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

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Books, Arts

4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2025

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

The North American prairie is home to bison, elk, wolves and bald eagles – and it's disappearing at a rapid rate. In their new book Sea of Grass, writers Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty chronicle the forces behind the loss of this ecosystem. In today's episode, they join Here & Now's Chris Bentley at a prairie outside of Chicago for a conversation about their research. They discuss the innovations in industrial agriculture that have transformed the prairie to farmland, the ecological consequences of that change, and what could be done to restore parts of the prairie.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. The American Prairie is disappearing.
0:08.3	At a pretty rapid rate, there's a couple different causes here, but the main one is agriculture.
0:14.1	But what do we lose when we lose the prairie? That's what writers David Hagi and Josephine Marcotti get
0:20.0	into in their new book, Sea of Grass,
0:22.4	The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie.
0:26.2	They spoke about their work to hear he now is Chris Bentley, where else, in a prairie outside of Chicago.
0:31.5	That's coming up.
0:34.9	I'm so glad that you guys came down here and met me in Mid-Awin National Tallgrass Prairie,
0:39.0	because I feel like this place kind of speaks to the same things that your book is about.
0:43.9	The prairie, but also what happened to the prairie when European settlers got here, basically got destroyed.
0:50.3	So this place was farmland.
0:52.0	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? 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.
1:12.2	I thought, ah, we're home. It's so beautiful. The warblers and the finches and the redwing blackbirds.
1:18.4	What always surprises me is how if you take a place and bring it back to wilderness or a natural area,
1:24.7	all the animals will come back pretty quick. They always find it.
1:29.7	Take us back to when people would have first come to a place like this. What would they have
1:33.5	seen? Because I know at the time from your book, people complained about the soil being like
1:37.4	gumbo and it was impossible to farm, which is wild to think of now. Well, it was many of the earlier
1:42.9	European settlers, it was a terrifying place.
1:45.4	They were used to forests and oceans, and they came from countries that had been settled years
1:50.8	ago and that were very manicured and carefully tended. So when they got to the prairie, many of them
1:56.5	were terrified by the openness and by the wildness of it. One of the things that the wagon trains would do,
	...

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