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Saturday, November 6th, 2021

America’s Native Grasslands are Disappearing

Author:     Katharine Gammon
Source:     The Guardian (U.K.)
Publication Date:     Fri 5 Nov 2021 05.00 EDT
 Link: America’s Native Grasslands are Disappearing
Stephan:   The grasslands are a fabled part of American history, from Lewis and Clark to the present day. But they have also been a vast area of exploitation,with farmers choosing commodity profit over conservation. This, as this report explains, has a massive negative impact on climate change. We must change our culture. The earth can no longer be seen as exploitable without consequences and, instead, recognized as an essential component of a healthy earth. Can we do this before it is too late. I don't know.
Buffalo Gap national grasslands, South Dakota, a protected prairie habitat. Credit: Tetra Images/Getty/Tetra

When Patrick Lendrum steps out into a natural grassland, he gets an incredible feeling of vastness looking out over the land – no mountains or trees or forests, just open expanse.

“The solitude out there is incredible, and there’s enormous bird diversity in grasslands, the sounds that they make if you’re there in the spring,” says Ledlum, a scientist with the World Wildlife Fund’s northern Great Plains program. “It’s just this natural, incredible chorus and a lot of the species that you see on grass, and you don’t see anywhere else in the world.”

Grasslands used to cover a large swath of North America before European settlement. When Europeans arrived, they quickly plowed up about half of the grasslands on the continent and converted them to agricultural use, growing corn, soybeans and wheat. And today, new research shows the rate that the ecosystem is being lost has been increasing.

Lendrum led a research team that released a report in September showing that from 2018 […]

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