Hi, I'm Irafledo. You're listening to Science Friday.

Did you know that most of the American prairie has been replaced by farmland?

Well, what exactly have we lost?

We're destroying it about as fast as we're destroying the Amazon rainforest.

It's an environmental catastrophe, but nobody's paying attention.

Perhaps you remember the 1971 film, The Emigrants, nominated for Five Academy Awards.

I bring this up because there's a scene at the end of the film that has stuck

with me for over 50 years. The story is about a family of Swedish immigrants who have arrived

in Minnesota with grass-filled prairies as far as the eye can see. The farmer, played by the

iconic actor Max von Sito, is searching for the perfect

plot for his family farm. He walks for miles through woods and streams and finally sinks

a rod into the ground, only to see that the dark, rich topsoil goes down more than two feet.

He carves his name into a nearby tree,

falls asleep underneath with a smile on his face. Now, I'm reminded of this iconic scene because

today, the fertile American prairie might just be the most underappreciated landscape in the United

States. Beginning in the early 1800s,

the majority of these grasslands were converted into big industrial farms. Those rich, deep, dark soils,

well, they're mostly gone, along with many of the birds, the bees, the bison, and an ecosystem that has vanished and been transformed over the centuries.

My next guest have detailed the loss of biodiversity in the American prairie and those working to restore what remains.

Let me introduce them.

David Hagi and Josephine Marcotti are longtime environmental reporters and the authors

of Sea of Grass, the Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie. They're based

...