the extreme.

-Grasslands, prairies, or more in the Midwest.

-I know a little bit about grass because I'm trying to grow some in my backyard.

-The amount of grass we have is depleting, and that's not good.

[Joshua Deel] What is the problem?

-Grassland loss.

How we define it is, one of the leading causes of biodiversity decline in the United States right now.

And most people don't know that.

[birds chirping] -Much of the conservation discussion today is about loss and extinction, and what we are at risk of losing in the next 10, 20, or 50 years.

With grasslands, particularly in the Southeast, we've already lost 99 percent of the grasslands that were originally in this region.

Most people don't appreciate how significant a role grasslands played in the ecosystems of the Southeastern United States.

And that's because those grasslands disappeared before there were photographs, before those systems were painted or drawn by early artists.

And the popular conception is that the Southeastern United States was entirely forested, and that's not accurate.

The Southeast had a diverse array of grasslands that supported a range of species, mammals, birds, insects, plants.

And those species have, in some cases, disappeared entirely, or in others, have been in rapid decline as those grassland systems have disappeared.

-We've had this long legacy of grassland species here in the South.

And they go back not just tens of thousands of years, they go back millions of years.

Recently, there was a fossil of the American cheetah discovered in Lee County, Virginia, right in the heart of the Southern Appalachians, in this cave.

So we had this rich array of cheetahs, the American lions, camels, bison, rhinoceros.

We had all the big animals you can think of that like you would imagine in the African Serengeti, we had many of those kinds of animals.

-You had two keystone species that helped maintain grasslands in the Southeast.

Bison were in the American Southeast.

Beavers were incredibly important to the maintenance of wet meadows and wet grasslands.

Both of those species were largely extirpated.

Beavers have made somewhat of a comeback in the Southeast, but obviously not the case with bison.

Most people don't even know that bison were as far east as Virginia and Tennessee.

Grasslands are one of the most important and yet, one of the most overlooked, ecosystems on the planet.

They are fundamental for the conservation of biodiversity.

They are fundamental both to mitigating climate change, and to adapting to climate change.

-Grasslands are really effective at storing that carbon underground sort of permanently, and keeping it from being re-released out into the atmosphere.

If you compare that to forests, they store their carbon in the wood products, in the trunk.

And so, if there's a wildfire that burns up that wood, it re-releases it into the atmosphere.

So in terms of storing that carbon for long periods, recent research has shown that grasslands can be just as effective, if not more effective, than forests at storing carbon.

-Five percent of the grasslands today have any sort of conservation on them, which means we're going to have progressive loss over time.

The significance of that, to me personally, has been in two areas.

One is that whole loss of biodiversity and what the loss of biodiversity means to all of us, and to our children, and to future generations with the effect on the balance of nature and food supply of the future.

And then, the second area is the whole area of climate change, and to me, that boils down to the power of these grasslands, which we now know are the most imperiled ecosystem out there today.

And as we degrade these grasslands, we lose these opportunities to have that sequestered carbon or pulling carbon out of the air as we address the larger issues of climate change broadly.

-Unfortunately, grasslands, both in the United States and around the world, have not received a proportionate share of attention and funding.

And they are in dire straits, not just in Appalachia, but in the Great Plains, in Central America, in Africa, in Asia, pretty much everywhere they exist.

The majority of grassland systems have been heavily degraded, and are at risk of losing a lot of the species and ecosystem functions that make them so critical.

[Dr. Dwayne] [reading] "Gone.

"Think about the finality of that word.

"That once something is truly gone from this earth, "it can never be brought back to the way it was.

Let us bow our heads in remembrance of our dear friend."

-So the honest truth is, if we lost all of the Southeast's grasslands, they were completely gone and all of those species were gone, what would happen?

That's the question you would logically ask.

The honest answer is, we don't know.

We don't know what happens when we pull species out of an ecosystem, or where we pull an entire ecosystem out, which we're on the verge of doing with grasslands.

What we do know is how important a lot of those species are.

And the question is, do we want to take that risk?

Do we want to take the risk of having those species go extinct or be reduced to such a level that they're no longer able to contribute to food security, that they're no longer able to contribute to recreation, that they're no longer able to contribute to our sense of the region from which we come?

And that's a risk that we consciously or not are taking right now.

[chatter] [Dr. Dwayne] So I'd say our greatest challenge is, educating the masses.

You know, I was real lucky.

Right out of college, getting my Ph.D., I was able to get a job as a professor at Austin Peay State University up in Clarksville, Tennessee, way back in 2007.

And as I began to develop my lab, you know, and my focus as a professor and a researcher, I kept going back to those formative experiences from my childhood.

I started thinking about the last time I'd heard bobwhite quail, for example, you know, and how it had been, you know, over 15 years at that point since I had last kicked up a covey of quail and sort of been scared, you know, that there's a feeling you have when they just blow up from under your feet.

And I thought about how long that had been.

I was having conversations with other professors and other researchers across the Southeast, and they were talking about similar kinds of experiences.

I talked to someone, and they said, "Yeah, you know, I've been studying northern pine snakes, and man, we haven't seen a pine snake in 25 years in this part of Tennessee."

And I talked to another friend of mine, and he said, "Well, I've been seeing the same thing with plants, you know.

These certain kinds of wildflowers, this certain kind of wild plum bush or these crabapple bushes, species that people like in the mountains of Appalachia have been making jellies out of crabapples for, you know, centuries."

And yet, these really common species were disappearing, and people didn't know why, you know.

They had ideas on why quail was collapsing, and crabapples were disappearing, and these wildflowers were going away.

And so, I realized then that there was this need to kind of pull people together, start having conversations, and sharing stories about why are these species disappearing.

So in 2015, I decided I was going to host a symposium at our university.

We had 150 people that came.

We had 33 invited speakers.

It was a three-day event.

We went out to prairies, and we looked at all kinds of-- we had field trip sites.

And the very last person who came to this event, who just decided to come to the event the week before, was from New York City, of all places .

I didn't really know who he was or why he was there.

But he sent me an email afterward, and he said, "Dwayne," he said, "My goodness, I was blown away.

I was blown away at this message that we've been missing this whole time."

So then, he posed this question to me.

He said, "What role can private philanthropy play in your mission to restore Southern grasslands?"

I kid you not, I had to go look up the word "philanthropy" just to make sure I knew what the hell he was talking about.

So that event was foundational.

That was May of 2016.

A couple months later, we were well on our way to developing what we call the Southeastern Grasslands Institute.

And I couldn't have done it without our co-founder and my best friend, Theo Witsell, who's in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Together, we co-founded the Southeastern Grasslands Institute.

And we started with a small grant of $20,000.

That's led to us being able to ultimately raise close to $25 million over our past seven-year history.

For the first couple years, it was just us working as much as we could all the time.

You know, we were our own communications staff, and we were the ones doing it in the field, writing the papers, writing the grants.

We're undergoing a pretty big growth episode right now.

So we're going to be at 30 full-time employees by the end of this year.

[♪♪♪♪♪] We don't have a lot of time left to try to solve this critical problem of grassland loss here in the Southeast.

We've got a lot to lose.

Most people have put the emphasis on, like, forest conservation and wetlands conservation.

And there hasn't been as much focus on grasslands.

Our mission at SGI is saving Southeastern grasslands.

-My name is Alaina Krakowiak.

I'm the Central Appalachian Grasslands coordinator for SGI.

As a kid, I spent a lot of time outside.

That was sort of the place I felt the happiest and most at ease.

But throughout high school and even early college, I sort of turned away from science.

I was more into music and actually started out college as an English major doing creative writing.

And I just didn't feel like I was finding my people in that path.

The reason I initially turned away from science when I was younger is because... it was just so boring in high school.

Like, it just wasn't that interesting to me to learn about cells and anatomy and things like that.

I had no idea that being a botanist was something you could do.

That you could have a job where you got to spend so much time outside just looking around and basically exploring.

And those were the things that I was really passionate about as a kid.

So I joined the LAB Group there at UT Chattanooga.

I wanted to do a floristic inventory.

Your goal is to make a big list of every single plant that's found there.

The Orchard Knob project just kind of fell into my lap.

Orchard Knob is a national military park that is basically right in downtown Chattanooga.

It's really tiny.

It's not what you would picture when someone says national park.

It's only about two blocks in size.

It's completely surrounded by an urban neighborhood.

Because it's a historical site where the Battle of Orchard Knob, a Civil War battle occurred, it was fortunate enough to be set aside and not developed at all.

So you can kind of picture it as like one tiny piece of a habitat type that used to probably be a lot more common all around Chattanooga.

And man, I just got really lucky because it turned out to be like a really exceptionally interesting site.

Orchard Knob is a grassland remnant.

So, a lot of the rare plants that are found there really are only found in grasslands and nowhere else.

Once I started to get to know that site, I got a lot more interested in the story of Southeastern grasslands.

I just became really fascinated with learning more about this group of habitats that it seemed like no one was talking about.

-For grasslands to persist in a region like the Southeast, they require disturbance.

Otherwise, grasslands become converted to forests.

So historically, that disturbance looked like burning by Native Americans.

It looked like grazing by buffalo and elk.

It looked like flooding that was caused by beavers.

That's how grasslands persisted.

-With a lot of rare plants or rare habitat, the general idea is, you know, we should just leave it alone.

We don't want to mess with it.

We don't want to hurt it any further.

So we just don't touch it.

But the interesting thing about grasslands in the Southeast is that they really need disturbance to thrive.

-When White humans came in and settled the landscape, all those disturbances went away.

Native Americans were pushed off their land.

Buffalo were hunted out of existence.

Beavers were trapped.

And the elements that created the disturbance that enabled grasslands to persist were taken away.

We need to bring that disturbance back.

We need to reintroduce fire.

We need to bring beavers back.

And we need to understand that grasslands depend on human interaction, in large part.

Healthy grasslands are not incompatible with human use.

It's exactly the opposite.

Healthy grasslands and human uses of the land, whether it's livestock or hunting or recreation, are not just possible, they're co-dependent.

And that is part of the great opportunity for grassland restoration.

-When I became a farmer and moved into agriculture, not just nature, but into agriculture and trying to be a producer, I knew that there was a problem with our soils and I knew that there was a problem with our grasslands.

I knew there was a problem with our grazers.

So we started drawing lines, like literally in the pasture.

Over here is natural grasses.

Over here are European grasses.

Animals graze over here.

And over here is our little pocket of nature.

Dwayne took us to what we call the million-dollar view.

And we stood up and we looked at it.

We were all looking at the mountains and the clouds and the beauty of the distances that you can see from one of the vistas on the farm.

And we were all looking up and I looked at Dwayne because I thought he's going to be so impressed with this.

And Dwayne was looking down and he said, "Do you realize that we're standing under this overhang of a couple of big white oaks, and under our feet is a little bluestem.

And it's growing because it's been ignored.

It hasn't been mowed.

It hasn't been sprayed.

It hasn't been grazed because nothing could get to it.

So it found its little tenacious patch of soil to exist."

And that was a, that was a light for me when Dwayne said that.

It illuminated the fact that, this is a healing earth that we live on, and we just have to open up that opportunity.

And we don't have to fight against nature, but we just have to open that door and let nature do what it's going to do.

So, if we can eradicate the things that we've introduced and open up those healthy pathways for soil, then the right things will start to happen, just even on this little patch of farm in Central Appalachia.

-But what can the average person do?

Well, even community level involvement can have a really big impact.

Orchard Knob had kind of gone to this critical point where it needed an intervention.

We had 40 or so volunteers come out.

They tackled a problem that would have taken a single person weeks and in a matter of hours.

But we really made a big difference on that day.

On an individual level, even if you just have a tiny yard, plant native plants.

Even having a tiny patch of native grassland habitat in your yard can serve as an island sort of in a sea of urban habitat to help, you know, create stepping stones between these larger patches of grassland that we have protected.

-You know, I kind of liken southern grasslands to this Appalachian crazy quilt, you know.

You've seen those old quilts on the front of barns around the mountains of Virginia.

That crazy quilt design, that sort of very much symbolizes grasslands.

They're all broken up and fragmented.

Some are big, and some are small.

But many of the existing grasslands are fractured and separated in space from each other.

And if I look ahead to, what will it look like to successfully restore and rebuild southern grasslands in the future, I think about that crazy quilt, and what we've got to do to connect these pieces together.

-The ultimate goal is not conservation just for conservation sake, but it's restoration to a point that you can maximally benefit people, and the livelihoods of people, to have an income, or to enjoy beauty, to enjoy nature, to restore their mental health in many ways.

And the best way to do that is by restoring that land, those grasslands, the rich biodiversity of life and species preservation that we know this balance, this fragile balance of life, depends on.

-[reading] "We should all be full of regret.

You were so selfless for so long, taking everything that the world threw at you.

We watched you slip away, and we didn't do anything."

[♪♪♪♪♪] [music fades out]