Habitat & Conservation  |  09/07/2021

Grasslands Forever


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Let’s get a move on. All of us. YOU can help create a North American Grasslands Conservation Act.

By Tom Carpenter, Editor at Pheasants Forever

This week you are going to hear a lot about a North American Grasslands Conservation Act. It’s Big Stuff. 

For now anyway, it may well be the most important and far-reaching initiative any of us – that’s the Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever Family of employees, members, chapter leaders, partners, sponsors, donors, friends and you – have ever tackled.

We are embarking upon a journey to bring a North American Grasslands Conservation Act into law. The goal? Pass deep-reaching legislation into permanent funding for voluntarily putting lost grasslands (prairie, meadow, field, savanna, sagebrush steppe, you name it) back on the landscape, for improving the grasslands we do have, and for making our working grasslands more productive for wildlife as well as the grazing that happens there.

Talk about win-win-win-wins! A reasonable parallel is the successful North American Wetlands Conservation Act or NAWCA. A grasslands act could be bigger in scope and funding. The goal is $350 million invested per year.

The biggest win for you and me though, may well be the value for wildlife that is going to result. Read into that: pheasants and quail, and more places to hunt them. I make no apologies there. Period.

And oh by the way, we won’t forget bobolinks and dickcissels and kingbirds and monarch butterflies and honeybees and bumblebees and swallowtails and prairie hawks and white-tailed deer and mule deer and elk too … all grassland creatures big and small and likewise welded into our hearts. 

Join us. Heed our calls to action. Call your legislator. Email them. Tell the world. One voice seems small. But when they rise as one, they get listened to. Let’s make it LOUD.

Below are the organizations going it with us. What a team! And if there are organizations on here you think should be, let them know. I am. Almost every conservation organization and its constituents that I can think of will benefit from a Grasslands Act. Ask them to do their part. 

Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever are The Habitat Organization. Grasslands are, figuratively and literally, the root of that. Maybe we should call ourselves Grasslands Forever. It does have sort of a ring to it. 

Let’s get a move on. We’ll help you with the messaging. Pick up a phone.  Fill out a form and hit Send to your elected officials. Demand some answers back. For now, this is the biggest thing we all might to for grasslands and upland habitat in our lifetimes.
#ActForGrasslands

National Grassland Conservation Act Partner Organizations
Pheasants Forever
Quail Forever
National Wildlife Federation
Backcountry Hunters & Anglers
The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership
North American Grouse Partnership
World Wildlife Fund
National Deer Association
Izaak Walton League of America
Land Trust Alliance
Wildlife Mississippi