Mark Ritchie, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

Mark Ritchie is president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, based in Minneapolis, Minn., which works to keep family farmers on the land. He also serves as national co-chair of Sustainable America and director of the International Forum on Food and Agriculture, and is on the boards of Mothers and Others, Libraries for the Future, Organic Growers and Buyers Association, and the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture.

Today I am on the second day of a trip to the far southern end of the state of Illinois to look at innovative forestry and agroforestry projects in and around the Shawnee National Forest. It took nearly half a day to get here, but it was worth it.

The Shawnee National Forest, like many in the Eastern United States, was created during the Great Depression out of abandoned or distressed farmland that was bought at inexpensive prices and then allowed to return to forests or wetlands. It encompasses about 280,000 acres, roughly one-third of the forestland that stretches across southern Illinois from Missouri to Indiana, just above Kentucky. This is rough, wild country with incredible biodiversity, beauty, and, to someone from Minnesota, very enviable stands of hardwoods. The colors, I might add, are brilliant.

We arrived around noon yesterday and headed out to tour an important demonstration project being conducted by the U.S. Forest Service in the river bottoms along the Mississippi. Land that had been planted mostly in soybeans, when it wasn't flooded, has been bought and is being planted in oaks, ash, cypress, and some wetland grasses. The Forest Service has acquired nearly 6,000 acres of river bottoms and is converting the land away from flood-damage-prone soybeans to flood-tolerant forests, swamps, marshes, and prairies. It is a fantastic project that deserves a great deal of attention and positive rewards. All afternoon long I kept seeing turkey vultures soaring overhead, while the white pelicans and egrets gathered their food in the many small bodies of water that have been created as part of this project.

Tonight I am sleeping at the Giant City State Park outside Carbondale, Ill. There is a beautifully graceful water tower here that has a winding staircase which you can climb to get a breathtaking view of the entire valley overlooking the Mississippi -- one of America's most undervalued treasures.

Today we will be meeting with two or three other biological diversity and sustainable forestry groups in the southern Illinois and Missouri regions and then I will head back to Minneapolis. Unfortunately, I have to be back for tomorrow because I scheduled in a lot of meetings. If I could stay in this region just one day longer, I would head out west of St. Louis to visit the gigantic Native American Indian mounds and pyramids.

The rest of the week will be jammed with meetings about the upcoming World Trade Organization ministerial conference coming to Seattle the last couple days of November this year. IATP and lots of other groups are getting geared up for major protests, seminars, and other events in Seattle during this time. I will talk more about this later in the week, but if readers would like to know more in the meantime, they can go to the IATP website or the sites of the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development and WTO Watch. For the latest info on events planned for Seattle, check out the ICTSD calendar.