You're listening to shortwave from NPR.

I flew to Colorado not to go to the beautiful majestic Rocky Mountains,

but to drive the other direction four hours into the short grass prairie of southeast Colorado.

That's a reporter Julia Rosen. She wrote a story about grasslands for the Atlantic.

I just drove way down these quiet rural roads and then further down these bumpy dirt roads and pulled off.

She was visiting the Southern Plains land trust.

It's an organization whose mission is to protect and preserve short grass prairies.

And the executive director, Nicole Rose Moreno, had given Julia GPS coordinates

for one of their more isolated preserves.

And I got out of the car and I walked out into this grassland and pretty soon the car was tiny and basically obscured.

And I was just in the middle of this sea of grass.

There were grasshoppers and wildflowers, prairie dogs and pronghorns.

And she realized walking out there just how extraordinary grasslands are.

One of the reasons I think it's easy to overlook grasslands is that they now are typically pretty small.

Like you might see a field and there's nothing particularly imposing or terrifying about a field.

You would never get lost in it. But in this landscape where it was literally grass for miles and miles in every direction,

it was like, wow, this is a forbidding landscape for a little human.

But also an essential landscape for little humans and a lot of other animals.

There's all sorts of life that evolve to live on them.

I mean grazing animals like bison and antelope.

And these animals only exist because grasslands exist on earth.

And then of course you have pollinators and all sorts of other smaller animals that are equally important.

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