And but, for many years now, dialogue concerning the Inexperienced Glacier has been largely relegated to the dusty confines of commerce journals and agricultural conventions. Maybe it is because the overwhelming majority of our remaining grasslands are privately owned. Maybe, as our forests burn and our levees break, there’s little sympathy left for the livestock business, accountable for roughly 15 % of the world’s greenhouse gasoline emissions — by no means thoughts the numerous results of tree encroachment that bleed far past the ranch. Or maybe, as considered one of Cather’s New York critics as soon as mentioned, or so she claimed, “I merely don’t care a rattling what occurs in Nebraska, irrespective of who writes about it.”
If America desires to protect what’s left of Cather’s non secular homeland, one thing higher than what Dr. Twidwell calls “postage-stamp prairies,” then “the clock is ticking,” he mentioned. The excellent news is that prescribed hearth, the place achieved repeatedly, has proved to successfully halt the Inexperienced Glacier’s unfold. The truth is, the Loess Canyons Rangeland Alliance, a gaggle of neighboring landowners in southwestern Nebraska, is among the first documented teams to halt the encroachment on a regional scale.
And but far too many landowners refuse to burn, paralyzed by reminiscences of wildfire, afraid of the liabilities hooked up to setting their pastures ablaze. Whereas the Agriculture Division’s Pure Sources Conservation Service in 2021 launched its first-ever biome-scale “framework” to guard the Plains’ remaining grasslands, what it calls “the world’s most imperiled and least conserved ecosystem,” it’s a far cry from the form of top-down federal efforts to transform prairie to forest that led us right here, nevertheless unwittingly. The framework, primarily based on the most recent science by Dr. Twidwell and different rangeland ecologists, goals primarily to defend and increase the “grassland cores” via prescribed hearth and different practices partly sponsored by the federal authorities and others. In the long run, nevertheless, these efforts depend on personal landowners’ willingness to undertake them.
Not way back, whereas reporting on the invasion, I buried myself in bluestem on the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie, simply south of Pink Cloud, Neb., the place the novelist spent most of her childhood. At simply 612 acres, it’s a postage stamp, to make sure. Nonetheless, it has by no means been plowed and appears a lot the way in which it did when Cather lived right here — not by the grace of God, thoughts you, or the spirit of Cather. The grass billows and the prairie swells as a result of the Willa Cather Basis units it ablaze when circumstance permits. Since 2006, the muse has eliminated roughly 10,000 invasive bushes, lots of them Japanese redcedar, through reducing and prescribed burns.
However for a second, I set all that apart. I watched the grass hum, so many stalks buff and bending within the February wind. I watched the clouds feather and circulate. Like Jim Burden in “My Ántonia,” I used to be, for a second, “solely joyful.”
