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George Frazier, "Riverine Dreams: Away to the Glorious and Forgotten Grassland Rivers of America" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
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Dr. George Fraser
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Dr. George Fraser
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Michael (Interviewer)
welcome to the New Books Network. Hello to my listeners. I'm very pleased to have Dr. George Fraser join me today to discuss his new book, Rivering Dreams, A Way to the Glorious and Forgotten Grasslands Rivers of America. Although George is currently an assistant professor of Computer Information sciences at Washburn University, where he his research focuses on such topics as artificial and environmental informatics, as an environmental author, his current book provides a compendium of engaging stories at the deep intersections of nature, history and place. Now, his previous book, the Last Wild Places of Journeys into a Hidden Landscape, was widely praised, winning the Ferguson Book Award, the Midwest Book Award, the Hamlin Garland Prize and designated a Kansas Notable Book. George now lives in Kansas with his wife and daughter. Welcome, George.
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Dr. George Fraser
Hey. Hey. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Michael.
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Michael (Interviewer)
So let's just begin. What inspired you to write this book?
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Dr. George Fraser
You know, for a long time I've been thinking about landscapes in the Midwest. And my first book, the Last Wild Places of Kansas, it started from a premise that the landscapes of the Midwest in some ways are underappreciated. And if you decide that you want to understand and experience prairies, Midwestern forest, wetlands, you may want to go out and experience them. But in states like Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, the first thing you kind of run into is a proverbial barbed wire fence. Because unlike the landscapes of the American west, in the Midwest, we have mostly private land. Like, for example, in Kansas, 98% of the land is privately owned. So I explored that in my first book and what I realized Was that one way to explore the landscapes in a land of private property is on rivers. And because of the nature of river access laws and rivers themselves, they provide an opportunity to explore prairies that may not be as available to other people in places where they're in the farm country in the Midwest. So I started there as a premise, looking at grassland rivers as a way to maybe have more access to land. But what I discovered was grassland rivers haven't really been treated as a subject. They are actually, like the prairies themselves, an underappreciated and culturally invisible natural resource.
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Michael (Interviewer)
Okay, so let me follow up. You point out restoring the river requires restoring the west grassland prairies, which span from southern Canada to Texas. Can you briefly summarize for our listeners what the connection is between these two types of ecosystem? Yeah.
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Dr. George Fraser
A grassland river defined is a river that in pre Euro American settlement times, the watershed was largely comprised of grasslands, majority grasslands. So there's really two types of rivers, then. In that sense, they're the ones that start in the mountains that are fed by snowmelt, and then pulse out into the plains, and ones that expend their entire lifespans in the prairies. And so, just like that, prairies have their own characteristics as ecosystems. Grassland rivers, too, are different kinds of rivers. And when we think of prairie preservation or prairie restoration, we really need to look at river preservation, river restoration, too. And so I'll mention that there are certain characteristics that grassland rivers have that make them different than other kinds of rivers. They, for example, have very low gradients compared to rivers in the east and in the mountains. They flow through broad floodplains that are laced with wetlands and oxbows that support migratory fish, migratory birds, corridors that stretch for thousands of miles. They're prone to seasonal pulses of rain. So historically, they're fed by snowmelt that pushed down onto the plains, by the monsoons of New Mexico and Colorado, and by the thunderstorms that march across tornado alley in the springs. And because of this seasonality, just like the prairies tolerate drought, they dry up. They spring back in the spring, these rivers also dry up, not only because of the intermittent rainfall regimes, but because there's lack of shade, relatively, compared to other types of rivers. And an offshoot of that is that the waters of prairie rivers are warmer than waters in the forests in the mountains. And so fish and other animals that inhabit these rivers have to be incredibly tough and well adapted, just like the plants of the prairies. And so, like, for example, if you put a salmon in the. In the arikory river in northeastern Colorado. It's going to die almost immediately. But the fish that have evolved in prairie rivers are incredibly well adapted and tough. And so one of the things that, when you're thinking of the dual nature of prairies and rivers, when you're thinking about not necessarily from a spiritual, philosophical level, but from a preservation level, they share characteristics of the prairies. They have been affected by hydrological changes that have affected prairies. With conversion to agriculture, water runs off a lot faster. It scours stream banks and creates incised banks. Because the prairies are in perhaps the greatest farm country in the United States, these rivers have been channelized to maximize cropland. And this has resulted in the loss of prairie buffers, cottonwood buffers, the prairies that used to run down to the streams, stream banks, causing erosion. And of course, you've got the pollution with fertilizers and pesticides that affects prairies. It certainly affects prairie rivers. And then in the western plains, groundwater mining of aquifers has reduced surface flows. And so this is sort of a western twist that affects both prairies and prairie rivers and all of the rivers of the west, of course.
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Michael (Interviewer)
Okay, so you just mentioned some threats to these rivers. What do you feel is the major human threat to the future viability of these waters?
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Dr. George Fraser
I mean, I really think it's cultural invisibility. You know, people don't really think of grassland rivers like they think of other rivers. In fact, when I was researching the book, I couldn't find a single book that outside of the sort of academia that's taken on grassland rivers as a subject, yes, certainly individual rivers like the Missouri, the arc, but not grassland rivers as a whole. And so I really have come to think, since I researched this book, not only through traditional research, but by thousands of miles, almost 2,000 miles of paddling, I've found that they hold some of the most surprising and underappreciated sort of outdoor resources in the entire American backcountry.
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Michael (Interviewer)
Okay. And I agree that many of the rivers you touch upon in your chapters are probably not well known outside those who live within the drainage of the Missouri River. I actually am a river person. I haven't heard a number of those names before. I think it would be interesting, interesting to our listeners to hear a bit about historically, what role did the Missouri and its tributaries play in human development in the region?
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Dr. George Fraser
Yeah, I mean, the Missouri river you mentioned not many people outside of the Missouri drainage. Maybe you've heard of these rivers. You need to understand the Missouri river basin is enormous. Though. And a large chunk of the citizens of the United States live within the drainage of the Missouri River. So it starts in Montana. And if you consider the Missouri, which flows through 2,000 miles of prairies right on its 2,300mile journey from Montana to St. Louis, if you consider then the Mississippi river from St. Louis down to the confluence with the Gulf as a single river unit, the this makes the Missouri Mississippi the fourth longest river in the world. So it's an enormous basin. It played an enormous role in the history of the country. Certainly what most people know about the Missouri is the trip that Lewis and Clark took at the beginning of the 1800s up the river, kind of surveying the Louisiana Purchase. But there were other waves of infinite immigration in those periods. Like for example, there were many trips, the Mormon Trail that went up the Missouri river, that also traversed the little known grand river of Missouri. And so basically, I think of this sort of in post Euro American times, settlement times, right? Because as sort of a twofold, you have period of time before the Louisiana Purchase and all of the westward push, and then you have the environmental change of the river for starting in the mid-1800s that tries to channelize that basin, tries to make the Missouri predictable as a river of commerce, and then everything that has transpired after that. But I want to mention just really quick, Michael, that's only after Euro American settlement, there's thousands of years of history. You know, 12,000, 18,000 years is maybe what they're pushing back of human history along the Missouri. And we have lots of plenty of history written about those times too. And so I tried to look at Native American history prior to Euro American settlement and then the history that came after that as one of the threads in the book.
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Michael (Interviewer)
Okay, so of all the rivers that flow through this expanse of the west, is there one river that is your favorite? And if so, why?
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Dr. George Fraser
Well, I mean, favorites have to do with personality. I mean, just as a personal favorite, I think the Kaw river that flows through Colorado and Kansas, I think it exemplifies what I have started calling Grassland River Revival as no other river in the middle part of the country. So the Kaw is one of these little known, we'll say, rivers at a national level, right? Up until recently, not many people would come to Kansas to visit the Ka. But that's changed now. The reason, it's my favorite river. It's my home river. So I did grow up in Kansas. I did learn to paddle on the Kaw back in the days when not many people paddled the river but since then, it's been added to the national. The National Water Trail System after groups like Friends of the Cog, Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks added several access points to the river, basically as a recreational resource, making it so that you can paddle about four hours between these stops. And so now we see people coming from all over the country to paddle the 173 miles of the Lower Kaw, kind of as a bucket list destination because you can do it in about seven days. It's a heck of a lot easier than the Appalachian Trail. And it provides sort of a sense of completeness. You've paddled an entire American river. And so you have this infrastructure of being able to stop about every three hours at a town to experience the last remaining unplowed swath of the tallgrass prairie in the Kansas Flint Hills, and then to enjoy what, again, I think I've mentioned before, but what I think is the most underappreciated camping resource in the entire American backcountry are the sandbars of the Kansas river, which are these vast, you know, sort of parking lots of sand. I'll describe great camping flats of sand where you can pitch your tent by yourself because there's usually there's so many sandbars, you'll get one to yourself. You can make campfires that, you know, you can are visible from the moon and. And the river moves along at a sensible pace of about 3 miles per hour. It's never very deep, but there's always enough water for your boat. So from just a recreational point of view and just a personal point of view, I would mention the call, and that's only one of its threads of interest.
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Michael (Interviewer)
Okay, so the previous author I interviewed was Terry Lohan, who wrote a book called Undammed, and she's a large proponent of removing dams on rivers. Have you seen many dams in your travels along these tributaries?
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Dr. George Fraser
Well, on the tributaries, yes. On the main stems of the rivers that I write about, there are some dams. And the Kaw, for example, has three. The Upper Missouri breaks, though, in my book I try to cover relatively wild sections of these rivers. Right. And so the Upper Missouri, the Upper Missouri is a great river below the three dams at, Great Falls. And you can paddle for 150 miles. Well, you can paddle much longer without a dam. Right. But this is a night, a beautiful undammed section there. You know, dams definitely dot the rivers of the Midwest. Another example of an undammed river is the grand river of Northwest Missouri. That is a very little known river, but it flows on Its main stem without any dams, through what once was the regime of deep soil, Tall grouse prairie, which is a subset of prairie that's almost completely gone today. Some of the last remaining unplowed sections are in the valley of the Grand River. The Niobrara river, which is probably the closest grassland river we have to being a true ecotourism destination, is another river that below Valentine, Nebraska, is undammed for, for 75 miles or so. But, you know, dams are definitely something you need to know about if you're going to personally paddle these rivers. And they've. They've affected the environmental characteristics of the rivers, too.
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Michael (Interviewer)
Okay, so back to your point that most of the land in this. In this watershed is privately owned. So what do the locals you have talked to during your travels feel about these rivers and the protection of the associated wildland species?
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Dr. George Fraser
Sure. So this is something I found throughout the Midwest in writing both of my books, is that even though a lot of the lands are privately owned in the Midwest, the remaining prairies, most of them are privately owned. The people, you know, the people of the Midwest that I've met along these rivers are more than happy to share the stories about the rivers because they know that these wild places are places that matter in the sense that, you know, western wild places matter. But their belief just is that, you know, they sort of, for a long time, thought they were the only ones that kind of knew that. And there was a growing appreciation of the prairies, tall grass prairies, short grass prairies, mixed grass prairies, the prairies that remain. And so I tried to look at just the subset of that, the rivers that flow through those prairies. And so I met hundreds of people that either in some way had a stake in the rivers, Right. Land along the rivers they were working to study, like biologists that were working to study fish species or mammals, like otters that had been reintroduced to the rivers, landowners themselves, who in some cases had properties that had been along the rivers for generations. And mostly, you know, in the places where I had to get access to private property, the people were more than happy to provide it for me. And, you know, often said, can I come along and paddle with you? And sometimes I did. But I'll make a point that in my book, this book is not about accessing private property or anything. Most all of these rivers can be accessed through public means and, you know, are completely legal to paddle. And you don't need to. Do you worry about private property access?
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Michael (Interviewer)
Oh, great. Now, the rivers you paddled and camped range from Grizzly habitat in northern reaches of the Missouri and ideal rattlesnake habitat in that drainage in the southern reaches. So I have to ask, what was the most harrowing experience you had when traveling these water courses?
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Dr. George Fraser
So, you know, I will mention that one of the threads of the book is personal travel. Right. And so I definitely make the case that if you like to paddle, and that's something that you're into, these rivers are an ideal, ideal recreational resource because, you know, these are non whitewater rivers. So a lot of people like to go and paddle exciting, harrowing whitewater rivers or go on rafting trips, that's fine. But if you're into more of a gentle glide and you want to paddle rivers to enjoy the peace and silence of a natural spot, the grassland rivers are the rivers for you in terms of harrowing experiences. The thing about any kind of river is you need to be vigilant because things can change quickly on a river. Right. And the most dangerous things about rivers are your own lack of attention. And so I tried to be very attentive and stay alive on the rivers, and I never had any kind of real harrowing experience. One night, while camped on the grand river in northwest Missouri, and this was just from probably my own lack of preparation, I was camped on a sandbar when a storm came up. And this was when weather was changing to winter. It was like an early October storm. And I had really prepared for. I hadn't really prepared for the wind. And so I moved my camp in the night up into the woods, and I moved my canoe off the sandbar. But a hellacious, maybe like once in every three year, windstorm came down and. And I was camped in a forest and trees were falling and the edges of a tree crashed my tent. But when I woke up in the morning, the more worrisome thing was I had pushed my. I had stashed my canoe in the woods and the wind had come up and blown the canoe away to who knows where. And so I spent the entire morning searching for the canoe. I had three more days to get to my takeout and it was gone. I never found the canoe. The Missouri part. There are people in the Missouri Department of Conservation that looked, they put the word out, they looked for canoe. The canoe. No one ever found that canoe. So I had to hike out, you know, arrange a ride home and. And it just reminds you, tie your darn canoe down.
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Michael (Interviewer)
Yes, luckily you got off the sandbar. I'm sure that area gets a little bit of flash flooding.
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Dr. George Fraser
Yeah. And. But it was Absolutely. And if it had been a rainy thing, I would definitely think about that. Right? But there was no rain. It was just a hellacious windstorm.
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Michael (Interviewer)
Now, in the book, you mentioned that fire was an essential aspect of historically maintaining grassland prairies. Why is this?
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Dr. George Fraser
I mean, we believe that prairies are a, you know, most of the life of a plant species is underground, right? They're, they're ephemeral. And this is one of the ways that grasslands can be tolerant of such drought and such changing conditions, is that most grassland species, their root systems are more extensive than the above ground part of the plants, and they can go dormant for years, come back, whatnot. But another aspect of the grasslands is they lay sort of along a temperature thermocline where there's just enough rain, just enough rain to keep the grassland species going fine, but probably to provide enough rain also to maintain woodlands. And so over time, the boundaries between the eastern forests and the grasslands of the North American interior changed, and they sort of moved west and east, sort of like an accordion, right? And in the prairie part of the Midwest, fires that were set originally by, you know, just by lightning because there are a lack of trees, they sweep across these landscapes and kill off woody species that otherwise try to convert the prairie to woodlands. It's always a dance between woodlands and prairies. And then later on, you know, when, you know, native peoples came to North America, a lot of the culture there, a lot of the prairie, the prairie people that lived, lived here. They understood that by burning the prairies, they could maintain, you know, habitat for game and whatnot to come in closer to where they lived. So they could attract, you know, attract, you know, the buffalo, other species that are grassland species, by burning the prairie. And they also, you know, they also knew that this would also open up areas for gardening, for harvesting plants that required, you know, frequent burns. And so prairies, if you think about the quote unquote, prairie wilderness, the stream, you know, wilderness. I'm sure some of your authors have talked about the many ways it's been misused historically, the Midwest grassland wilderness is a peopled wilderness that was maintained by the people that lived there through. And one of their tools was fire. Now, what happened with Euro American arrival and events like the 1830American Indian Removal act in states like Missouri, where native peoples were starting to be removed,
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Michael (Interviewer)
you
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Dr. George Fraser
had land surveyors coming in after that, and they were walking the entire. Like in the early 1800s, people, land surveyors basically walked every square mile of Missouri and they would make notes in their journals about what the land cover type was. And so I met a researcher, University of Missouri, who had, he and his students had gone back through all of these land surveys about the time of the War of 1812 and made a very detailed map of just how much prairie was in Missouri. It turns out about one third of the state was prairie. But the interesting note that he made is there were land surveys and soil surveys and they were completed about nine years apart. And by the time the second round of surveys came, they were noting that there was a higher percentage of woodland species. And in some places the same parcel had been resurveyed and where it was a grassland before it was becoming wooded. And they realized the reason was the Native Americans had been there in the early surveys. And the Indian Removal act comes during that time. And so already you have a cessation of these fires and a conversion of woodland begins. And that's the thing that you see today. So in my lifetime, I can tell that the prairies in Kansas are, are being, I guess, for lack of a better term, invaded by woodland species, by species like the eastern red cedar, which is a native species, but it's behaving like an invasive species today because the climate and the lack of fire is different than during the 12,000 years that Prairies were here in the Midwest before the time of Euro American arrival.
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Michael (Interviewer)
So along these lines, with the forecast of higher frequency of longer duration droughts in your neck of the woods, have you seen more natural fires occurring?
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Dr. George Fraser
Yes, and I want to point out that I'm not an environmental scientist or biologist. So this is from my reportage, right, from work as a journalist. But certainly we see and this, we are speaking together in the end of February, and just in the last two weeks, there have been some ravaging fires on the Oklahoma, Kansas border. And definitely in years past you hear about fires in the west, right, in California, Colorado, and those are on the increase. But now you have fires in southern Kansas in the Gypsum Hills that are, you know, have even become newsworthy, that have, you know, decimated some of the counties there. And there were very notable fires in 2015. And they seem to be, you know, this seems, in 2026, seems like it's going to be a big fire year. But does that. So how does that affect prairies, though? Probably. Probably not in the way we might expect it to because these fires are temporary events. We have a lot of infrastructure, you know, just infrastructure like roads that will stop fires that were not there before. People will go out and try to put out fires. They're not going to sweep across vast landscapes on any regular sort of basis. And so most of the fires today are intentionally set to maintain prairies in terms of. In terms of maintaining prairies that exist in the Flint Hills, you have annual burning of the prairies and the fires are started at different times of year according to how fire management regimes are prescribed. But I don't think that droughts themselves and the fires that come from that would ever bring us back to any kind of prairie management sort of fire regime.
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Michael (Interviewer)
Now, I know you mentioned the Native American Removal act in the early 1800s, but today, do you think there's laws on the books that negatively affect the health of these watercourses you've paddled?
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Dr. George Fraser
Maya, I want to emphasize, I mean, when you're mentioning the Indian removal act of 1830s as something that affects prairies, I mean, that mainly affected the Native Americans that were affected by the act. As a separate question, are there laws on the books that negatively affect prairies
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Michael (Interviewer)
or the health of the rivers?
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Dr. George Fraser
The health of the rivers. One interesting law that, and I'll use Kansas as an example, but in different ways it affects rivers across the Midwest is in Kansas we have the concept of a navigable river and it's enshrined in the Kansas Constitution. And for many years it was believed that to access a river and say, how do you want to access it? Maybe go paddle on it or maybe use the river to go gather medicinal plants or to go fishing, maybe to be a commercial fisherman. There's many things you can do on a river for commerce that we separated rivers into navigable and non navigable rivers. So the navigable rivers were defined as a river that had enough flow in it to support commerce of some sense. Now, the term commerce turned out that there's a legal definition to that, or there was some discussion about what that meant. And so for most of Kansas history, it was believed that if you just stayed on the water itself, because water in all of the Midwest, in the United States is a public resource, right, that, that the public had a right to be on the water, which is their water, as Long as you didn't touch either side of the bank. Now, this would be like the most conservative definition of river access you can imagine. We always believed in Kansas that was the case. But there was a court case, Meek vs. Hayes in the 1990s in Kansas that sort of settled this question in a different way. And the result of that, it took the plaintiff. Is that the term they use? I'm not a lawyer. In southeastern Kansas, there was a rafting group. So their use of commerce on the river was to take groups on rafting trips on, I believe it was called Shoal Creek in southeast Kansas. And it seemed like that was a reasonable argument, that that was a use of commerce on a river. And the Kansas. The Supreme Court in Kansas found that that wasn't the case, that there were only three navigable rivers in the state. And they were decided at the time of the Kansas Constitution, the Kansas. And in Kansas, we call the river the Arkansas River. In Arkansas, in Colorado, they call it the Arkansas River. And then the Missouri were the only three navigable rivers. And that other than those, there was not really a reasonable argument that the other rivers of the state were body waters, you know, that that could support real commerce. And so because of that, you know, it became illegal to paddle any other river in the state for any reason to be on the water, whether you touch the bank or not. And so the result of that is to paddle any other river in the state of Kansas, you need to get permission from every land on, for the entire segment of the stream on both sides that you want to paddle. Now, Kansas has the most restrictive river access laws in the country. There are other Midwestern states that aren't as restrictive. And there are many sections of other Kansas rivers that flow through public lands, for example. So if a river flows through public lands, of course, you can access it, like, for example, a state park or a federal reservoir where maybe the river comes into a lake. And in states like Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, the laws are much less restrictive. And so you have a patchwork of legislation that in most cases, it goes state to state. In some cases, there are county differences. Recently in Kansas, just In this year, 2026, there was an attempt to bring a new law that would allow counties the right to determine, you know, what could and couldn't happen on a navigable stream. And that that didn't make it out of committee if it did. And so what I mean by that is the committee and the campus legislature that was taking it up. And so, yeah, the law. Laws are a complicated thing. They don't seem to be on the side of people that want to go and experience rivers all the time in all Midwestern states. But if, you know, most reasonable people can find there are plenty of great rivers in the Midlands and in the Great Plains that aren't that if you want to go experience the rivers that you can get onto. And I focused on, even though I mentioned the topics that you're talking about and I mentioned legal issues in the book, also want to look on the bright side. There are many thousands, tens of thousands of miles of rivers that we can go out and access if we're looking at just the, you know, the ecotourism sort of recreational point of. The point of that discussion.
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Michael (Interviewer)
Well, that was very interesting towards the end of the book. End of your book, you provide a list of steps that one may consider in doing to restore prairie grasslands. Can you share how you came up with these?
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Dr. George Fraser
Yeah, what I talked to was what I found. I came up with the list by talking to grassland restorationists. So there's a budding sort of industry throughout the prairie provinces here of people that make their living restoring tall grass prairies mainly, but also mixed grass and short grass prairies in the Great Plains. But the industry is strongest in the tall grass prairie states. So the prairies themselves were originally kind of started to disappear in their easternmost historical areas that they existed in Indiana, Illinois, Missouri and to some extent Kansas. They sort of moved west. And so the places where they disappeared first became the cradle of grassland restoration. So we start to see in the mid 20th century, people in Illinois, people in Missouri following, you know, really following on the work of restoration philosophers and ecologists like Aldo Leopold start to look at, you know, rewilding. And so today that often takes the form of a very practical thing, right? That people have land that originally, you know, the prairie was plowed, right? And then for a period of time it was cultivated. And in many, many areas in the Midwest, that period of cultivation ended. And, you know, for whatever reasons, people decided to stop planting the land. And so maybe it converted to, you know, use as a pasture for horses or cattle. And then after that, you know, you see woodland species start to come and this process of succession takeover. Well, today in many cases, not only in public lands, but in private lands, people want to try to revert that to tall grass prairie for practical reasons. Right? Because the tall grass species don't need a lot of maintenance. You don't have to water them. They were evolved to live here. And so you have groups like, I'll mention a group in Northeastern Kansas native lands. And they. There's a deep science behind this of going and making sure you have the right seed mixes, making sure that maybe when you plant, planting a prairie is not planning a garden. And we still don't know how to plant, quote, unquote, prairies that will fully function like the tall grass prairies that were there originally. Not all the species come back. Some species are very hard to cultivate. There is a growing movement to, you know, to use what I mean by growing movement. Scientists have realized that the microrhizomal components in the soil are very important. So there are companies that provide microrhizomal adjuncts to prairie seed plantings. And so there's a lot of new science going into how to restore prairies so that they, one, they kind of look like prairies used to look like. And what I mean by that is they have the roughly the same species in the same proportions. But even beyond that, maybe they will never have prairies that look like an uncloud tallgrass prairie look like. But perhaps we can create prairies that function like the original prairies did. And so one vision of rewilding prairies in the Midwest is to take the prairie remnants that exist and where possible, surround them with adjunct prairies that are replanted that function like prairies. And when I say function, I mean that the species that depend on the prairie to exist, right, the insect species, the bird species, these are species in steep decline in the Midlands, right. If they can move out into these replanted prairies and go about their lifeways, then does it really matter that these prairies have the exact same species? If they provide what scientists use this term, ecosystem services? Right. If they provide those services, maybe then that's a way for us to stem the curb of the loss of, say, grassland bird species. So that's definitely something to keep track of in terms of an issue in wildlife restoration and rewilding that's unique to the prairie provinces here in the Midwest.
- [38:57]
Michael (Interviewer)
Thank you for sharing that. Is there any final thought you'd like to share with the listeners?
- [39:03]
Dr. George Fraser
No. That in the Midwest, in the Great Plains, the prairies and the rivers of the prairies, these are wild places that matter. And the Midwest played an important role in the environmental history of this country. And for some reason, it's been strangely left out of the discussion of American ecosystems. And so my book, Rivering Dreams takes up this topic. We've talked a lot about paddling and about laws and stuff. The Riverine Dreams is an accessible book, whether you ever intend to put your paddle into the water or not? I mean, what I look at is the cultural, the scientific, the historical and the ecological aspects of these rivers. And I try to also pair with it the interesting, what I think is the fascinating narrative of these rivers in terms of their meaning on the American landscape and what it means to be a wild place today.
- [39:59]
Michael (Interviewer)
I agree. Your storytelling was amazingly engaging. The book is Riverine, A Way to the Glorious and Forgotten Grassland Rivers of America, published by the University of Chicago Press. Thank you, George.
- [40:14]
Dr. George Fraser
Thank you, Michael. Sam.