# Sea of Grass >[!info]- metadata >*`= this.tags`* >- Online Rating - `=this.onlineRating` | My Rating- `=this.personalRating` >- Status - `=this.status` >- Progress - `=this.currentPage` of `=this.pages`  ## Summary `=this.description` ## My Thoughts >[!quote]+ My Review >`= this.review` ### Highlights - [“] This is the paradox of the prairie. Feared by pioneers, shunned by tourists, dismissed today as a wasteland best viewed from thirty thousand feet, the North American prairie is nonetheless one of the richest ecosystems on Earth. - [ ] A recent soil analysis found that one cubic yard of tallgrass prairie sod contains so many grasses, sedges, flowers, burrowing mammals, worms, mites, nematodes, and soil microbes that on a small scale it rivals the tropical rainforest for biological diversity. And, like the rainforest, the prairie showeases nature's prodigious talent for symbiosis. - [ ] These landscapes have played a central role in the course of human history because they support huge populations of grazing beasts-goats, sheep, cattle, horses-who, in partnership with grass, perform one of nature's miracles: turning sunshine into protein. - [ ] The nascent movement also suggests that more Americans may be embracing what Aldo Leopold called a "[[land ethic]]," the idea that the land is more than an economic asset to be exploited; it is an irreplaceable gift to be honored in its own right—a concept that would have been familiar, even obvi-ous, to the people who lived here before Europeans arrived. - [ ] Towering stands of big bluestem brush your shoulders, their magenta sheaves waving alongside the lacy fronds of feather reed grass. Hummingbirds and monarchs flit from flower to flower and wild raspberry bushes snag the trousers of anyone walking by. The refuge is crisscrossed with mowed footpaths because the thickets of grass and flowers would otherwise be all but impenetrable. - [ ] From the beginning, this fertile place supported a remarkable abundance of wildlife. When the first humans arrived-perhaps around 11,000 B.C.E., although the scholarly consensus keeps changing—they found a grassland so rich in animals that the historian Dan Flores has called it "the American Serengeti." Mastodons and mammoths roamed this land, as well as saber-toothed cats, hyenalike dogs, and enormous canines known as dire wolves— all finding prey in the huge population of horses, camels, giant bison, and other grazing animals that lived off the grass. - [ ] This was not the untamed wilderness imagined by some Euro-peans. In the centuries before Columbus arrived, humans occupied every corner of the American continent, numbering at least five million. Indigenous people established complex societies, built large fortified cities, mastered agronomy, and raised crops such as corn, beans, and squash. In the twelfth century, a great city-state known as Cahokia dominated the central Mississippi Valley. - [ ] Having lived through a war for independence from the English crown, Jefferson also saw small landowners as a bulwark ağainst tyranny—be it by government or industry-whose stewardship of the land would be regulated by "the natural affection of the human mind." #### Chapter 2, Plow - [ ] The federal government became a service agency that dug canals, built roads, and surveyed land. And because many of these projects were designed to help pioneers settle the new land and secure their ownership, they fostered an enduring American attitude toward land. This was the radical new idea—a sharp contrast to feudal Europe and the Indigenous societies of the plains-that those who worked the land were entitled to own it. Land quickly became a commodity to be bought and sold, creating an ethic that revered individual property rights—a philosophy that would greatly complicate efforts to protect soil, water, wildlife, and other natural resources for the next two centuries. ### Literature Notes #### Deep time I often feel a connection to deep time on the prairie, deep time. The sense that so many things are here/have been here before. I’m may ways the prairie shows us the resilience and fragility of the natural world at the same time.