Imagine driving down a country road in Southwest Louisiana. It’s flat as far as you can see, with occasional brick houses and mobile homes facing the road, and expansive tracts of sugarcane fields, crawfish and rice ponds, or fallow fields making up the rest. There are almost certainly some cattle grazing in pastures along your route. You may spot some homesteads with sheep or goats or horses and the requisite watch donkey, now that dogs aren’t allowed to run loose as much these days.

Many of these homesteads will have a vegetable garden out back. Some will also host a family business: a small engine repair, a seafood processor, a catering facility. The only trees are those along fence lines and those planted at homesteads for shade or aesthetics. Maybe it just rained, so the deeper ditches at the road are filling from the shallow canals that landowners in these parts maintain to prevent flooding, especially if their house is on a slab.

The nearby town has a couple of churches (at least one is Catholic), a gas station, school and library, maybe a McDonald’s, and a locally owned restaurant that serves plate lunches if you’re lucky. Not far away is a Dollar General. Power lines are overhead, and posts mark underground gas pipelines at regular intervals. Depending on the time of day, commuters, school buses, tractors, and mail carriers are on the road too. If it’s summer (March to October around here), your windows are probably closed and the A/C is on because it’s muggy and buggy. But if you roll down the windows, you probably hear road noise from the interstate ten miles away, maybe farm equipment at work, or an occasional helicopter, crop duster or commercial airplane overhead.

This is what it’s like driving down Placide Road in Maurice in northern Vermilion Parish in Louisiana. But it could also describe roads that connect the hundreds of communities in Acadiana, the French parishes in Southwest Louisiana that collectively form the historic coastal grassland that many call the Cajun Prairie.  This is the human landscape that sprang from and forever changed the prairie. It was our home, and it still is.

This is a story about a 32-acre piece of land my siblings and I inherited on Placide Road. To my knowledge, I’m the first to name it, and I’m calling it the Baudoin Prairie. It’s been at least a century since it was prairie, and I’d like to see it become one again. This land is what my father, Andrew “Ray” Baudoin, inherited from his father, Edgar, and he has now passed it down to me and my siblings, Gina and Adrian. 

Our 32 acres is part of a larger 80-acre parcel where my great grandparents Gerard and Ursule were the first Baudoins to make their home and where they raised their six children. After Pop-pop died in 1984 and Grandma (Electa Mallet Baudoin) died in 1998, my father and his siblings divided this 80 acres and the rest of the land.  In a random drawing with his siblings to divide the estate, my father inherited these 32 acres in 1999. He maintained it for a few years with annual bushhogging before letting our cousin Gerard raise crawfish on it. When Gerard stopped farming it, Daddy leased it to a sugarcane farmer. Daddy donated this land to us in 2018 in the start of that lease. By the time the lease ended in 2023, I had convinced my siblings to let me try to restore it to prairie.

This is also a story about where this parcel of land fits in the historic 2.5 million-acre coastal prairie where the Cajuns and others, most of them French speaking, settled, farmed, and developed homesteads. These communities eventually grew into towns and cities that dot the system of prairies across southwest Louisiana many call the Cajun Prairie. It’s where our famous food and music arose. Our natural heritage shaped our cultural heritage. The biology of the prairie has shaped the biography of the people who live here. The prairie is part of OurBio.

I’m neither a restorationist nor a writer, but here I am attempting to tell a story about our family journey toward restoring prairie function on our family land. I’m taking on both because they seem important and doable and challenges worthy of my efforts and natural interests. They are grand learning opportunities. If I fail, nothing is lost but my time, and I still will have gained deeper understanding of the land that I’ve been given and have a responsibility to steward. 

I’ve spent my career as a teacher, which required telling stories in ways college freshmen would care about. I’m sure that’s how I became a lifelong learner. And I learn (and write) best if I feel a responsibility to communicate it to others effectively. As I approached retirement and had settled into our homestead in St. Landry Parish, I took on more roles as a conservation volunteer and advocate. My advocacy comes from a place of optimism about the power of regular people to do good for our land and all its inhabitants. I generally don’t pursue projects like this out of some sense of fatalism. Yes, I’m worried about the fragile state of our environment, especially habitat loss. But just telling others to conserve habitat is ineffective. One has to first understand the land before they can take sustainable and responsible action. That’s why the first step in developing advocacy needs teachers.

Education research confirms what educators know: the impact of what we do in our classrooms is most lasting if we can get our students see the world (not just the worksheet) differently. That’s one goal of this writing project: to help you see your land differently. The impact of one’s teaching is even greater if one’s students develop agency, a sense of their own ability, to do what they can in the world they live in to make it a better place. So that is my hope with this writing project, that you who read this might be inspired to bring nature home to whatever land you steward. By sharing our journey about how I’ve gone about restoring the Baudoin Prairie, I hope that it will lower barriers, real and perceived, that exist for other landowners also new to habitat conservation.

I also am aware that a novice like me has to learn a lot about the science of restoration and how to navigate state and federal farm and other conservation programs. I grew up in the suburbs, not on a farm. My biology expertise is more at the biochemical and cellular level, not ecological. So I am acutely aware of my naivete about agriculture, land conservation and even the prairie ecosystem.  But I’m enough of a scientist to be able to interpret what I need to help my family make decisions about the Baudoin Prairie’s future. And I’ve got enough grit to ask questions and not give up too easily. It is through all this decision-making that I am learning. Hopefully I can help others know that they have options for what to do with their land. It doesn’t have to be sold to a developer for more subdivisions, leased for marginally profitable agriculture, nor neglected to become a mess of invasives for someone else to deal with.

This Land is Your Land. This Land is My Land. From the Texas state line to the Atchafalaya Basin. And it can do so much good.