Sarah Smarsh recounts how 96 percent of the tallgrass prairie that once blanketed the US is now gone—destroyed to allow farming and cultivation. Smarsh goes back to glacial retreat to outline the history of the prairie and its importance as a vast ecosystem, at one time an abundant home for plants and wildlife alike. She explains that actively cutting down eastern red cedar trees in a bid to return her property to its natural state is all about taking good care of the land.
Policy, as ever, reflects the biases of the powerful. In 1873, the Timber Culture Act gave homesteaders 160 more acres of free land if they planted trees on at least a quarter of the area. During the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, the Franklin Roosevelt administration created the Prairie States Forestry Project, which devoted $14 million to planting nearly twenty thousand miles of windbreaks to help stay the topsoil that destroyed prairie roots had previously anchored; the Department of Agriculture still subsidizes their planting.
Unchecked exaltation of trees is a lazy environmentalism that not only actively threatens grasslands by planting trees where they harm native habitat but also blinds us to the lack of policy efforts—surely no accident—to protect landscapes even more vulnerable than woodlands to agriculture and development. Though grasslands can be found within a number of national parks, they tend to be peripheral to other landscapes and attractions. The National Park Service does manage the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, in the heart of the Kansas Flint Hills, but the preserve is owned by The Nature Conservancy. Globally, according to that nonprofit, only 5 percent of remaining grasslands are protected.
There are, of course, no “good” or “bad” plants, and those that overtake grasslands will become native habitat over the course of millennia. But the cleverness of humans, and the scale at which we operate, makes us inordinately powerful co-creators with the earth. We owe some intention to the landscapes we shape and often destroy, even if indirectly. On this piece of land that my husband and I impact in the most direct ways, our intention is to ensure a welcoming home for native wildlife—threatened beings whose poignant struggle for habitat we witness daily, creatures of grass to whom we wish to be good neighbors.
