Word: tallgrass
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Iowa eight cities with populations over 50,000 but none with more 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...
There are still, however, some places where the tallgrass prairie remains nearly as the pioneers saw it--vast, rolling expanses reaching beyond the horizon. U.S. environmentalists would like to keep it that way, and so would the National Park Service. Last month Park Service Director William Penn Mott toured the proposed site for the nation's first Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve: 50,000 acres near Pawhuska, in the Osage Hills of Oklahoma. "You have a jewel here," he told ranchers and conservationists at a barbecue on the Foraker Ranch, one of the properties that could make up the preserve...
...bison and elk are virtually gone, and preserving what remains of the prairie has long been a challenge for conservationists. An effort to establish a tallgrass park at a site in Kansas foundered seven years ago because of local opposition. Ranchers were reluctant to surrender commercially exploitable land...
...hopes of resolving the conflict between conservationists and local interests, the Park Service has endorsed the idea of creating a tallgrass "preserve" instead of a prairie park. That way, limited cattle grazing, hunting and oil drilling would still be permitted. The Government also plans to acquire land for the preserve only from willing sellers. Even so, the Indians remain wary. "Any act creating the preserve can later be amended," says Attorney Ralph Adkisson, a member of the Osage tribal council. "There will be pressures later for limiting any economic activity in the preserve...
...persuade Congress to approve the plan as early as next year. "We are going to have a prairie preserve," he vows, "and it's going to look just like it looks now. We want to tell the whole story, not just the botanical story, not just the tallgrass story, but also the story of the Osage Indians, the raising of cattle and the exploration for oil. I think it's just a matter of sitting down with all the interests and working out the details." The preserve can be created, he believes, for about $20 million. Says Mott...