Already praised by writers such as Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert, “Sea of Grass” is about the “ecological marvel” of the North American prairie.
Former Star Tribune journalists Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty’s book, subtitled “The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie” is a vivid and hopeful portrait of land that has seen many uses and that may still hold answers for the survival of humanity. The following is an excerpt from early in the book:
“In the bars and cafés around Cottonwood Falls, Kansas, regulars tell the story of a settler family that arrived in Chase County about 1860, their wagon loaded with the household goods and farm implements required to start a new life on the prairie. They encountered a member of the Kansa tribe, according to the story, and asked where they might find a good place to farm. He gave them a warning: Their steel plow would be useless here. Puzzled but undaunted, they claimed a homestead and hitched horse to plow, only to discover that he had been right. In this part of east-central Kansas, the hard limestone bedrock lies so close to the surface that a plow can’t carve a furrow without striking rock. Subsequent settlers got the message and chose to settle farther west. So by a quirk of geology, the Flint Hills region survived as a rare island of grass in a vast sea of corn and wheat. Today it covers some 4 million acres in eastern Kansas and northern Oklahoma and includes the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, the nation’s largest remaining patch of native tallgrass prairie. It may be the best place in the country to see the ancient landscape that shaped life here for centuries before Europeans arrived.
“Standing on a rise at the center of the preserve you can see for miles and imagine the sea of grass early European explorers described centuries ago. The gently rounded hills roll like ocean swells — nothing but amber grass and prairie flowers to the edge of the sky. To the west, a lone bison grazes in a creek draw. To the northeast, a red-tailed hawk soars on the breeze, gracefully circling in its hunt for prey. The silence is immense until a breeze comes over a nearby rise, playing the grass like an instrument. This is what the prairie must have looked like 200 years ago, when Lewis and Clark explored the West for President Thomas Jefferson. And 500 years ago, when the Pawnee, Osage, Wichita and Kansa people hunted buffalo and learned to turn the stone into weapons. Or even 12,000 years ago, when this landscape emerged fresh to the sky after centuries under the combined forces of ice and geology.
“Between 60 and 80 million years ago, the prairie had not yet made its appearance. A wide sea lay across the middle of what is now North America. As the planet warmed, the waters receded, leaving a moist plain covered by hardwood trees. Then, about 65 million years ago, a massive shift in the Earth’s tectonic plates caused a geological event known as the Laramide orogeny, which shoved the western half of the continent toward the eastern half, lifting a giant crust of rock that would become the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada. By erecting a high barrier between the Pacific Ocean and the center of the continent, the mountains cast a ‘rain shadow’ over the land to their east and gave the region its defining dry climate. When clouds roll into the West Coast from the Pacific, they collide with the wall of mountains and dump most of their moisture on the western front in the form of rain or snow. As a result, the drier eastern side of the Rockies receives just 10 to 15 inches of precipitation annually, one-half or one-third of what the rest of the continent typically receives. The central hardwood forests dwindled, eventually leaving a dry open plain.”
Sea of Grass
By: Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty.
Publisher: Random House, 400 pages.
