Some blogs just write themselves like this piece from the Raleigh News & Observer about saving land from the evil white man – or, nowadays, WalMart – by calling it a prairie.
Some highlights:
Creating prairies is considered a new way to save some land from the fences, parking lots and highways of progress.
Lawrence Barden, a professor of biology at UNC-Charlotte, said that until the region was permanently settled by Europeans, wide expanses of grassland, some up to 20 miles wide, were common. The prairies were swarmed by birds — meadowlarks, prairie warblers, grasshopper sparrows and loggerhead shrikes — and big game.
“There were bison, too,” he said. “In the mid-1700s people would go out near Charlotte and kill two or three buffalo in one day.
“And 10,000 years ago, there were really huge animals,” Barden continued. “There were camels, horses, giant tree sloths, mastodons and mammoths. They could really keep the place open.”
(Oh, my!)
Those working on prairies say patience is the key to success. It takes multiple burning cycles to beat back the well-entrenched shrubs, maples and sweet gums. In essence, they must destroy one ecosystem to create another.
