Great Plains Restoration Council “Serving our Youth, Protecting our Prairie Earth.”
Great Plains Restoration Council “Serving our Youth, Protecting our Prairie Earth.”
3D Aerial View – GPRC/WRC’s 4,600 acre Oglala Prairie Preserve (outlined in blue)
Black-footed ferret recently released into Conata Basin, Buffalo Gap National Grassland. Photograph by Dan Licht, Pronghorn Productions.
Photograph by Dan Licht, Pronghorn Productions
Through a joint project between GPRC and Wildlands Restoration Corporation, we’ve purchased 4,600 acres directly adjacent to the North Unit of Badlands National Park. We have just reached agreement with the National Park Service for the 6.5 mile Park fence between our property and the Park to be taken down so the two can ecologically connect. The ultimate goal is to help the National Park Service acquire this new preserve and fold it officially into the Park.
Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation
Successful completion and transition accomplished:
As of September 2009, Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation grew successful enough to take over all of the youth programming which we had partnered on for so many years, and has now spun off to operate fully on their own, with great advances toward creating a whole new green and sustainable community. GPRC is now solely focusing on the Southern Plains.
On Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, GPRC and Thunder Valley CDC (TVCDC) share mutual Ecological Health goals of bringing buffalo, antelope, prairie dogs and other native wildlife back and building healthy sustainable communities. We jointly run the Youth InterACTION leadership development program. GPRC is working to acquire and restore a new, several thousand acre former cattle ranch (fee land) that has excellent connectivity to the South Unit of Badlands National Park in southwestern South Dakota. Next to it, Thunder Valley CDC is working to build, near the road, on 200 already degraded areas, one of the greenest communities on the Great Plains. Its centerpiece will be a state-of-the-art solar-powered wellness center complete with swimming pool, basketball court, gym, cultural space, and more. This new community will help Oglala Lakota folks build financial equity, healthier living conditions and much healthier lives, while serving as an Oglala-led Ecological Health education lab where youth and adults relearn and reconnect with the natural world, their culture, and their place within it. Thunder Valley will also be a language lab, front-edge community meeting place for the exchange and development of new ideas, a headquarters for new prairie wilderness restoration and protection, and a sustainable ecological economy model for Tribal residents in all 9 Districts on the Reservation. Community Meeting House is just completed.
