He was a giant of conservation. His deep voice and the twinkle in his eye conveyed his intellect and his passion for conservation whenever he spoke. His generosity of spirit filled the log home he had built with his wife Pat. You were among the fortunate if you could sit in their modest living room, with Pat serving nuts and lemonade, as Paul waxed eloquent on the latest reading he had done or the opinion piece he was working on for the newspapers.

As national Chief of the Natural Resources Conservation Service under Bill Clinton, he built a new landscape across America. He set a new tone for farmers and landowners to work with the government to rebuild their soil by just giving it a rest for a while. He always said “All farms need wildness” and at least some farmers stopped apologizing for the “weeds” they let grow in fallow fields.

I only knew him in his later years, long after he served as a legislator representing Decorah in Des Moines, long after he served as head of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. I only knew him later, when he often groused about his injuries and how they were slowing him down in his 70s. He had broken his neck in a tractor fall, but that wasn’t what stayed with him – it was his knee that eventually put him in a wheelchair and wore down his spirit.

I knew him when he helped pull together more than a dozen landowners to meet at the Pizza Ranch because it had a quiet meeting room, even if it was the first time they’d ever stepped foot in the place. When he would spend an hour on the phone with me while I sat in my car on Main Street West Branch telling me how threatened other land trusts were by SILT, and about how much Iowa needed us all to succeed. When he would tell me how hard he worked for two years to have another land trust allow farming on his land under their easement, and how just as he was signing it SILT showed up among Iowans’ option for conservation. When he taught me what a victory the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture was – not greenwashing by ISU as I had feared – and how he and Ralph Rosenberg and Dave Osterberg fought so hard to create it. (He never mentioned Jean Lloyd Jones, but she was over in the Senate carrying the same water for such projects.) And I suspect it was some of the last footsteps he took when he drove to Des Moines and personally delivered his comments about saving the center to Gov. Branstad the day we packed the hearing rooms to save it.

He and Pat made it to Des Moines for our annual dinner to honor Lyle and Sue’s farm donation, but he couldn’t rise from the table. He made it to our SILTFest in Decorah so we could record him saying that “Soil is made of clays, sands and silt. SILT is what holds it all together,” but by then he was permanently in a wheelchair.

He loved SILT’s vision as he loved all things meant to protect our land and support young conservation-minded farmers. He showed up. He gave what he had to an upstart like me who couldn’t truly know the battles he had waged. He made his mark on me and this organization and I’ll forever be grateful.

I will never forget him. I hope you never will either.

Suzan

PS Want to know more about what he stood for? Read this wonderful piece by Paul, published by Laura Belin in Sept. 2020.