I have recently sold the movie rights to my first book Ghetto Plainsman, and am making a $10,000 challenge donation to Great Plains Restoration Council. Will you please help match it by making a tax-deductible year-end donation today?

For every $10,000 raised by the public, up to $40,000 total, I will personally donate $2,500, up to $10,000.

That will raise $50,000 for Great Plains Restoration Council.

With the increased attention, now is the time to begin building a larger and stronger Great Plains Restoration Council that can sustain GPRC’s leading work long term. I need your help.

We expect 2016 to be a year of new friends and growth in our efforts to get people to care about America’s endangered prairies and plains as a matter of our own health.

I’ve put my life into this effort to build a new culture of caring for our devastated prairies and plains while also developing Ecological Health programs like Plains Youth InterACTION™ and Restoration Not Incarceration™ that directly help people help themselves through taking care of the Earth. Everybody here at GPRC has given substantial service.

Early on, naysayers said this work was impossible. People didn’t care about prairies, and any effort to merge the health and recovery of young people with the prairies was too “outside the box”. Now, Ecological Health is a growing national model, where you have people like the quiet young man in Atlanta who sees his own world through the prairie story and can hardly contain himself he wants to talk so bad. Or the 16-year-old doing 16 years in the Oakland jail for a foolish mistake and asks, “What can I do to help the Earth? Can I come see the prairie when I get out?” And other organizations are also leading, like the young high-achievers in Youth Diving With a Purpose (a GPRC partner) who travel to South Florida from many states and even Mozambique to learn more, interact with other young divers, help the ocean, do coral reef restoration, and more. Our own bodies and lives are part of the ecosystems in which we live, wherever we live, and by taking care of one, we take care of the other.

16 years ago I started Great Plains Restoration Council. As much as I had experienced in life, and on America’s Great Plains, I still had no idea how extensively the country had forgotten our prairies and plains region. They were so damaged, so worn out, so depleted of life that America had largely left them for dead.

But I can tell you that my love for the once-incomparable beauty and wildness of the prairies and plains, where buffalo, prairie dogs, antelope, and sky-darkening flocks of migrating birds and monarch butterflies surged on an ocean of grass, was too uncontainable to ignore. We are more than “flyover country”.

Most people saw only tedious, endless miles of grain and crop fields and tired Dust Bowled “rangelands” strung up in barbed wire. But beneath that, there have always been pockets and moments of the original grass ocean’s life and vitality. Here at GPRC this is what we have stuck to in our years of work to rebreathe life back into the land and ourselves for the future.

In Great Plains Restoration Council we took the long game, and worked at building a new culture of caring through our projects like the Fort Worth Prairie Park, Esteban Park in Houston, prairie dog restoration on the Galisteo Basin Preserve in Santa Fe County, NM, and the Oglala Prairie Preserve in South Dakota. And we have helped a lot of people care deeper for the Earth and themselves, especially young people.

Now, with the movie on the horizon, and existing projects coming to a head, Great Plains Restoration Council is researching a much larger, legacy landscape restoration project on the Southern Plains where Southern bison, black-tailed prairie dogs, pronghorn antelope, and black-footed ferrets could all thrive together. With your help, we can leverage all our years of work and institutional knowledge into a larger organization – an exciting national institution of Ecological Health. It will take time, but the first thing is to take steps. Start walking, like we have always done.

Will you please make a year-end donation today to support our efforts? We are only able to do this work with the support of people like you. We’re all in this together. And Great Plains Restoration Council is your organization to help people and prairies.

Again, I will personally donate $2,500 for every $10,000 raised by the public, up to a total personal gift of $10,000. Please help Great Plains Restoration Council reach this fundraising goal of $50,000 to start 2016 off strongly.

Thank you as always. And best wishes and health from all of us out here in the land of sun, wind, grass and blue sky,