From "A Tapestry of Change," an essay by
Donald Worster introducing The Inhabited Prairie, a book of photos
by Kansan Terry Evans
The
past is a living tapestry that begins right under our feet and unrolls
over the hills and valleys, the farms and villages behind us. Some of
its threads can be picked out as distinctly cultural, but most are the
purposeless skeins of water and air, green pigments of chlorophyll,
ribbons of DNA, flashes of sunlight. We may call some of that fabric
"history" or "economics," the rest "evolution" or "geology," but it
is all one past.
If
you want to grasp the complex wholeness of that tapestry, you could
do worse than spend some time on the North American prairie. Here, the
intricate weave is out in the open for anyone to scrutinize. The great
bowl of sky brews the continent's most unstable patterns of weather,
an instability that drives both human and nonhuman life in unique directions.
The limited rainfall is matched by great gusty winds, causing high rates
of evaporation and low soil moisture that explain the dominance of grasses
over trees. Underfoot the dark brown earth is the product of 10,000
years of organic chemistry, though before that Holocene soil existed,
there were other soils, and before them were vast inland seas, the primordial
source of life, now solidified into chalky swells breaking the surface.
Natural selection has thrown out such innovations as the pronghorn,
the prairie dog, the big bluestem grass, and the little blue grama.
And here too have come, though only in the last few moments, a succession
of human settlers. Like all forms of life, they have been tested for
their adaptive skills, though none has been tested for all that long.
A
few centuries ago the North American prairie was still beyond the ken
of Western Civilization, except for the quixotic band led northward
by Coronado in the 1540s. Tens of millions of bison were the largest
assembly of legs and brains to be seen. Several hundred thousand Indians,
the descendants of people who had been gathering and hunting here for
at least ten millennia, defined what it meant to be human. Today, the
prairie has not only been "discovered"; it has been radically changed
- changed perhaps more than any other biome in what we now call the
United States. Americans have invaded with ferocious speed and in a
geological instant have rewoven the ancient grassland into corn land,
wheat land, pig land, cattle land. Our innovations, like nature's, continue
to proliferate but at a far more rapid rate: cattle feed lots, natural
gas pumping stations, four-lane highways, truck stops, gated communities,
irrigation systems.
Here
on the prairie, or what once was prairie, we can find revealing lessons
in what humans have done to the earth and what that doing has done to
us - lessons of success or failure in cultural as well as biological
terms. Many other such tapestries of change offer themselves for study:
places like the prairie in being no longer wild or natural or pristine
but where the age-old conversation between humans and the natural world
ceaselessly goes on. It may be, however, that this one stretching across
the middle of our continent is the most instructive we've got.
Worster is Hall distinguished professor of American
history. These are the first four paragraphs of his essay introducing
The Inhabited Prairie (University Press of Kansas, 1998).
The North American prairie is just one site where "the age-old conversation
between humans and the natural world ceaselessly goes on," writes KU historian
Don Worster.
To see larger versions of these pictures, please
click here.
The
past is a living tapestry that begins right under our feet and unrolls
over the hills and valleys, the farms and villages behind us. Some of
its threads can be picked out as distinctly cultural, but most are the
purposeless skeins of water and air, green pigments of chlorophyll,
ribbons of DNA, flashes of sunlight. We may call some of that fabric
"history" or "economics," the rest "evolution" or "geology," but it
is all one past. 
If
you want to grasp the complex wholeness of that tapestry, you could
do worse than spend some time on the North American prairie. Here, the
intricate weave is out in the open for anyone to scrutinize. The great
bowl of sky brews the continent's most unstable patterns of weather,
an instability that drives both human and nonhuman life in unique directions.
The limited rainfall is matched by great gusty winds, causing high rates
of evaporation and low soil moisture that explain the dominance of grasses
over trees. Underfoot the dark brown earth is the product of 10,000
years of organic chemistry, though before that Holocene soil existed,
there were other soils, and before them were vast inland seas, the primordial
source of life, now solidified into chalky swells breaking the surface.
Natural selection has thrown out such innovations as the pronghorn,
the prairie dog, the big bluestem grass, and the little blue grama.
And here too have come, though only in the last few moments, a succession
of human settlers. Like all forms of life, they have been tested for
their adaptive skills, though none has been tested for all that long.
A
few centuries ago the North American prairie was still beyond the ken
of Western Civilization, except for the quixotic band led northward
by Coronado in the 1540s. Tens of millions of bison were the largest
assembly of legs and brains to be seen. Several hundred thousand Indians,
the descendants of people who had been gathering and hunting here for
at least ten millennia, defined what it meant to be human. Today, the
prairie has not only been "discovered"; it has been radically changed
- changed perhaps more than any other biome in what we now call the
United States. Americans have invaded with ferocious speed and in a
geological instant have rewoven the ancient grassland into corn land,
wheat land, pig land, cattle land. Our innovations, like nature's, continue
to proliferate but at a far more rapid rate: cattle feed lots, natural
gas pumping stations, four-lane highways, truck stops, gated communities,
irrigation systems. 
Here
on the prairie, or what once was prairie, we can find revealing lessons
in what humans have done to the earth and what that doing has done to
us - lessons of success or failure in cultural as well as biological
terms. Many other such tapestries of change offer themselves for study:
places like the prairie in being no longer wild or natural or pristine
but where the age-old conversation between humans and the natural world
ceaselessly goes on. It may be, however, that this one stretching across
the middle of our continent is the most instructive we've got. 