Word: grasslands
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...location of the palace, and the vast size of Kublai's grounds, can be traced today, with the help of guides from China's Bureau of Relics. It is the ghost of magnificence; only a few shards of colored tile can still be found in the sweep of grassland. Not far away, Chinese industrialization crowds...
Where no written records exist, restorationists turn to the geological record. Pollen preserved in layers of mud, for example, enabled a University of Arizona scientist to determine that a thousand years ago, the Nature Conservancy's Hassayampa River Preserve near Phoenix was covered by a marshy grassland unique to the Southwest. But the presence of corn pollen indicated that 500 years ago, Native Americans had farmed the site. "So do we restore this area to the way it was before the Native Americans disturbed it?" wonders the Nature Conservancy's Richter. "If it's not natural now, then when...
...than 200,000. Crowding is almost nonexistent, and so the attendant evils of crime and hopelessness are minimal. The core of the population also has some link to those people who first halted on the tallgrass prairie and sank their plows. Writes Author John Madson, an eloquent native Iowan: "Grassland of such magnitude was wholly alien to the western European mind. It diminished men's works and revealed them to a vast and critical sky, and forced people into new ways of looking at the land and themselves and changed them forever...
Gradually, the riddle of how grassland becomes a desert unravels. It is most often believed to be ruined by overgrazing, but it can be abused by no grazing at all. "Grazing, like the use of rest, fire or technology, is only a tool applied by a human. You must look at the context, understand the landscape as a whole, observe keenly day by day and change your plans accordingly...
...supports and, as required by federal law, take 15% to 20% of their cropland out of production. In effect, range plowers break prairie land that may have little agricultural value and collect money for keeping it out of cultivation. Says Bernie Spanogle, district forest ranger at the Pawnee National Grassland in Colorado: "People are farming the federal crop programs, not the land...