Prairie

For a millennia, the North American prairie (bordered on the north, east, and south by forest) existed as a complex ecosystem that supported rich life, including aboriginal human cultures. Within the span of a human lifetime, however, it was almost entirely eradicated by conversion into agricultural land-use.

The early settlers, reliant on forests for building materials, firewood, fencing, and hand-crafted implements, initially distrusted a land on which few or no trees grew. That changed with the discovery that the tallgrass prairie could be converted into some of the richest cropland on the continent. Vast acreages went under the plow; other areas were overgrazed by domestic livestock. The assault on the central prairie began in earnest in the 1820s and was sped up by the opening of the Erie Canal, in 1825. The development of steamship routes on the Great Lakes and the westward expansion of the railroad system, in the 1850s, also facilitated large, westward population movements. By the beginning of the Civil War, most of the tallgrass prairie had been put to the plow. The widespread availability of barbed-wire fencing by 1890 released ranchers and farmers from their greatest dependency on wood and marked the final domestication of the prairie.

In the pre-settlement period, almost 60% of Illinois, then nicknamed the Prairie State, was covered by tallgrass prairie. In the post-settlement era, however, only about 0.01% of the original prairie was left. Prairie originally covered 85% of Iowa; in the post-settlement period 0.02% remained. The western states, with an overall drier climate and soils less suitable for agriculture, fared somewhat better, but no state retained more than a small fraction of its original prairie.

Most prairie today represents "island" habitat, existing in isolated patches rather than as a continuous extent of natural vegetation. Island communities are more vulnerable to natural and human-caused disturbances, and experience a higher rate of species disappearance than non-island ecosystems. Typical islands of native prairie, called relics, include small cemeteries that coincidentally preserved the prairie; small preserves in arboreta and demonstration projects; and areas such as railroad embankments in cities where development was restricted or the land was considered unsuitable for building on. About 30% of the remaining prairie in Illinois exists in tiny islands of less than one acre.

The loss of the prairie was part of a broader economic movement that involved both industrialization and the development of commercial agriculture. The economic development of the former prairie states resulted in the almost total eradication of a large unit of natural vegetation. Efforts are under way to restore large tracts of reconstructed prairie that might support relatively small numbers of breeding bison. Seeding with native plants and the use of controlled burns are crucial parts of the management system being used to achieve this ecological restoration. However, the formerly extensive tallgrass prairie will never be totally recovered, because its essential land-base is needed to provide food and livelihoods for an ever-increasing population of humans.