The American prairie was so vast, so alien, it shattered comprehension.
Newcomers to the seemingly endless grasslands that once spanned approximately a quarter of North America often hit a psychic wall, descending into fits of mania. Prairie madness, as the phenomenon came to be known, was recorded by the journalist E.V. Smalley in 1893 after a decade of observing life on the frontier: “An alarming amount of insanity occurs in the new Prairie States among farmers and their wives.”
America’s treeless, isolated expanse put early European settlers to the test. Drought, loneliness, and debt drove many to failure, forcing the homesteaders to retreat East.
But those who stayed unwittingly launched one of history’s largest terraforming projects, rewiring the land, the climate, and the future of the continent.
In Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie, longtime Minnesota journalists Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty trace this staggering transformation.“The Europeans who colonized North America in the nineteenth century transformed the continent’s hydrology as thoroughly as the glaciers,” they write. “But, remarkably, they did it in less than one hundred years instead of tens of thousands.”
In putting hundreds of millions of acres of prairie to the plow, settlers not only forcibly displaced Indigenous nations, but completely altered the region’s ancient carbon and nitrogen cycles. They also turned the region into an agricultural powerhouse. The deep black soil once prevalent in the Midwest — the result of thousands of years of animal and plant decomposition depositing untold carbon stores into the ground — became the foundation of the modern food system. But the undoing of the American prairie also dismantled one of the Earth’s most effective climate defenses.
Grasses, like all plant life, inhale planet-warming carbon dioxide. As a result, “earth’s soils now contain one-third of the planet’s terrestrial carbon — more than the total released by human activity since the start of the Industrial Revolution,” Hage and Marcotty write. A 2020 Nature study found that restoring just 15 percent of the world’s plowed grasslands could absorb nearly a third of the carbon dioxide humans added to the atmosphere since the 1800s.
Today, the tallgrass prairie, which covered most of Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and the far eastern edge of the plains states, clings to about 1 percent of its former range. Even the hardier shortgrass prairie of the American West has been reduced by more than half.
“This is the paradox of the prairie,” the authors write. “Feared by pioneers, shunned by tourists, dismissed today as a wasteland best viewed from thirty thousand feet, the North American prairie is nonetheless one of the richest ecosystems on Earth.”
Americans, then as now, have struggled to make sense of the prairie. Hage and Martcotty spoke to Grist about the near collapse of the American prairie, and what its return would mean in an era of a rapidly warming climate.
The prairie has been misunderstood at our own peril. Why is that and how do you make people care about grass?
Josephine Marcotty: When European settlers first arrived, they were terrified by the open spaces and by the crazy weather that they encountered on the prairie. Wide open grasslands were not something they had ever experienced in Europe, which had been much more controlled by humans for a longer period of time.
David Hage: The areas were so remote and a lot of these immigrants had come from sweet little villages in Norway or Sweden or Germany. Here, they landed, and they might not have a neighbor within 10 or 15 miles. People really suffered from terrible loneliness and even mental illness from the isolation.
JM: But by the time Americans realized that the prairie was something to preserve, the tallgrass prairie was almost all gone. It had been plowed and turned into farmland. So the tallgrass prairie is almost something that we’ve never experienced. We don’t know what it is.
DH: We can talk about wildlife, we can talk about water, l but the thing that knocked me out is climate change. The world’s grasslands are one of the planet’s greatest buffers against climate change. When we plow open the grasslands, as we’re doing now, a million acres a year out West, you’re releasing huge amounts of carbon, you’re making climate change worse, and you’re taking out all those acres of grass that could sequester carbon in the future. One researcher we talked to, Tyler Lark, at the University of Wisconsin, said that the recent pace of plowing in the western grasslands is the climate change equivalent of adding 11 million cars to the roads every year. So it’s a climate change disaster.
Early settlers didn’t just plow the prairie. They also forcibly displace Native peoples to do it. How do you see large-scale prairie restoration as a means of reparations?
DM: We write about the bison herds out West on Native American reservations. There are now 25 or 30 of these wonderful tribal bison herds. This operation to rescue Yellowstone bison and distribute them to Native peoples has launched these tribal bison herds all the way from Alaska down to Texas. And it’s a triple win: It saves this endangered, magnificent animal; it’s good for the grasslands, because where bison graze, grass flourishes; and it’s a wonderful way of preserving the threatened cultural heritage of the Plains tribes in South Dakota. There’s also a great outfit called the Buffalo Grasslands Coalition, which is a tribal operation to raise money and restore grasslands and native ecosystems on tribe-managed land.
JM: A lot of the tribes have both a sacred herd that they use for their cultural and the religious ceremonies, and they also have livestock herds that they use to turn into meat that they sell, not only to their tribal members, but to others. It’s having that economic independence that grants a stronger sense of sovereignty. You can’t do it without economics.
The majority of the prairie is gone. Given its value, why does its destruction continue? Is it policy or profit or something else?
JM: Because corn pays more than cattle or bison.
DH: We came across an amazing statistic, that of all the major landscapes in America, grasslands were the last one to get their own national park. It didn’t happen until 30 or 40 years ago, and one of the reasons was to protect that grass, they would be competing with farmers and people who wanted to earn a living on that land.
JM: The EPA just raised the ethanol fuel mandate. In other words, they’re creating an even greater market for corn. And it was ethanol that really drove corn prices up, and they’ve been up ever since we started mandating the use of ethanol in fuel. That’s just going to continue as long as we don’t subsidize other kinds of farmers that actually grow food for us. Otherwise, grassland will never be able to compete.
The book makes the case that federal subsidies for ethanol have been disastrous for grasslands. Is it possible to dismantle a system that is both ecologically catastrophic and economically entrenched?
DH: It is a huge source of revenue for farmers in the Upper Midwest. We ran into a lot of farmers who said, “I wouldn’t be able to sell my corn crop if it weren’t for ethanol,” or “I didn’t make any money until ethanol came along.” So it’s very hard for politicians campaigning in the Midwest to stand up against ethanol. But it would only take very modest changes to the federal farm bill: Just wind down the ethanol mandate a bit, add a little more money to these proven federal conservation programs which reward farmers for conservation practices on working land.
JM: The economics are a false economy. It’s all driven by federal policy and not markets.
DH: We met wonderful people in the course of reporting this book, generous, hard working people, but they’re trapped in a system that’s not of their own making. We have this federal set of subsidies that just pushes farmers in the direction of plowing more land, planting more corn, using more chemicals, and they don’t have a lot of choice if they want to save the family farm and stay in business.
The book has an alternative vision for agriculture — one that saves soil and may even provide a lifeline for the prairie. What does that look like and where is it happening?
JM: It’s going to be different wherever you farm. It’s a lot easier to grow cover crops in southern Iowa than it is in North Dakota, simply because of the difference in the weather. A big piece here would be for farmers to plant more diverse crops. Nature does not like simplicity. Nature likes complexity, and if we had a more complex farm system, it would be better for everyone.
DH: There’s really good research coming out of Iowa State University and the University of Minnesota, which shows that when you have a slightly more diverse crop rotation, you have less flooding, less erosion, healthier soil, less diesel fuel and less fossil fuel-based fertilizers.
