'Sea of Grass' chronicles the disappearance of the North American prairie

Summary

Summary of NPR's Book of the Day Episode: "Sea of Grass" Chronicles the Disappearance of the North American Prairie

Release Date: June 11, 2025

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Introduction

In the June 11, 2025 episode of NPR's Book of the Day, host Andrew Limbong delves into the critical issue of the rapidly disappearing American prairie. Highlighting the environmental and ecological ramifications of this loss, Limbong introduces listeners to authors David Hagee and Josephine Marcotte, who explore these themes in their book, Sea of the Conquest, Ruin and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie. The episode features an in-depth conversation with the authors, moderated by Chris Bentley, providing valuable insights into the prairie’s transformation and the efforts to restore it.

The Disappearing Prairie

Andrew Limbong opens the discussion by emphasizing the alarming rate at which the American prairie is vanishing, primarily due to agricultural expansion. He poses a critical question: "What do we lose when we lose the prairie?" This sets the stage for Hagee and Marcotte to elaborate on the multifaceted consequences of prairie loss.

Historical Transformation of the Prairie

Chris Bentley begins the conversation by asking the authors about their visit to the Midawini National Tallgrass Prairie, a site that embodies both the destruction and partial restoration of prairie land.

• Josephine Marcotte shares her emotional connection to prairies:
  "We love a prairie. We'll drive long distances to see the prairie. And the first thing that struck me when we climbed out of the car was just to hear this chorus of songbirds. I thought, ah, we're home. It's so beautiful. The warblers and the finches and the red-winged blackbirds." (01:40)

• David Hagee comments on the resilience of nature:
  "What always surprises me is how if you take a place and bring it back to wilderness or a natural area, all the animals will come back pretty quick. They always find it." (01:55)

Bentley probes the authors to recall the initial challenges faced by early European settlers in adapting to the prairie environment. Hagee explains the settlers' struggles with the prairie’s openness and harsh conditions, contrasting it with their accustomed environments of forests and oceans.

Agricultural Innovations and Their Impact

The authors discuss pivotal agricultural innovations that facilitated the transformation of prairies into croplands:

• Steel Plow: Essential for breaking through prairie sod.
• Fertilizers: Drastically increased agricultural yields, contributing to a population boom.
• Tile Drainage: Enabled water management, turning wetlands into arable land.

Hagee highlights the unintended ecological consequences:
"The transformation of the prairie from grassland to cropland can destroy an entirely different ecosystem, which is the Gulf of Mexico. I don't know how many millions of acres have been drained and have chemicals and fertilizer applied. And much of that runs off into the Mississippi, flows down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, where all those nutrients create the dead zone where nothing can live." (06:01)

Marcotte adds to the discussion on water pollution:
"We have thousands of miles of streams and river segments that are classified as impaired by the EPA. They’re unsafe for swimming. They can’t sustain aquatic life. And it’s mostly because of agricultural chemicals. And I mean, in Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes, there are big sections of the state where kids can’t swim in a lake." (06:23)

Environmental Consequences

The episode underscores the dire environmental repercussions of prairie conversion:

• Dead Zones: Excessive nutrient runoff leads to oxygen-depleted areas in water bodies, harming marine life.
• Polluted Rivers and Lakes: Agricultural chemicals render many waterways unsafe and ecologically barren.
• Soil Degradation: Practices like tile drainage and excessive plowing have led to soil erosion and reduced fertility.

Marcotte poignantly quotes naturalist Wendell Berry to illustrate the lasting ignorance of these practices:
"We plowed up the prairie and never knew what we were doing because we didn’t know what we were undoing." (05:38)

Restoration Efforts and Solutions

Bentley inquires about the future of prairies and the potential for restoration. The authors advocate for practical solutions to mitigate environmental damage:

• Prairie Strips: Implementing grassy buffers to protect waterways from agricultural runoff. Marcotte suggests:
  "If we could take 10% of the corn belt out of production or a little bit more, put it in prairie strips, these grassy strips that protect the water, we would go a long way towards solving the pollution problems." (08:22)

• Economic Incentives for Farmers: Encouraging sustainable practices by altering incentives so that environmentally friendly farming is financially viable. Hagee remarks:
  "The farmers we have today are living in a system that they didn’t create. They very much have to survive and thrive on a commodity system and a federal policy system and with products that they have no control over." (09:07)

Challenges Facing Restoration

Despite the promising strategies, significant challenges impede prairie restoration:

• Economic Pressures: The dominance of industrial-scale agriculture prioritizes profitability over sustainability.
• Policy Limitations: Existing federal policies often do not support the financial viability of sustainable farming practices.
• Ecological Shifts: The extensive loss of prairie land has altered native ecosystems, making restoration a complex endeavor.

Personal Reflections and the Emotional Connection to Prairie

The conversation culminates with the authors sharing their personal attachments to the prairie landscape:

• David Hagee describes the sensory experience of the prairie:
  "You can’t think of prairie or be on a prairie without being in the sky. There was a description in one of the books we read where the shadows of the clouds would race across the grassland like clipper ships. And that's what appeals to me, is the wind and the space." (09:38)

• Josephine Marcotte echoes the sentiment, reinforcing the emotional and aesthetic importance of preserving these vast grasslands.

Conclusion

The episode of NPR's Book of the Day effectively highlights the intricate balance between agricultural advancement and environmental stewardship. Through the insights of David Hagee and Josephine Marcotte, listeners gain a comprehensive understanding of the historical transformation of the American prairie, the subsequent ecological consequences, and the ongoing efforts to restore and preserve this vital ecosystem. The discussion underscores the urgency of implementing sustainable practices and policy reforms to mitigate the environmental degradation caused by overreliance on industrial agriculture.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• "We plowed up the prairie and never knew what we were doing because we didn’t know what we were undoing."
  — Josephine Marcotte (05:38)

• "What always surprises me is how if you take a place and bring it back to wilderness or a natural area, all the animals will come back pretty quick. They always find it."
  — David Hagee (01:55)

• "If we could take 10% of the corn belt out of production or a little bit more, put it in prairie strips, these grassy strips that protect the water, we would go a long way towards solving the pollution problems."
  — Josephine Marcotte (08:22)

• "You can’t think of prairie or be on a prairie without being in the sky... that's what appeals to me, is the wind and the space."
  — David Hagee (09:38)

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Note: Timestamps correspond to the provided transcript and are included to reference specific points in the discussion.

Transcript

[Andrew Limbong]

Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. The American prairie is disappearing at a pretty rapid rate. There's a couple different causes here, but the main one is agriculture. But what do we lose when we lose the prairie? That's what writers David Hagee and Josephine Marcotte get into. In their new book, Sea of the Conquest, Ruin and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie. They spoke about their work to Here and Now's Chris Bentley. Where else in a prairie outside of Chicago? That's coming up.

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[Chris Bentley]

I'm so glad that you guys came down here and met me in Midawin National Tallgrass Prairie because I feel like this place kind of speaks to the same things that your book is about the prairie, but also what happened to the prairie when European settlers got here. Basically got destroyed. So this place was farmland. It was also a munitions plant during World War II. Now it's been restored partially to a beautiful prairie again. So what do you think about this place actually just coming here? What are your first reactions?

[Josephine Marcotte]

Well, we love a prairie. We'll drive long distances to see the prairie. And the first thing that struck me when we climbed out of the car was just to hear this chorus of songbirds. I thought, ah, we're home. It's so beautiful. The warblers and the finches and the red winged blackbirds.

[David Hagee]

What always surprises me is how if you take a place and bring it back to wilderness or a natural area, all the animals will come back pretty quick. They always find it.

[Chris Bentley]

Take us back to when people would have first come to a place like this. What would they have seen? Because I know at the time from your book, people complained about the soil being like gumbo and it was impossible to farm, which is wild to think of now.

[David Hagee]

Well, it was to many of the earlier European settlers, it was a terrifying place. They were used to forests and oceans and they came from countries that had been settled years ago and that were very manicured and carefully tended. So when they got to the prairie, many of them were terrified by the openness and by the wildness of it. One of the things that the wagon trains would do that the first people through would do is they would tie a ribbon or a cloth around what they called a compass plant, because there were. The leaves of the plant would align themselves according to the direction north, south, east and west. And they could use that as a compass themselves.

[Chris Bentley]

The compass plant can grow, like, seven feet tall, Right?

[David Hagee]

Right. So they could see that flag way above the rest of the grass.

[Chris Bentley]

I think the compass plant also has roots that go up to 15ft underground, which is one of the amazing things about the prairie and prairie plants. Just talk about the ecosystem and how amazing it is. It might not look like much to people who don't know what they're looking at, but what's so special about the prairie?

[Josephine Marcotte]

Well, one reason that grasses are so fascinating is that they adapted to this extremely harsh, hostile environment farther west from here. Very little rainfall, hot sun, horrible winters. Most of their life, most of their growth is underground, so they can survive a wildfire that sweeps across the prairie. They can survive temperatures 30 degrees below zero. It's just exquisitely adapted to this hostile environment where most other plants can't survive.

[David Hagee]

Prairies are designed to withstand fire, and that is one of the ways that they keep the forest back. The fires burned down the trees, and then the grass moves in behind it. But we've lost that fire. So that's one of the ways we're losing grasslands is because we're letting trees and bushes encroach.

[Chris Bentley]

Right. And the loss of these grasslands is kind of the story of the prairie. I mean, we're here in Illinois, the Prairie State, where we have basically 0% of the prairie left. I think it's 99% cities and farms, basically, and almost entirely corn and soybean farms at that. So what happened? Why did we. And how did we change this vast landscape so completely in the matter of, like, a hundred years or so?

[David Hagee]

One of the choices we made in the book was trying to decide which part of that agricultural history to focus on. And we chose to focus three chapters on, you know, some of the greatest inventions of agriculture. One was the steel plus, which was the only way that they could break through the sod on prairie.

[Chris Bentley]

John Deere's plow, among others.

[David Hagee]

Right. The other one was fertilizer. The invention of fertilizer has almost doubled the population of Earth. And the third one was tile drainage. That was just sheer brute strength and machinery to dig trenches and to lay tile and to dredge rivers to get the water off the land so they could turn it into cropland.

[Josephine Marcotte]

We forget, but the big swatches of the Great Plains were swamps in the 18th century. Big swamps in Iowa. The northern third of Iowa was pretty swampy.

[Chris Bentley]

The Great Black Swamp is western Ohio today, right?

[Josephine Marcotte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were so afraid of these swamps that they inspired these terrible names like Buzzard Swamp and Death Swamp and really dark names, apparently.

[Chris Bentley]

It didn't stop people from wanting to settle it, though.

[Josephine Marcotte]

Yeah.

[Chris Bentley]

So we did all that, or people did all that in the Midwest and the Great Plains. And yet we're still living with the effects of it today. You quote the naturalist Wendell Berry in your book, who wrote, we plowed up the prairie and never knew what we were doing because we didn't know what we were undoing. So how are we still living with the effects of everything you just described? Drainage tiles, fertilizer, industrial agriculture.

[David Hagee]

One of the things that always amazes me is the idea that the transformation of the prairie from grassland to cropland and could destroy an entirely different ecosystem, which is the Gulf of Mexico. I don't know how many millions of acres have been drained and have chemicals and fertilizer applied. And much of that runs off into the Mississippi, flows down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, where all those nutrients create the dead zone where nothing.

[Josephine Marcotte]

Can live closer to home. One result has been that we have thousands of miles of streams and river segments that are classified as impaired by the epa. The. They're unsafe for swimming. They can't sustain aquatic life. And it's mostly because of agricultural chemicals. And I mean, in Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes, there are big sections of the state where kids can't swim in a lake.

[Chris Bentley]

So we're standing here in a tallgrass prairie. But then there's this whole other world of the short grass prairie, which is like west, the Dakotas and West. I guess I didn't know this until I read your book, but today it sounds like the short grass prairie is actively being converted into row crops, sort of in the same way that the Midwest converted its prairie, tall grass prairie, to crops in the 19th century. What's going on? What's driving that change?

[David Hagee]

You know, it's. Again, it's the same thing that drove the change back in the 1800s. It's technology, but again, it's driven by economics. I mean, it is much easier to make money with corn than it is to make money with cattle or by raising bison, if that's what you're doing.

[Chris Bentley]

And what's the impact? What's being lost? Because when I think of the west grasslands, I think of buffalo, I think of ranches and wide open spaces, right?

[Josephine Marcotte]

Well, for sure you're losing wildlife. Bison, wolves, monarch butterflies. But those regions of the short grass prairie, the Dakotas for example, are now seeing all the same problems that we see farther east. The rivers are polluted, they have horrible dust storms. Two summers ago there were dust storms in South Dakota that reminded people of the Dust Bowl. People had to stop their cars. The dust was so thick they couldn't see where they were going. So the same sins of the parents are being visited on the children, so to speak.

[Chris Bentley]

So where does that leave us? How do restored prairies like the one we're in now fit into this? Or what do we do? Because we're not going to be able to bring back 100% of the prairie or anything close, right?

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[Josephine Marcotte]

And I don't think anybody wants that. Anybody advocates that. We're not anti farmer, but we would like to see incentives changed a little bit so that farmers have more choices. And farmers who want to protect the land, want to protect the water, can operate on a level playing field with sort of big industrial scale agriculture. And there are a lot of studies which show that we can solve many of the major pollution problems. We could clean up the Mississippi, we could, we could reduce the dead zone with rather modest changes. If we could take 10% of the corn belt out of production or a little bit more, put it in prairie strips, these grassy strips that protect the water, we would go a long way towards solving the pollution problems.

[David Hagee]

You know, the farmers we have today are living in a system that they didn't create. They very much have to survive and thrive on a commodity system and a federal policy system and with products that they have no control over. So we have a great deal of respect for them and you know, they understand their piece of the earth very well. And there are a lot of things that they could and would do, but they have to be able to do it financially, safely and to avoid the risk that would shut them down.

[Chris Bentley]

I got to ask you, what do you personally love about the.

[David Hagee]

I like the space. You can't think of prairie or be on a prairie without being in the sky. There was a description in one of the books we read where the shadows of the clouds would race across the grassland like clipper ships. And that's what appeals to me, is the wind and the space.

[Chris Bentley]

Thus, sea of grass.

[Josephine Marcotte]

Sea of grass, yeah.

[Chris Bentley]

Well, Josephine Marcati Dave Haggi, thanks so much for talking to me.

[David Hagee]

Thank you for bringing us out here. It's a lovely place.

[Josephine Marcotte]

Thank you.

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