jarriel jones
IN CONVERSATION WITH JAMES EDWARD MILLS
To hear an American landscape described as a war zone is to be confronted with powerful—but predictable— images: a strip-mined Appalachian hillside, a polluted urban river, a clear-cut forest in the Pacific Northwest. But when Jarid Manos uses the term, he’s talking about someplace else: the Great Plains. The writer and activist is referring to a chapter of the
nation’s natural history that even other conservationists often forget. Once, on an American Serengeti spanning 13 states, an ocean of grass supported tens of millions of bison, prairie dogs, and antelope. Today, this complex ecosystem is so far gone it has almost passed from the collective memory. Founder of the Great Plains Restoration Council, Manos has set out to protect and revive the last remnants of the battered prairie. Drawing on his own experience of personal transformation, he’s leading an effort to rehabilitate both a lost landscape and forgotten people—with the belief that a connection between the two can heal them both.
What early experiences set you on the path to the work you’re doing now?
I was alienated and self-hating as a kid. I struggled with extreme depression and anger. I had to figure out the world for myself, and the conclusion I came to was that the world was a hostile and hopeless place. I left my small, rural town in the Midwest, tried to go to school, but ended up involved in prostitution and drug dealing in New York City.
And you looked to the natural world to get away from all that.
Right. Since I was a child I’d had this crazy dream—that I could escape into the fabled wilderness of the American Great Plains, just disappear under hundreds of miles of sky and never talk to anybody again.
Did you find what you were looking for? When I finally made that escape attempt, I started noticing that something was off. Where I had imagined a landscape of openness and health, I found the Great Plains strung up in bristling wires, overgrazed and sore, and the remaining native wildlife struggling to survive the onslaught of poisons and traps and bullets. In many places, even the creeks don’t flow anymore.
And some ranchers and cops made it a dangerous place for people of color. I often felt safer in the inner city, because there the threats were occasional and specific—whereas on
the plains, I felt a pall of violence and hatred stretching from horizon to horizon. I don’t want to be antagonistic here, but this was my personal experience.
As someone who had already faced problems with depression, how did you react when you discovered the plains weren’t what you’d expected?
For years I struggled to find the safe place I had dreamed of. I got angry. I became militant, went underground, and started cutting down barbed wire fences. And I studied—I learned more about the history of the Great Plains and began to get a sense of its embedded stories.
I believe the American story in particular is the story of people on the land. Whatever happens to that landscape, those stories persist; they’re layered in like sandstone beneath our feet. There are places in the West where it still feels like the 1870s—in the sense of both the violence and the beauty.
How does your own story fit in? I would say there were three major stages of my narrative. The first was hopelessness and despair. The second was this anger and militancy. And the third is learning to love more, through the work that I do.
I try to insist on an ultimate goodness in people. I believe we can have the most exhilarating life by getting healthy and giving back. I’m aware of the world’s problems and I work in
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