Chase County — As of now, 10,000 more acres of Flint Hills land is untouchable.
The land owned by ranchers Bill and Maggie Haw is now under a conservation easement, the Nature Conservancy announced this morning. The easement means that the land remains in private hands and can be used for activities such as cattle grazing, but more intensive development is off limits.
“Maggie and I believe that donating this easement is one of the most important things we’ve ever done,” Bill Haw said. ”If someone makes a shale discovery that’s worth hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to landowners, they can’t do it. It means ... nothing that’ll change the appearance of this landscape, forever. That’s a long time. And it’s a wonderful thing to think it’ll be here forever.”
The donation was announced at a news conference at the Matfield Green rest area on the Kansas Turnpike.
The Nature Conservancy’s goal is to protect 70,000 acres in the Flint Hills through conservation easements. That’s around 100 square miles of land.
“Some people thought it was a wishful dream on our part,” said Alan Pollom, the state director for the Nature Conservancy.
Over the past year, according to the conservancy, about 15,000 acres in the Flint Hills has been placed under those easements, not including the Haws’ land.
The Flint Hills contains about 95 percent of the nation’s remaining tallgrass prairie, an ecosystem that once stretched from Indiana to Kansas and from Alberta to Texas.
“This is a unique treasure and we have an obligation to protect it,” said Gov. Kathleen Sebelius at the press conference. “I’m very excited about the future. I’m here on behalf of about three million people who couldn’t be here today to say thank you to the Haws.”
Bill Haw said he wanted to see the land protected for a long time. Doing so in this manner, he said, protects both the ecosystem and the cowboy culture while preventing projects such as wind farms or a NAFTA superhighway.
“The governor has been a true warrior in protecting the Flint Hills from things that may damage the wonderful environment we have,” he said. “Maybe I should start calling her Xena, the Warrior Princess.”
He quoted extensively from “Roads” by Larry McMurtry, which includes a long, lyrical passage about the Flint Hills as seen from the highway.
“‘It is rare,’ McMurtry wrote, ‘to see that much grazing land untouched by oil wells or torn by the plow.’”
The governor urged more landowners to take part in the conservation easements, a position Haw echoed.
“This is too precious to lose,” Haw said. “We’ve got to do it.”