‘Like a cancer’: Iowa scientists feel grief amid Iowa’s changing climate landscape

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On summer and fall nights, Connie Mutel likes to sleep on a cushioned patio sofa on her screened-in porch.



She listens to the hooting of owls, the crickets’ chirps, and the soft sound of leaves brushing together in her wooded backyard.


But over time, much of the noise stopped.




She no longer hears the hooting of young owls — only the adults. She doesn’t hear the chirping of redhead birds in the mornings, signaling to their parents that they’re hungry. She doesn’t see as many eggs in her backyard hatch.


When the silence started to come this past summer, it was hard for Mutel not to notice.


“It just made me so sad,” Mutel said.


Mutel, who authored the Iowa conservation books “Sugar Creek Chronicle” and “Tending Iowa’s Land,” has been studying conservation and environmental issues for most of her life.





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The retired University of Iowa hydroscience and engineering historian and senior science writer has been studying ecology and conservation since the late 1960s.


Nature has been ever-present in Mutel’s life. From her youth in Wisconsin, to living in an “idyllic” cabin in the Colorado mountains, to building a home in Solon with her husband in the 1970s, nature has always been in the front of her consciousness.


Mutel didn’t keep her love for the natural world to herself. When her children were young, she sat with them on the back deck of their home and watched insects and nighttime birds fly around and hoot. The Mutels would congregate at one of the lights outside their home and watch insects be reeled in and listen to them buzz. Mutel watched her three sons try to catch nighttime moths in their hands.


That’s why, when she heard the silence in her backyard and across her land, it filled her with sadness.


“Not hearing some of these birds at night or knowing that they didn’t make it fills me with so much grief,” she said.


Mutel is just one longtime researcher and conservationist facing environmental grief head-on as Iowa’s environmental landscape continues to shift.


Only 0.1 percent of prairie land — once plentiful in Iowa — remains in the state. The Iowa Department of Natural Resources said grassland birds, like the Eastern Meadowlark or the Henslow’s sparrow, have declined by 53 percent since 1970. Statewide, forested land decreased by about 250,000 acres between 2012 and 2023.

‘Like a cancer’​

Dennis Schlicht spent 55 years and countless hours studying the skipper butterfly, traveling throughout Iowa and into Minnesota to document its habits, population and movement patterns.


About 10 years ago, he stopped. With the butterfly species in decline, it became too painful to keep going.


“It’s just in your face,” said Schlicht, 76. “We thought we were helping the process by doing surveys, but it turns out we were just overseeing the funeral.”


By 2000, Schlicht came to believe the species’ decline was irreversible. But he’d started seeing decline years before that.


According to the Xerces Society, a nonprofit environmental organization, the Dakota skipper is “imperiled” across its habitat. It is on Iowa’s endangered species list, and has not been recorded in the state since 1992.


In general, there are about 115 butterfly species in Iowa and about 47 of them are skippers, Schlicht said. The skippers are disappearing faster.


Schlicht said the Dakota skipper — one of the species he studied the most — “is not a typical butterfly.” It’s smaller — the wingspan is two to three centimeters — and has rounded wings, more hair on its body, and almost appears mothlike.


The species has historically lived in tall-grass prairies. So, when the prairies started to disappear, so did the skipper.


Schlicht authored “The Butterflies of Iowa,” a manual for identifying butterfly species in Iowa and the Plains states.


But after publishing the book in 2007 and no longer being able to document the species in its native habitat, Schlicht said he “gave up.”


“It's just so depressing to go there and see nothing, you know?” Schlicht said. “Losing these native species is kind of like a cancer. How long do we wait before we do something?”

‘A grief that never ends’​

Mutel has experienced other formers of grief — like losing both of her parents. But the loss she feels over Iowa’s habitat and landscape changes, and the effects of climate change overall, is different.


“It’s because it’s ongoing,” Mutel said.


When she was writing “Sugar Creek Chronicle,” which published in 2016, Mutel weaved into the story her two bouts with breast cancer as a metaphor for climate change, showing that “they’re both invisible substances that can kill.”


Mutel, who has lived in her Solon home for more than 50 years with her husband, Robert, said she knows the woods surrounding her home. She knows where Eastern Phoebe birds nest and has watched the number of hatchlings dwindle. Every season brings a reminder of her “environmental grief.”


“It's a grief that never ends,” she said. “I think it's like picking off a scab. The scab heals. It's getting better. You pick it off, and the scab starts over again.”

‘Like a cancer’: Iowa scientists feel grief amid Iowa’s changing climate landscape

Many researchers who’ve spent their careers studying the natural world experience environmental grief from witnessing the changes and disappearances of some species. They encourage people to reconnect with nature, and say climate change is a challenge that an be turned into an opportunity.

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Pauline Drobney, a retired prairie biologist who spent 30 years working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said conservation and environmental work can’t be done without also feeling grief over what has been lost.


Drobney, 71, said she focused on ecological restoration work before it was “really a thing.”


Her passion for the natural world was lit when she was very young. Growing up in Pocahontas, Drobney said money was tight in her home, but she and her five siblings would hunt, gather weeds and make dried plant arrangements.


This passion was fully ignited when she was 16 years old and her grandfather asked her to drive them to the 160-acre Kalsow prairie in Manson, one of the last remnant prairies in the state.


Standing on a gravel road, looking out into the prairie, was the first “awareness” she had about the impact of natural land in Iowa.


With her grandfather’s “old age and wisdom” and Drobney’s “youth and naivete, it was a distilling moment,” she said. “It was really a special moment as we looked out over the ancient prairie before us with the cornfield behind us. It was really powerful. It was the seed that he planted in me and eventually I came to understand that you don't really understand prairies by standing on the edge. You have to get into it and let it get into you.”


Years later, Drobney became the first biologist at the Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge in Jasper County. Founded in the 1990s, the refuge works to protect, restore, reconstruct and manage native ecosystems of tall-grass prairie, oak savannas and more.


Drobney cofounded and was the first president of the Iowa Prairie Network, an organization dedicated to learning, teaching and protecting Iowa's prairie heritage through prairie conservation.


The network was formed in 1990 by Iowans who were concerned that Iowa’s prairie heritage was disappearing.


“This environmental grief is not new for me and for so many other people,” Drobney said.

Conservation at ‘the core’​

Being immersed in nature at a young age and throughout the bulk of her life, Drobney said conservation is always in the front of her mind.


One aspect of the problem, Drobney said, is that many people don’t feel similarly.


“Very frankly, I think the problem is that we do not live with a conservation ethic at our core in our society,” Drobney said. “It’s almost like a business we live in.”


She said there are attempts to “do well by the land,” both by local organizations and by organizations like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Natural Resources, but having appropriate funding to truly “do well” by the land is hard to come by.


Drobney said at its peak, the Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge staffed about 15 to 17 people, ranging from outreach and maintenance staff to biologists.


Now, she said, there are three people left on staff and no in-house biologist.


“The support is just not there,” she said. “The people who work on these projects have a big heart, but the support is just not there and that’s really tough.”

Channeling grief into action​

Moving forward, Drobney said people have “to give what they’ve got” to conservation or environmental protection efforts.


“If we had this culture of conservation at our core — that I think is so critical — we would have the prairies and savannas at the heart of our decisions. We would have clean water and soil stabilization at the core of our work. ... But we don’t have that.”


Mutel frequently gives talks about conservation and climate change throughout Iowa. She said she’s been incorporating the idea of “how to have hope” into every presentation she gives.


“I’ve been taking the idea that you go from grief to hope to action, and the necessity of making that transition,” Mutel said. “This topic of grief comes up just when you’re talking to people and it's so easy to get so frightened. It is scary and depressing for anybody.”


To help ease the grief, inspire hope and jump into action, Mutel said people should actively work to reconnect with nature.


“We live in a different world now. We don’t want to admit it and we don’t recognize it because we don’t want it, but we need to make this challenge an opportunity,” Mutel said. “Celebrate the small achievements and the small things.”