Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.

A new nonprofit with local roots aims to combine the arts and conservation to "restore and re-story rural landscapes throughout the Central Flyway."

Josh Anderson, a native of Park River, North Dakota, and Austen Camille, a Canadian-American artist with Texas roots, recently founded the nonprofit Flyway Foundation. The pair, who met in November 2024, are dedicated "to fostering multigenerational and interspecies collaborations in the rural landscapes that they love deeply," their new website states.

Anderson, earlier this month, resigned as watershed coordinator for the Walsh Three Rivers Soil Conservation District in Park River, a position he'd held for nearly three years, to devote his time to the new venture. Before that, he was a professor of American literature at a university in Connecticut.

In his new role, Anderson says he plans to split his time between North Dakota and his house in Connecticut, which will be "kind of a home base for a while."

Anderson, who launched his "Common Ground: A Prairie Podcast" in early 2024, describes himself as a writer, scholar and land steward. The focus of the Flyway Foundation is to "cultivate the culture side of agriculture," Anderson says, taking what he and Camille do best as artists and writers who are committed to rural landscapes, and expand the effort to a flyway-scale level.

"As anyone working in conservation can tell you, the thing we're lacking the most is people to do the work," Anderson said. "There's so much land to cover, there's so much work to do and we just simply don't have enough people involved in doing the work. I kind of see this as, in some ways, a model that recruits people using the arts and creativity in really engaged, community-based ways to get people excited about the work of conservation."

At least part of the inspiration for the new nonprofit comes from a project on which Camille and Anderson collaborated in early September. Known as "Thinking Like a Prairie" and funded by a grant from the North Dakota Natural Resources Trust to the Walsh County Three Rivers SCD, the project brought students from the North Valley Career and Technology Center in Grafton to a restored grassland in Walsh County.

The program was modeled after Aldo Leopold's book, "Think Like a Mountain."

"We're thinking about, 'What does it take to actually start valuing the prairie ecosystem as kind of our local ecosystem in the Great Plains?' " Anderson said.

As part of the project, Camille taught students how to turn prairie plants into paper, turn soils into paint and make plates, "which are still in process," out of clay, Anderson says - all from materials they collected on the prairie.

Sometime next April, the plates will be used for a Prairie Potluck Dinner, to be held at the North Valley Career and Technological Center's Performing Arts Center in Grafton. The event will include speakers from The Nature Conservancy, Audubon Great Plains and the North Dakota Livestock Association, Anderson says.

"They're going to come and give talks about the importance of collaborative local grasslands management, and they're going to talk from their unique perspectives," he said.

The menu will include locally sourced bison burgers and salad with lettuce that the students grow in the school's greenhouse.

Just as students witnessed the fall migration during the September "Think Like a Prairie" event, they'll experience the spring migration during the Prairie Potluck, Anderson says.

"We're helping students to be able to think seasonally," he said. "We'll invite members of the public to get that multi-generational perspective, and it's really all in service of raising awareness, raising care and raising the future generation of conservation-minded folks right in that (Central Flyway)."

The Flyway Foundation also is applying for grants to do projects in other states, Anderson says.

"The long-term vision is to try to bring artists into communities to help focus on conservation," he said. "Our belief is that artists can do this important work that we often overlook, of changing the way we see and value our local ecosystem. And we can do that in a collaborative way with the folks that live in those communities, that know the land, know the economy, know the cultural history really well.

"It's kind of taking inspiration from migratory birds, bringing outsiders who are artists into local communities, and then finding ways to make art that is responsive to that local place, and also draws collaboration from the local community."