'Sea of Grass' chronicles the disappearance of the North American prairie
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Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. The American prairie is disappearing at a pretty rapid rate. There's a couple different causes here, but the main one is agriculture.

But what do we lose when we lose the prairie? That's what writers David Hagee and Josephine Marcotti get into in their new book, Sea of Grass, The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie. They spoke about their work to here and now's Chris Bentley, where else? In a prairie outside of Chicago. That's coming up.

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I'm so glad that you guys came down here and met me in Mid-Awen National Tallgrass Prairie, because I feel like this place kind of speaks to the same things that your book is about. The prairie, but also what happened to the prairie when European settlers got here. Basically got destroyed. So this place was farmland. It was also a munitions plant during World War II. Now it's been restored partially to a beautiful prairie again, so...

What do you think about this place, actually, just coming here? What are your first reactions? Well, we love a prairie. We'll drive long distances to see the prairie. And the first thing that struck me when we climbed out of the car was just to hear this chorus of songbirds. I thought, ah, we're home. It's so beautiful. The warblers and the finches and the red-winged blackbirds. What always surprises me is how if you take a place and bring it back to wilderness or a natural area, all the animals will come back pretty quick. Yeah.

They always find it. Take us back to when people would have first come to a place like this. What would they have seen? Because I know at the time from your book, people complained about the soil being like gumbo and it was impossible to farm, which is wild to think of now. Well, it was to many of the earlier European settlers, it was a terrifying place. They were used to

forests and oceans and they came from countries that had been settled years ago and that were very manicured and carefully tended. So when they got to the prairie, many of them were terrified by the openness and by the wildness of it. One of the things that the wagon trains would do, that the first people through would do, is they would tie a ribbon or a cloth around what they called a compass plant.

because the leaves of the plant would align themselves according to the direction, north, south, east, and west. And they could use that as a compass themselves. And the compass plant can grow like seven feet tall, right? Right, so they could see that flag way above the rest of the grass. I think the compass plant also has roots that go up to 15 feet underground, which is one of the amazing things about the prairie and prairie plants. Just talk about the ecosystem and how amazing it is. It might not look like much to people who don't know what they're looking at, but...

What's so special about the prairie? Well, one reason that grasses are so fascinating is that they adapted to this extremely hostile environment. Farther west from here, very little rainfall, hot sun, horrible winters. Most of their life, most of their growth is underground.

So they can survive a wildfire that sweeps across the prairie. They can survive temperatures 30 degrees below zero. It's just exquisitely adapted to this hostile environment where most other plants can't survive. Prairies are designed to withstand fire, and that is one of the ways that they keep the forest back. The fire is burned down the trees, and then the grass moves in behind it.

But we've lost that fire, so that's one of the ways we're losing grasslands is because we're letting trees and bushes encroach. Right, and the loss of these grasslands is kind of the story of the prairie. I mean, we're here in Illinois, the prairie state, where we have basically 0% of the prairie left. I think it's 99% cities and farms, basically, and almost entirely corn and soybean farms at that. So what happened? Why did we...

And how did we change this vast landscape so completely in the matter of like 100 years or so? One of the choices we made in the book was trying to decide which part of that agricultural history to focus on. And we chose to focus three chapters on some of the greatest inventions of agriculture. One was the steel plow.

which was the only way that they could break through the sod on prairie. John Deere's plow, among others. Right. The other one was fertilizer. The invention of fertilizer has almost doubled the population of Earth. And the third one was tile drainage. That was just sheer brute strength and machinery to dig trenches and to lay tile and to dredge rivers to get the water off the land so they could turn it into cropland.

We forget, but the big swatches of the Great Plains were swamps in the 18th century. Big swamps in Iowa. The northern third of Iowa was pretty swampy. The Great Black Swamp is western Ohio today, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were so afraid of these swamps that they inspired these terrible names like Buzzard Swamp and Death Swamp. Really dark names. Apparently it didn't stop people from wanting to settle it, though. Yeah.

So we did all that, or people did all that in the Midwest and the Great Plains, and yet we're still living with the effects of it today. You quote the naturalist Wendell Berry in your book who wrote, we plowed up the prairie and never knew what we were doing because we didn't know what we were undoing. So how are we still living with the effects of everything you just described? Drainage, tiles, fertilizer, industrial agriculture?

One of the things that always amazes me is the idea that the transformation of the prairie from grassland to cropland could destroy an entirely different ecosystem, which is the Gulf of Mexico. I don't know how many millions of acres have been drained and have chemicals and fertilizer applied, and much of that runs off into the Mississippi, flows down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, where all those nutrients create the dead zone where nothing can live.

Closer to home, one result has been that we have thousands of miles of streams and river segments that are classified as impaired by the EPA. They're unsafe for swimming. They can't sustain aquatic life. And it's mostly because of agricultural chemicals. And I mean, in Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes, there are big sections of the state where kids can't swim in a lake.

So we're standing here in a tall grass prairie, but then there's this whole other world of the short grass prairie, which is like West, like the Dakotas and West, I guess. I didn't know this until I read your book, but today it sounds like the short grass prairie is actively being converted into row crops, sort of in the same way that

the Midwest converted its prairie, tallgrass prairie, to crops in the 19th century. What's going on? What's driving that change? You know, it's again, it's the same thing that drove the change back in the 1800s. It's technology. But again, it's driven by economics. I mean, it is much easier to make money with corn than it is to make money with cattle or by raising bison, if that's what you're doing.

And what's the impact? What's being lost? Because when I think of the West, grasslands, I think of buffalo. I think of ranches and wide open spaces, right? Well, for sure you're losing wildlife. Bison, wolves, monarch butterflies.

But those regions of the short grass prairie, the Dakotas for example, are now seeing all the same problems that we see farther east. The rivers are polluted, they have horrible dust storms. Two summers ago there were dust storms in South Dakota that reminded people of the Dust Bowl. People had to stop their cars, the dust was so thick they couldn't see where they were going. So the same sins of the parents are being visited on the children, so to speak.

So where does that leave us? How do restored prairies like the one we're in now fit into this? Or what do we do? Because we're not going to be able to bring back 100% of the prairie or anything close, right? Yeah, and I don't think anybody wants that. Anybody advocates that. We're not anti-farmer farmers.

But we would like to see incentives changed a little bit so that farmers have more choices and farmers who want to protect the land, want to protect the water, can operate on a level playing field with sort of big industrial scale agriculture. And there are a lot of studies which show that we can solve many of the major pollution problems. We could clean up the Mississippi. We could reduce the dead zone with rather modest changes. If we could take...

10% of the corn belt out of production or a little bit more put it in prairie strips, these grassy strips that protect the water. We would go a long way towards solving the pollution problems. You know, the farmers we have today are living in a system that they didn't create.

They very much have to survive and thrive on a commodity system and a federal policy system and with products that they have no control over. So we have a great deal of respect for them. And, you know, they understand their piece of the earth very well. And there are a lot of things that they could and would do. But they have to be able to do it financially safely and to avoid the risk that would shut them down.

I gotta ask you, what do you personally love about the prairie? I like the space. You can't think of prairie or be on a prairie without being in the sky. There was a description in one of the books we read where the shadows of the clouds would race across the grassland like clipper ships. And that's what appeals to me, is the wind and the space.

The sea of grass. Sea of grass. Yeah. Well, Josephine Mercati, Dave Hagee, thanks so much for talking to me. Thank you for bringing us out here. It's a lovely place. Thank you. This message comes from NPR sponsor, Viore, featuring the Core Short. Receive 20% off your first purchase on any U.S. orders over $75 and free returns at viore.com slash NPR. Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions.

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