How do you merge your illustration work, your writing, your DVD work, etc., with your hands-on reconstruction work?
The reconstruction work that we do merges seamlessly with all my other projects including the educational/awareness aspect. We delight in having people come out for advice on their own plantings, help with a burn, or just enjoy the raucous color display when everything is in full bloom. Of course the hands-on work often inspires the artwork and keeps things real. It’s also great when you have to draw or film something and don’t have to leave the farm!
What has changed in the outdoor world since your first days of trying to learn about it and protect it? What's better, what’s worse?
So many things in the outdoor world have changed in my lifetime for better and for worse that whole books are written to address this question. But in general I’d say that things were pretty nasty in the 1960s as far as air and water quality and habitat destruction were concerned, and at the pace of environmental atrocities at that time we would be a lot worse off now if it were not for some pretty bold legislation and the blooming of environmental groups and an explosion of awareness—thank you, Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold et al. If you would have told me 20 years ago that you would see dozens of bald eagles munching on bullheads along the Iowa River behind McDonald’s in Iowa City or that we would have a trapping season for bobcat and river otters or that turkeys would become a nuisance here, I would not have believed it. So there have been some miracle reversals, but we may have outdone ourselves with our contribution to global climate change, which will make DDT nearly wiping out raptors, oil spills, excessive logging, near total destruction of the tallgrass prairie, wetland draining, ivory-billed woodpeckers, etc., seem like trivial events in comparison to what we may be facing. It could be more than easy to go completely negative here, so I concentrate on keeping our consumption footprint small, continue to work on protecting and creating high-quality habitat and holding my breath that people will have the courage to get up and do what needs to be done before it’s too late.
Mark Müller, coauthor, An Illustrated Guide to Iowa Prairie Plants, and author, Prairie in Your Pocket, Woodland in Your Pocket, and Wetlands in Your Pocket
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