Word: tallgrass
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...case in point: of the 5 million acres of tallgrass prairie that rippled to the horizon when settlers first forged west across what is now Iowa, only 200 remain, much of it in bits and pieces along highways. Butterflies are the main pollinators of those grasses and flowers, but the variety of vegetation is rapidly decreasing as the butterflies are forced to forage for nectar in ever smaller prairie fragments. Prairie phlox, for example, one of the most common Great Plains flowers, depends on the butterflies to reproduce. But if the phlox is broken up into small stands, the butterflies...
...Life on the Mississippi. The author's visceral decision to explore one American locality was an intuitive leap from the restlessness of Blue Highways. And it was a leap toward the nation's center. He had seen Chase County's Flint Hills and the bits of remaining tallgrass prairie as a boy. He was attracted in part because the historical past was very recent (white settlement began in 1856) and because the present is isolated from shopping- mall modernity, so that both are faded like old jeans...
...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...
...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...