Minnesota journalists document importance of North American prairie in new book

NINA MOINI: This is Minnesota Now. I'm Nina Moini. Now for an underdog story where the underdog is the grass and dirt beneath our feet. The prairie is teeming with such a wide diversity of living things that it's on par with tropical rainforests, but it often doesn't get the same attention or concern.

In a new book, a pair of Minnesota journalists document the story of North American grasslands, as well as efforts to protect and restore them. David Hage and Josephine Marcotty are the authors of Sea of Grass, The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie. And they're joining us in the studio to talk about the new book. Thank you both for being here.

JOSEPHINE MARCOTTY: Lovely to be here.

DAVID HAGE: Thank you. Nina.

NINA MOINI: So you've both had long careers covering the environment, working for The Star Tribune. Dave, can you tell me what brought you to this point of wanting to start this book project?

DAVID HAGE: Sure. It grows out of a project that Josephine wrote six or seven years ago when we were both working at the paper. She came across two data sets, separate but parallel, which showed that we are now plowing up the prairie, the continent's remaining grasslands, a million acres a year. That's roughly as fast as we're destroying the Amazon rainforest.

This is a complete environmental disaster. It's bad for climate change. It's bad for polluted streams and rivers in the Midwest. It's bad for wildlife habitat, monarchs, and so on and so forth. And yet nobody's paying attention because it's in remote parts of South Dakota, Montana.

Anyway, the series was a big hit with readers of The Star Tribune. And then, after Josephine and I retired, we'd always wanted to go into the topic more deeply. And we did. And that's the book.

NINA MOINI: That's awesome. I'm so happy for you both, for continuing on the work that you're passionate about. So Josephine, I think sometimes people might drive through a prairie and just look out at everything and just say, grass. But it's more complicated than that. So could you describe some of the different landscapes you're actually talking about in the book, tall grass, short grass. It's more than people might see.

JOSEPHINE MARCOTTY: Yeah. I think a lot of people, especially as they're driving through the Midwest, they look out and they see what they call empty land. I mean, a land with nothing in it. But if you stop for a moment, and you get out of your car, and you actually start walking through the grass, you'll find it's an incredibly complex ecosystem, up to your knees and sometimes even up to your shoulders.

NINA MOINI: Sure.

JOSEPHINE MARCOTTY: But there are three, as you mentioned, three kinds of prairie. There's the tall grass, what they call mid grass, or medium grass, and short grass. And it's all created by the amount of rain.

So the tallgrass prairie, it was just much farther east. When European settlers first came upon it, they would find that they couldn't see over it. In order to find out where they were going, they would have to stand up on the back of their horses. It was so tall.

Medium grasses get less rain. That's more toward Western Minnesota, Western Iowa. And short grass is the West. And the short grass prairie is where we now have a lot of cattle ranching and cattle grazing. And that is really where we have the remaining grasslands. 40% of the grasslands that we had are remaining in the West, and that's where it's under threat now from intensive agriculture.

DAVID HAGE: I would just add the tallgrass prairie, places like Iowa, Illinois, 99% is gone. And so if you want to see it today, you have to go to special places to still experience what that tallgrass prairie was like 100 years ago.

NINA MOINI: So you're sounding the alarm on these threats. What are some of the impacts to people listening, thinking, well, why should I care?

JOSEPHINE MARCOTTY: I just had this conversation with a good friend of mine who grew up in South Dakota near Sioux Falls. And one of the local rivers there, it's highly polluted with nitrogen. And I said, well, wouldn't you like your great nieces and your great nephews be able to swim in that river? Wouldn't we like to have all our kids who live in farm country be able to swim in the lakes? And in Minnesota and in Iowa and elsewhere, you almost can't, because there's just too much water pollution.

And there's also an enormous amount of pressure on drinking water. One of the chapters in our book is about the legal fight between the city of Des Moines and farm interests and drainage interests in Northwest Iowa, about water pollution, that the citizens of Des Moines have to pay thousands and thousands of dollars for to treat. And that's true throughout the Midwest.

DAVID HAGE: The other thing that really terrified us is climate change. Grasslands are a huge buffer against climate change. Because what do grasses do? They absorb carbon out of the atmosphere. That's photosynthesis. And then they lock that carbon deep underground in deep roots.

Everybody in the Midwest knows if you turn over a shovel full of soil in our part of the country, it's black. It's this rich black. Why is that? That's carbon. Grasses have been storing that carbon in the soil for thousands of years.

So the planet's big grasslands, the veldt in Africa, the pampas in South America, the Asian steppes, and ours, which is the biggest of the remaining four grasslands, are an invaluable buffer against climate change. And every time we plow it open, we release more carbon into the atmosphere.

NINA MOINI: To your point, and Josephine, I'm sure that when you all were writing this book were wanting to be conscious of the different uses of that land, development that may happen, agriculture, and not making it seem like it's really the fault of farmers or producers. Where is the responsibility here? Where does it lie? And what can be done at this point?

JOSEPHINE MARCOTTY: I mean, the simple answer is that the responsibility is with all of us. I mean, we all drive cars that burn gasoline. That contributes to climate change. We all live in houses where the water runs off our roofs and collects pollution on the way to the neighborhood stream. In many ways, we're no different than farmers in the way we live.

They often get a lot of attention because they own the land. And there is no system, or there is no way to stop the pollution, always, that comes off their land. I think that what we need is a paradigm shift in how we grow our food. That is the responsibility of all of us in terms of the choices we make at the grocery store and in terms of the demands we make of our legislators and congresspeople on things like the Farm Bill.

NINA MOINI: Anything to add?

DAVID HAGE: Yeah, in the book, we are critical of American agriculture. Because all the incentives are to use a lot of chemicals, plow up a lot of soil. But we're not really critical of farmers. We met lovely, wonderful, generous people who took us out on their property, explained what they do.

The problem is we have set up a set of incentives, mainly through the Federal Farm Bill, that just push farmers in one direction. They push farmers to plow more land, grow more corn and soybeans. There's no incentive to grow barley or wheat or blueberries. The Federal Farm Bill pushes farmers to grow more corn and soybeans, more and more with more chemicals. And so if you're a farmer, you're stuck in this world that's not of your own creation.

And we forget the stress that farmers face. If you lose the family farm, that's a horrible thing in a rural community. And so taking risks, fighting against these incentives that the federal government has set up, doing the right thing by the land is very risky for farmers.

NINA MOINI: I think sometimes it's easy to rally people behind things that are cute, cute animals, really amazing scenic landscapes. Not that the prairies are not amazing. They really are awe inspiring in their own ways. But what do you think about that? Dave, I'll start with you. How can the people who are interested get people to really care and get behind prairies?

DAVID HAGE: Well, I agree with your point, Nina. I call the prairies the Rodney Dangerfield of ecosystems, get no respect. The grasslands were the last ecosystem in North America to get their own national park. We had Yellowstone and the Rockies and Acadia. In the old days, the Park Service said they wanted to protect majestic landscapes, meaning mountains and oceans. And they didn't protect grasslands until 30, 40 years ago.

But there are places where you can experience it. Josephine writes in the book about an extraordinary experiment here in Minnesota, Northwestern Minnesota called Glacial Ridge, where they restored thousands of acres of tallgrass prairie, beautiful. You can go down to Kansas, the Flint Hills region, it's the largest remaining patch of tallgrass prairie. There's a beautiful spot in Iowa. And you walk into that, and literally, the grasses and flowers were over our heads when Josephine and I visited. The birds, the colors, it's goldenrod, liatris, lupin, coneflower, it's just gorgeous once you walk into it.

JOSEPHINE MARCOTTY: I mean, if we're talking about loving a landscape or appreciating a wild place, there really is nothing like a grassland because you can't really have a grassland without sky. And in places in South Dakota, or even in Minnesota, you can look up. And you can see the weather coming from miles away. Those huge stacks of cumulus clouds.

And also, just the nature of the silence, where the only thing you can hear is wind and birds? It's unlike the silence you would experience in, say, the forest, or even on a mountaintop. And the other thing is just the light and the space gives me an amazing feeling when I'm out there.

NINA MOINI: Dave and Josephine, thank you both so much for coming by and sharing your work with us. I really appreciate it.

JOSEPHINE MARCOTTY: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

DAVID HAGE: Thank you, Nina, so much.

NINA MOINI: Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty are journalists based in the Twin Cities. Their new book, Sea of Grass, The Conquest, Ruin and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie, comes out May 27th.