Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie by Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty; Random House, 400 pp., $32
To the east and west, they call it “flyover country,” a place where there is supposedly nothing worth knowing or seeing—a flat, boring land covered by grass or wheat and corn, stretching from the Rockies almost to the Mississippi River. Although it provides much of their supply of food and energy, many Americans and Canadians prefer to ignore it. Some, however, want more out of that interior country than electricity or protein. They want myth and romance. Sea of Grass offers plenty of those desirables, but does it offer a plausible future?
Coauthors Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty, both reporters at The Minnesota Star Tribune, aim at a grand new overview of the North American grasslands and their history over the past 200 years. The region has many names, but the authors prefer “prairie,” the term used by early French explorers who compared the continent’s interior to domesticated meadows in Europe. There was no such artificial meadowland when Europeans arrived; the region was overwhelmingly a natural grassland, with no domesticated livestock and only a scattering of agricultural patches. But by 1900, those grasslands, covering as much as 40 percent of the United States, had become intensely agricultural—plowed up for grain production or stocked with sheep and cattle, a cropland or pastureland on a grand scale. Sea of Grass provides an engaging account of this history, and then it asks, What do we do now?
The story is familiar, not only because it has been told often but also because it is biblical in origin. We are a sinning, fallen people who need a savior to restore the beautiful meadows and make us godly again. Hage and Marcotty suggest a revived conservation movement, as bold as the first one led by Theodore Roosevelt. This time, though, instead of protecting the watersheds of the Mountain West, the new conservation will bring back the old prairies and their wildlife. How such a large and now private expanse could be redeemed, however, is not clear. Redemption sounds hopeful, but it faces obstacles natural, political, and cultural.
How the perception of agriculture has changed! After 1814, when Lewis and Clark’s official report on their explorations across the West was published, every generation wrote about the grasslands, although usually in celebration of the coming of the farmer. This book’s title echoes one from a Conrad Richter novel published in the Dust Bowl year of 1936. Richter wrote about grasslands in New Mexico, far to the southwest, but he was an unabashed agrarian mythmaker. So was the great film director Elia Kazan, who turned the Richter novel into a movie about war between good homesteaders and evil cattle kings over who should own the land. Since then, the most appealing grassland stories have shifted toward the Dakotas and Montana—witness Dances with Wolves. Our view of the farmer has changed, as has that of the wildness in nature, which we now value and celebrate.
Hage and Marcotty hail from the Twin Cities, an urban society that resulted from the agricultural invasion, as did Chicago, Des Moines, St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver, and Dallas–Fort Worth. We learn about the coming of the farmer—of drainage districts and the Corn Belt, the inventions of John Deere, and the heavy use of commercial fertilizers that are now washing into the Gulf of Mexico, creating a dead zone. Farmers have become the enemy, for it was they who destroyed 99 percent of the tall-grass prairie and about half of the short-grass plains. But the primary ruins the authors identify are the slaughter of the bison and the end of Native American hegemony. Insects can still be found in profusion, suggesting that the prairies are not wholly depauperate, though their return to full glory would require restoring a much greater diversity of wild species and rebuilding lost ecosystems.
Hage and Marcotty do not seek a wild nature populated by extinct Pleistocene species like mammoths, camels, saber-toothed cats, or giant ground sloths. No, they specifically want the buffalo and Native people back—that more recent Eden seen by Lewis and Clark a mere two centuries ago. Yet it’s unclear how we might achieve that in a time of anthropogenic global warming, which may end all farming in the region while preventing the restoration of wildlife from any era. Certainly, the federal government or private entrepreneurs will not find it easy, in a hotter, drier future, to bring back any of the region’s many pasts.
There is, of course, an alternative that might be realistic, though it is almost un-American in spirit. It is a policy of doing nothing at all, of letting natural selection decide, as it has decided in the past. It means practicing benign neglect toward farmers and foragers alike. But who among us is ready to tolerate that? Will Americans or Canadians let nature take its course, or will they try to bring back a time and place that we have lost?
We can be sure that the sea of grass, like the earth of which it is a part, will continue to change, whether by human hands or natural forces. At some point, the prairie may return all on its own, after global warming has come and gone. Perhaps we cannot stop natural selection; perhaps we may only be able to protect some human way of life or invent a new one for ourselves. Maybe in the end, it is an attitude of adaptive humility we should be seeking in the grasslands of North America—a future that does not involve redemption. If bringing back a lost Eden looks impossible, might we then settle merely for a sustainable homeland for ourselves, whoever we are, and for other living creatures, some of them bound to be altogether new?
