With passion, land steward educates next generation

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When Destiny Magee was in community college, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to for a living.

So when she transferred to the University of Northern Iowa and had to pick a major, she chose biology because she “always loved animals.” But when she took a seminar course at UNI focusing on tall grass prairie in Iowa, her passion for conservation and restoration work came front and center.

From there, she started learning about the history of Iowa’s environmental landscapes and how they currently are being affected.

“Growing up, I never saw Iowa as a wild place or as a place with natural areas,” said Magee, 35. “But taking that class and actually learning about what Iowa's natural landscapes were, and what still is around, really caught my attention.”

After earning her bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in ecology from UNI, Magee worked for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources as a maintenance worker and for the nonprofit Bur Oak Land Trust as an AmeriCorps worker in Iowa City, before joining the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation.

The foundation is a statewide conservation nonprofit that has worked with private landowners and public agencies to protect and restore Iowa’s land, water and wildlife since 1979. Since its inception, the foundation has protected more than 200,000 acres of Iowa’s natural resources.

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Magee now works as the foundation’s Eastern Iowa stewardship assistant, a role she has been in since January 2023. Magee said her love for Iowa’s dwindling prairies and her drive to conserve them helped lead her to the job.

“There are still pockets of remnant prairie that were never touched, never plowed or never degraded in any way. And there's still ways, not only to protect those areas, but also to start restoring some of those prairies,” Magee said. “I think Iowa really needs that, and for people to know that there's prairie here.”

Only about 0.1 percent of prairie land — once plentiful in Iowa with about 23 million acres statewide in the 1850s — remains in the state.

Bill Kohler is the Eastern Iowa Land Stewardship director with the foundation and works closely with Magee. Kohler said that within the Land Stewardship department, he and Magee work to protect different types of habitats on properties the foundation owns. The foundation currently owns and stewards about 10,000 acres.

This typically entails removing invasive or non-native species like honeysuckle, autumn olive or wild parsnips, and using prescribed burns to help boost biodiversity in prairies and oak savannas.

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Before taking environment courses in college, Magee did not know there were any prairie land left in Iowa. But now with the Heritage Foundation, she is working to educate others on Iowa’s prairie history.

One way Magee educates Iowans is by working closely with the foundation’s summer interns and volunteers.

“Destiny has spent the last two years with INHF teaching young professionals in Iowa and trying to get people involved in natural resource management,” Kohler said. “I think that teaching an intern the skills that they may need to further their career is something that Destiny takes seriously, and it shows in how highly our interns speak of their time working with her and our organization during the summer.”

He added that Magee specifically enjoys showing the foundation’s interns new plant species that they never knew existed.

Kohler said that when he was brought in as the Eastern Iowa Land Stewardship director in 2021, he was doing a lot of the prairie restoration and invasive removal work himself, with partner agencies or other foundation staff. But Magee bolstered the team’s work when she joined the foundation in 2023.

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“By bringing Destiny aboard locally with INHF it has drastically enhanced our capabilities to do the work we feel is so important in Iowa,” Kohler said. “Destiny brings a wealth of knowledge and skill to our program and has a dedication that every natural resource employee needs. It’s by no means and easy job, but Destiny always has a positive attitude and passion for what she does, which makes the work much easier.”

But staying in Iowa as an adult wasn’t initially Magee’s plan. Magee — a Waterloo native — said one of the main draws of staying in Iowa was the prairies themselves.

Kohler said he sees that Magee understands the importance of what the foundation does by the passion she puts into the job.

“Native landscapes in Iowa have been dramatically changed from what they once were, and I think both Destiny and I understand that we can help preserve some of the things that make Iowa what it was through our work at INHF.”

Olivia Cohen covers energy and environment for The Gazette and is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues.

Comments: olivia.cohen@thegazette.com