I recently ran across this item on the news feed: Here’s How to Experience North America’s Most Endangered (and Underrated) Ecosystem.
That ecosystem was the North American prairie.
The article listed seven parks and preserves in which to experience the prairies, which included Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan, Living Prairie Museum in Manitoba, Badlands National Park in South Dakota, and Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota.
It is a short list and rather subjective, and there are certainly other areas to explore, but nonetheless it was great to see Theodore Roosevelt National Park on the list. The park and the badlands area are treasured places for a variety of reasons. Those wide-open expanses of prairie to the horizons are becoming rarer with each new day.
Considering prairie an endangered ecosystem might sound foreign to a North Dakotan. After all, North Dakota supports lots of pastureland, particularly in the western part of the state. Plus, there are the Little Missouri, Sheyenne, and Cedar River National Grasslands, several National Wildlife Refuges, as well as other native prairie tracts.
But prairie is one of the most endangered ecosystems, perhaps the most endangered ecosystem, in North America. Somewhere around 70% of the grasslands have been lost in the Great Plains, largely due to conversion to cropland. It seems that the economic incentives work against the preservation of this ecosystem. Some have even referred to prairie as the Rodney Dangerfield of ecosystems. It gets no respect.
I think John Madson took an insightful perspective on prairie in his book, Where the Sky Began-land of the tallgrass prairie:
“A man could stand in a small grove of virgin white pine of the same size and feel that he was in primeval forest. Not so with prairie. To the average man, a scrap of native prairie is just a shaggy weed patch between cornfields. Prairie must have sweep and perspective to look like prairie. It is more than native grasses and forbs: it is native sky, and native horizons that stretch the eye and the mind. To be good prairie, really good prairie, it must embrace the horizons.”
