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Land As Big As the Sky The Sierra Club seeks a thriving American heartland spared from additional plowing and draining. Club activists are working to preserve the small amount of native prairie that remains, to institute farming practices that will not deplete this fertile land, and to organize the people of the region to ensure its bountiful future. On Our Agenda
The Land The varied grasses of the Great North American Prairie grow from central Canada to the Mexican border and from the Rockies to Indiana, covering more than a million square miles. Before the plow and the cow, the tallgrass prairie dominated the humid east and the shortgrass prairie the arid west, with the mixed-grass prairie in between. Within the ecoregion's boundaries are 16 national grasslands and five national parks, but no federally protected native tallgrass prairie. Population 33.5 million. Economy Although mining and oil-and-gas development lurk in the corners of the ecoregion, agriculture rules the Great Plains. Traditional rural life is on the wane, however, as mechanization and agribusiness consume family farms and the land itself succumbs to shortsighted agricultural practices. Well-Known Fact 60 years ago dust clouds blackened the midday ski above the mixed-grass prairie (during one storm the dirt blew to the decks of ships 300 miles off the Atlantic coast). This was the site of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, a result of years of excessive cultivation coupled with drought and overgrazing. Little-Known Fact The source of drinking water and irrigation for Plains residents from Nebraska to Texas, the Ogallala Aquifer is one of the world's largest--as well as one of the most rapidly dissipating. Every year farmers pump 6 million acre-feet of water from the Ogallala, which recharges at an annual rate of only 185,000 acre-feet. If current irrigation practices continue, agribusiness will deplete the Ogallala Aquifer in the next century. Nature Meccas It's still possible to stand beneath waves of bluestem in the rolling grass oceans of the Osage Hills of Oklahoma and the Flint Hills of Kansas, where conservationists hope to protect a viable tallgrass prairie. Good times are to be had in the Badlands' of North Dakota's Theodore Roosevelt National Park, where Teddy himself found solace in the spectacularly chaotic pinnacles, spires, and buttes. In Oklahoma's Wichita Mountain National Wildlife Refuge, visitors can see descendants of the 25 million bison that once roamed the plains. Superlatives From March to October, at least a dozen different species of wildflowers bloom in the prairie each week, ever taller to stay eye-to-eye with the rising grasses. Almost half of the United States' migratory waterfowl, including snowgeese, whooping cranes, and sandhill cranes, pass through the prairie-pothole region of the Northern Plains. Progress In one of its most recent victories, the Sierra Club successfully lobbied to designate sections of the Niobrara and Missouri rivers as part of the National Wild and Scenic River System. In previous years Club activists helped stop the siting of nuclear-waste-storage facilities in Kansas, North and South Dakota, and Wyoming, and worked to enact federal legislation to force the cleanup of uranium mining and milling wastes; helped prevent construction of the Oahe Diversion Project in South Dakota; campaigned to protect Cheyenne Bottom in Kansas, a major wetland on the Central Flyway; and contributed to the passage of ballot measures in Missouri to increase funding for the purchase of tallgrass prairielands as state parks and preserves. Unprotected Treasures North Dakota's Little Missouri National Grassland is under siege by oil-and-gas developers, and although only 5.3 million of the original 17 million acres of wetlands remain, the state's prairie-pothole region is still being drained for conversion to cropland. Biggest Threats Despite federal "sodbusting" regulations, virgin grassland continue to be plowed; groundwater supplies are dwindling; and federal and state officials see the region's unpopulated open spaces as the perfect places to stash toxic and nuclear trash. Celebrators Writers Kathleen Norris, Willa Cather, Ole Rolvaaag, Ray A. Young Bear, and William Least Heat-Moon. Tells It Like It Is Where the Sky Began: Land of the Tallgrass Prairie by John Madson (Sierra Club Books, 1982). To Learn More
Contact: Photo courtesy Philip Greenspun. Up to Top |
