Great Plains Restoration Council “Serving our Youth, Protecting our Prairie Earth.”
Great Plains Restoration Council “Serving our Youth, Protecting our Prairie Earth.”
GPRC is expanding into Houston.
In formal partnership with Katy Prairie Conservancy and the Harris County Attorney’s Office, Restoration Not Incarceration is designed to help the Katy Prairie Conservancy restore several thousand acres of coastal prairie while providing special rehabilitative work opportunities to temporarily incarcerated individuals. The restoration of our Houston prairies provides the mechanism through which struggling individuals, particularly young urban males, can establish improvement of life outcomes as well as a pathway to employment once released from jail with the skills learned through this initiative. An integration of values and productive work in nature provides a stabilizing avenue for youth and adults as they reintegrate into society.
The Katy Prairie is the coastal prairie region just west of Houston. The Katy Prairie Conservancy currently owns or manages 18,000 acres, nearly all of which needs ecological restoration, from removal of exotic invaders like Chinese tallow to replanting native prairie on old fields. Their goal is a 50,000 acre connected reserve stretching from just west of Houston to the Brazos River
Partnering with the 5,000 acre Wind River Ranch in Mora County, New Mexico, we will create a minimum 100,000 acre refuge for wild buffalo, black-tailed prairie dogs, antelope and other native wildlife in northeastern New Mexico that will become a complete, functioning shortgrass prairie ecosystem. Plains Youth InterACTION and Restoration Not Incarceration will assist. Mora County is among the poorest in the nation, with 22.4% of residents living below the poverty line. This project will protect native wildlife entering into the "extinction spiral" while also offering an economic and cultural driver for the region based on green restoration and sustainability. Details coming soon.
Bringing the journey home to completion, to the place of original conception where the prairie meets the sea, there needs to be a reintroduction of wild buffalo, pronghorn antelope, and maybe even critically endangered red wolves back to the few Texas reserves of long-grass coastal prairie left. Excellent, sizeable places to begin are Padre Island National Seashore, Aransas National Wildlife Refuge/Matagorda Island Complex, Anahuac/McFaddin National Wildlife Refuges, and Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge. Restoring and rewilding these and other areas can offer Green Collar jobs, education opportunities, renewed health, and deeper ecological belonging for people of all colors, cultures and communities. Houston and the other coastal cities and towns can lead here.
