This is Michael Maxwell with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out.
Today, I am recommending Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie by Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty, a book that not only focuses on the environment all around us here in Sioux City, it also puts Iowa at the wellspring of some of today’s most challenging conservation issues.
Sea of Grass is organized into three parts: the “Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption” of the book’s subtitle. Each section feels episodic in the way of a bingeable documentary miniseries. Now, while the writing in Sea of Grass may be digestible, the content can at times make this book a nauseating read for an Iowan.
Before moving to Iowa, I hadn’t really heard much about nitrate. I did not know about the nitrate cycle at all, or that human engineered nitrate for fertilizer, an Industrial Revolution innovation, has disrupted the natural ecosystem to the extent that there are about four billion people alive today who could not exist sustained only by the amount of nitrate that is naturally available.
I won’t get too much more into the weeds here, pardon the pun, but suffice to say this book explained so many of the environmental issues I read about in the local news, and that it explains all of this in ways that I could not just understand but could also recognize all around me.
Check out Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie by Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty and more fascinating nonfiction about Midwestern ecosystems at the Sioux City Public Library today!
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