On a half-dozen occasions over the years, in late September, I have found myself driving from Wisconsin, across Iowa and northwest Missouri, through the Flint Hills of Kansas, to the The Land Institute at the southern edge of the city of Salina, Kansas. That journey spans a landscape that has changed profoundly over the past two centuries.
The Native peoples along this route—the Ho-Chunk, Sauk and Meskwaki, Ioway, Potawatomi, Otoe, Missouria, Pawnee, Kansa—had their lands taken from them by the U.S. government across the nineteenth century. Most of the region’s tallgrass prairie disappeared by the early 1900s, plowed under by newly arrived settlers—the next step in establishing the Midwest’s modern agricultural empire.
Since World War II, that empire has grown immensely powerful but increasingly brittle through market concentration and consolidation. In 1945, Wisconsin was home to about 155,000 dairy farms; there are now about 5,200. In this same period, the number of farms in Iowa has fallen from around 209,000 to 87,000; in Kansas, from 141,000 to 55,700. Over the course of only 150 growing seasons, the prairie’s biological and cultural abundance has given way to vast monocultures of corn and soy, expanding concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOS, and nutrient-choked surface waters.
The effects ripple through the nearby rural communities. Main Streets that once bustled with activity have had their dollars captured by the regional Walmarts, the prolific Dollar Generals, and ever-encroaching Amazon. Interstate highways drained brains away from rural areas and into the cities. Now the data centers are coming, demanding land, energy, water, power lines, zoning variances, and tax incentives.
Amid these epochal changes, Salina and The Land Institute’s Prairie Festival—an annual gathering of contrarian agrarians, radical plant breeders, visionary foodies, devoted community keepers, and sustainers of soil, society, and spirit—have called out to thousands of wayfarers from all parts of the continent, myself included.
For decades, the Institute’s “Big Barn” along the Smoky Hill River has been packed with festival attendees, the space pulsing from dirt floor to rafters with ideas about ecology and economics, agronomy and history, philosophy and art. Far from boardrooms, laboratories, and classrooms, those attending the “intellectual hootenanny” can think freely about the causes and consequences of the changes in the land. They can imagine responses that would not merely treat particular symptoms of maladjustment in our agroecosystems, but, in the words of Wendell Berry, “solve for pattern.”
At the center of these circles was—and still is—the singular figure of now eighty-nine-year-old Wes Jackson. Son of Kansas, plant geneticist, systems rethinker, and MacArthur-certified genius, Jackson walked away from a straight-row academic path at California State University in the early 1970s and returned to the prairies of Kansas.
Jackson and his then wife Dana Lee Jackson co-founded The Land Institute in Salina in 1976, with the intention to “search for sustainable alternatives in agriculture, energy, shelter, waste management”—and, implicitly, to forge alternative ideas and worldviews. “If we don’t get sustainability in agriculture first,” Jackson said in 2000, “sustainability will not happen.”
The U.S. National Agricultural Research, Extension, and Teaching Policy Act of 1977 quietly introduced the term “sustainable agriculture” into the official federal lexicon. A year later, Jackson published an article titled, “Toward a Sustainable Agriculture”—one of the first published uses of the term. Jackson wrote, “Since we initiated the split with nature some 10,000 years ago by embracing enterprise in food production, we have yet to develop an agriculture as sustainable as the nature we destroy.”
This challenge has remained at the center of Jackson’s thought ever since. The Land Institute’s work has grown alongside a now-global sustainability movement that recognizes the inherent interconnectedness of agriculture, human health, climate change, biodiversity conservation, environmental justice, community prosperity, and social resilience.
One of the pleasures of the Prairie Festival has always been Jackson’s extemporaneous concluding remarks. Regular attendees learned early to keep notepads in hand, anticipating spontaneous bolts of Jacksonian wisdom from the podium. From my 2008 notes: “We need to save wild places because they contain answers to questions we have not yet even asked.” That line lies close to the heart of the conceptual framework that Jackson has developed across his lifetime.
In recent years, Jackson’s work has received broader coverage and attention. In The Restless and Relentless Mind of Wes Jackson, published in 2021, Robert Jensen, emeritus professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, provides a sharp summary of Jackson’s intellectual journey. He writes that, at the critical crossroads of that journey, “the potential on the prairie won out over the steady paycheck” in California.
In Hogs Are Up, Jackson’s collection of autobiographical “digressions,” also published in 2021, Jackson notes that it was his daughter Laura who, tired of changing schools, made the case by turning one of those philosophical bolts back on her father: “I thought you always said that we are not called to success but to obedience to our vision!” Laura Jackson, whose own vision would lead her to become a leading prairie ecologist, won the argument.
Finally, a newly released documentary, Prairie Prophecy, conveys the essentials of Jackson’s story and thinking. We need to deal not simply with the problems in agriculture, but the problem of agriculture. It was the emergence of agriculture that began to sever human access to nature’s wisdom. Over more than ten millennia, people have, through ever-intensifying modification of natural systems, burned through five pools of concentrated carbon energy, stored in soils, forests, coal, oil, and natural gas.
The externalized costs of this exploitation, visited upon human and natural communities, can no longer be sustained. We need now to move beyond what Jackson calls our “human cleverness” and turn with respect to the ecosystems that have long adapted to and expressed their particular places. These become the models and measures for durable agroecosystems. In the American Midwest, this means taking inspiration from our vanquished prairies, mimicking their structure and function, and moving from annual monocultures toward perennial polycultures.
Perennial Films
Wes Jackson, ‘Prairie Prophecy.’
These works also collectively highlight a vital truth about Jackson’s path: He did not walk it by himself. He acknowledges his own ignorance as a gift, writing, “We often learn the most from the most unusual people, in places we weren’t looking for, in ways we didn’t expect.” He has always been as much an integrator as a generator of fresh thought. This means drawing on any and all lights, from ecologists, historians, artists, and writers (including his close friend Berry) to Leland Lorenzen, “a quirky neighbor who was a twentieth century Thoreau” (as Jensen put it). “[Jackson] is serious about how much he relies on friends and colleagues, especially those with expertise beyond his own, for the ‘yeastiness of thought’ that he covets.”
Transformation, in short, will not come through sequestered specialization. Rather, we need to, as Jackson says in Prairie Prophecy, “drive knowledge out of its categories.”
Fifty years after Jackson returned to Kansas, why is this more important than ever? Because we are still trying to understand what’s the matter—not just with Kansas, but with the nation as a whole.
In the very first issue of The Land Institute’s Land Report (originally published in 1976 and reprinted as the concluding essay in Hogs Are Up), Jackson observed, “The United States as a developed country might be regarded as a greenhouse culture. Lately we have been watching a gathering storm outside our comfortable environment and have become suddenly cognizant of how vulnerable our culture is.”
By now it is clear: The crisis of American democracy is fundamentally a crisis of our relationships on and with the land. Not the hazy heartland of American myth, but the actual, real, tangible, bloodied, and beautiful land, and its kinship community of soil, water, plants, animals, and people.
The rural-urban divide in our politics has mystified some observers for whom its importance is newly realized. For others who have long recognized and fueled the divide, it cynically inspires their acts of political exploitation. But others yet, of a more productive bent, begin with the soil, and return there for proof and measure.
Start there, and the rural-urban divide becomes a tragically predictable, albeit unintended, consequence of the post-World War II industrialization of agriculture. Resentment has festered in the furrows and grown from the depletion of our rural economies, communities, landscapes, and ecosystems. Resistance may now come, in at least one of its necessary forms, through reclaiming and rebuilding the literal common ground.
Over the past fifty years, the term “sustainable” has been regularly criticized for being too nebulous, insubstantial, jargony. It is dismissed as too easily co-opted and greenwashed. All true enough. New adjectives—resilient, regenerative, reciprocal—have helped elaborate and deepen the concept. But let Wes Jackson’s experience serve as a reminder that, in first evoking the term, he knew its bite.
In The Land Institute’s “search for alternatives,” Jackson and colleagues have taken on an all-powerful status quo 10,000 years in the making. If there is any doubt about this, simply observe the fierce antagonism with which the current administration is dismantling anything that dares reveal, or even mention, our flaws and vulnerabilities. Watch how its authorities disdain anything that would lead us away from the nation’s sheltered greenhouse culture and back toward the self-sustaining, self-governing prairie.
Prairie Prophecy is now screening in cities across the United States. A version that has been shortened for television is set to air on PBS stations in April 2026.