A ‘Green Glacier’ Is Dismantling the Great Plains
One hundred and fifty years ago on Thursday, the novelist Willa Cather was born in her grandmother’s house in Virginia. Though she drew from her Southern childhood throughout her career, plucking memories like grapes from the vine, it was the swelling prairies of Nebraska — surreal in their expanse, in their commune with the sky, in the almost tidal energy underfoot — that conjured her most enduring works, the bluestem eternal that proved her muse.
“The homesteads were few and far apart; here and there a windmill gaunt against the sky, a sod house crouching in a hollow,” she wrote in “O Pioneers!,” the first in her prairie trilogy. “But the great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its somber wastes.”
Like so many other certainties of the 20th century, however — American hegemony, ground water, Social Security, fossil fuels — Cather’s “great fact” is now in question. North America has already destroyed more than 60 percent of its native prairie. We’ve plowed the sod, left the topsoil to blow away, traded wildflowers for row crops, switch grass for suburbs, hay meadows for Home Depots. We’ve cleaved it apart with freeways, transmission lines, irrigation canals and oil pipelines. And now the Eastern redcedar tree is hungry for what’s left.
Thanks in part to roughly 100 years of fire suppression on the Great Plains, this drought-tolerant native tree — once primarily confined to river bottoms and rocky outcrops — has crept from the gullies to the grasslands, from the humid East to the arid West from Texas to South Dakota, and is now dismantling what little remains of one of the most endangered ecosystems in the world.
