Preserving, in an Ocean of Grass, a Sense of Infinity
TWO hours southwest of Kansas City, the sky stretches and the land begins to roll. The wooded hills of eastern Kansas metamorphose into undulating plateaus, crowned by an ocean of grass that stands tall to meet the horizon. Driving along Interstate 35, I recognize the signs: a highway marker instructing vehicles to pull over during the burning season, another indicating a warren of cattle pens directly ahead.
Soon I join a caravan journeying into the grasslands beyond the freeway. I have come here to watch the filmmakers Aimée Larrabee and John Altman shoot the final scenes of 'Last Stand of the Tallgrass Prairie' on the ranch of Bill and Maggie Haw in the Flint Hills near Emporia. New York is heavy with snow, but on this February day Kansas is as warm and clear as spring.
I grew up on these plains, some three hours west, where my great-grandfather settled. Opportunity had lured him from Pennsylvania into Apache territory, where he ran cattle on some two million acres along the Mexican border, served under the lawman John Slaughter and kept an eye on Geronimo with a crew that included a man who called himself Jim Lowe, a k a Butch Cassidy. But the sweeter buffalo grass of Kansas beckoned him north in his maturity, and more than a century later my family still lives on this land, in a house that began as a dugout, on a prairie so isolated that the nearest town is 15 miles away.
Friday night on most PBS stations (next Sunday at noon on WNET in New York), 'Last Stand of the Tallgrass Prairie' will tell the story of the people of the grasses and the promise that brought us here.
'No mountain can be as beautiful for me as the far horizon, level as a floor, 20 or 30 miles in the distance,' wrote the playwright William Inge, a native of Kansas. 'The sight fills me with a wonderful feeling of personal freedom, and also with a sense of infinity.'
Ms. Larrabee was introduced to these prairies as a child, when her parents traveled on I-35 and she first spied the Flint Hills: a swath of rolling plateaus strewn with jagged stone -- and thereby saved from the settlers' plows -- that bisect the state from north to south. What distinguishes the Flint Hills from the rest of the Kansas prairie is the tallgrass, reaching upward of eight feet, with a root system that extends into the earth some three times its height. It was to this land of grasses that Coronado, mesmerized by the glint of the sun on their stalks, ventured in 1541 in search of gold.
Still, recalling what inspired her to take on the project, Ms. Larrabee said: 'I only thought the prairies were beautiful. I had no idea of their scientific aspects.'
What she and Mr. Altman conceived as perhaps a dozen location shoots across four seasons evolved into a project lasting five years, as the filmmakers went into the Flint Hills and beyond, interviewing ranchers, scientists and descendants of the American Indians who first laid claim to the land.
With the singer Lyle Lovett as host and the actor Michael Murphy as narrator, 'Last Stand' chronicles the evolution of the North American prairies as a whole -- from their genesis in the shadows of the Rocky Mountains to their destruction with the advent of row-crop farming -- but especially the region of tall grasses at their heart, a land of stark beauty and harsh climate.
The tallgrass prairie, which once stretched across the continent, is today the most endangered ecosystem in North America; less than 5 percent of it remains. We rightly worry about conserving the planet's wetlands, yet a plot of these native grasslands contains more species than a parcel of rain forest the same size. Not only do the grasslands provide a home for a diverse range of animals, from the black-tailed jackrabbit to the bald eagle, and more than 600 species of plants, but they are also integral to the production of fresh air, absorbing some 200 pounds of carbon dioxide per acre annually.
The scientists at the Konza Prairie Research Natural Area near Manhattan, Kan., in the Flint Hills some 70 miles north of the Haw Ranch, have devoted much of the last 25 years to studying the conservation of the tallgrass prairies, around the world as well as in North America, from the steppes of Mongolia to the Serengeti of Africa to the pampas of Argentina. Owned by the Nature Conservancy and administered by Kansas State University, the 8,600-acre site is a testament to what nature has known all along, and to what humans discovered thousands of years ago: in order to survive, the tallgrass prairie needs to be grazed, needs to be burned.
Seventy million years ago, the Rocky Mountains had yet to rise -- creating a shallow inland sea to their east -- and the North American prairies did not exist. But by the time the first humans migrated onto the continent some 12,000 years ago, that sea had dried up, leaving in its wake drought-resistant grasses with buds just below the surface, which expanded as wind scattered their seed, fire destroyed forests and the grazing of prehistoric mammals stimulated their growth.
But maintaining the prairie is no easy feat. In its reduced state, the things that once kept it thriving -- fires, set by lightning, that burned hundreds of thousands of acres, and grazing by vast herds of bison -- no longer take place. Left to their own devices, the grasslands would disappear within 20 years, said Dr. David Hartnett, Konza's director.
The American Indians mimicked nature's patterns, and by setting great fires they lured bison, which craved the newly burned grasses' tender shoots. Later, settlers followed the Indians' example, and the contemporary Flint Hills rancher manages the land's idiosyncrasies with a tried-and-true regimen: burn the dry top-grass in the spring; graze through the summer; allow the grass to lie dormant in the winter. What would seem anathema to standard conservation practices -- the use of fire -- has been proven to maintain the prairie's biodiversity.
As Rose Bacon, a Flint Hills rancher, likes to put it: 'We don't raise cattle. We grow grass.'
IT is stewards like Ms. Bacon who are the heroes in this story of the preservation of one of the nation's richest natural resources. 'We wanted to show that these ranchers are really the saviors of the prairies,' Ms. Larrabee said. 'It comes back to establishing that this is the way the system works. You can work with it, or you can try to change it.
'This is really the story of grasslands worldwide and how best to conserve them, now that it's too late to go back. And we've tried to answer the question we first asked ourselves: 'Why care?' '
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