Two hundred and fifty million years ago, during the Paleozoic Era, the land where the Tallgrass prairie now grows was buried under the Permian Sea. Shells and invertebrate fossils at times reemerge to remind us of a geological period that the land has not forgotten. This prairie, which once populated 150 million acres of North America, now covers less than four percent of the continent.
During the early nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, the American Tallgrass prairie was still a vast and diverse ecosystem, second only to the Amazonian rainforest. It provided excellent cropland soil for farmer-settlers as well as a rich landscape for large and small domestic animals to forage. But as a result of over tilling and overgrazing, the extensive vertical root system of indigenous grasses, which reached many feet underground into layers of dark humus, was severed, and now the fertile soil could no longer...