The PROSE Awards, Award winner, Biological and Life Sciences

GREAT PLAINS: America's Lingering Wild has won it's first award! The Prose Awards are the American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence. Thanks and credit is due to Dan O'Brien, David Wishart and Ted Kooser for their contributions to this book. Awesome!

 

Above the fruited ‘Plains’

December 20, 2009

Americans may know more about the threats facing the Amazon rainforest than those facing the Great Plains, among the most endangered ecosystems in the world. The vast expanse between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains is a land of bison and bighorn sheep, extinction and environmental degradation. Photographer Michael Forsberg crisscrossed the region gathering evidence to rebut the notion that the center of the United States is a wasteland. He makes his case in “The Great Plains: America’s Lingering Wild’’ (University of Chicago), an oversized work of unconventional beauty.

© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.

SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW
Holiday Travel Books: By JOSHUA HAMMER, Published: December 3, 2009

GREAT PLAINS
America's Lingering Wild
By Michael Forsberg
260 pp. University of Chicago. $45.

Photographs of the endangered ecosystem of the prairies and steppes between the Mississippi River and the Rockies. Above, bison in the snow.

 

Great Plains: America’s Lingering Wild
By Michael Forsberg with Dan O’Brien, David Wishart, and Ted Kooser
University of Chicago Press, 2009; 260 pages, $45.00
Reviewed by Laurence A. Marschall
Review: December 2009 - January 2010

One of Michael Forsberg’s most arresting photographs shows a female bobcat staring at the camera. The felines are relatively common in parts of the Great Plains, we’re told, but being shy of humans and well camouflaged, they’re rarely glimpsed. The bobcat is emblematic of the Great Plains—both are natural treasures that most Americans are barely aware of. We travel over or through the vast swath of Midwestern landscape as fast as we can, missing the beauty of seasonal flowers, secretive wildlife, and prairie wetlands. Thanks to Forsberg and his essayist collaborators, we now may linger and learn. The images range from panoramic cloudscapes over seas of grass to group portraits of bison, bighorn sheep, and sandhill cranes. The book’s subtitle calls the region “America’s Lingering Wild,” but Forsberg sounds a note of caution: “only a fraction of the habitat from a century ago remains.”

 

Top 10 New Radical Gifts

Are you like me -- suddenly realizing that the holidays are only weeks away? And are you totally and completely convinced that you don't want to give the same old, same old this year? Then my favourite New Radical gift ideas might just come in handy. Hopefully you'll find something for the hearts, minds, and souls of the ones you love. (New Radicals are people who are putting the skills they acquired in their careers to work on the world's greatest challenges. For more about the New Radicals, please see archived articles.)

WISDOM
Award-winning photographer Michael Forsberg believes that we can save the Great Plains -- the grasslands that stretch across western North America, second only to the Serengeti in size. His new book, Great Plains - America's Lingering Wild, the most gorgeous coffee table book to come along in years, spells out what's wrong and what we can do. Many of the stories in the book were written by Dan O'Brien, author of a number of books about the region. Dan also raises buffalo in South Dakota, a sustainable (and healthier) alternative to beef, which he sells through his company, Wild Idea Buffalo. You can even order a combo -- buffalo steaks and an autographed copy of the book. A feast for all the senses!

 

November 2009, The 'Great Plains,' by Paul Johnsgard.

The Great Plains cast a footprint-shaped imprint over the heartland of North America that covers a million square miles, the heel resting gently on the glacial-shaped plains of eastern Alberta and the toes touching the muddy shorelines of Texas and northeastern Mexico. Across much of this 1,800-mile north-to-south distance perennial grasslands once exerted their quiet dominance, sustaining the lives of the ecologically and culturally diverse tribes of Native Americans and of the hundreds of species of mammals, birds and reptiles. These grasslands also supported myriads of smaller vertebrates and invertebrates that are much less well known and tend to be overlooked by present-day casual observers.

Michael Forsberg is no casual observer and has spent several years visiting remote corners of this grand but now sadly fragmented ecosystem, photographically documenting the best of what remains. And it is a glorious documentation; most of the photos are not only highly artistic but also ecologically informative. Most of the images occupy an entire page, but sometimes spill over to cover two pages of this coffee-table-sized book. Any photographer perusing the book will repeatedly be brought up short with envy and admiration, wondering how in the world some of the images could have been obtained. As one who has wandered with camera in hand over much of the same country as Mike, I am often reminded of the fact that I have seen many of these same places and species but also never captured them in the same way that Mike was able to do so effectively. I would never have believed that one could, for example, obtain salon-quality photos of a wild cougar in western South Dakota or a full-frame scene of a prairie-nesting Sprague’s pipit, a will-o’-the-wisp grassland spirit that I have rarely been able to approach any closer than about 50 yards.

Mike managed to assemble a blue-ribbon team to help tell his story. Ted Kooser compares Mike’s photos to the brief flashes of distant landscapes visible through the open doors of boxcars as a freight train whizzes past a Dakota railroad crossing. And I have often thought that, of the tens of thousands of photos in my own collection that were acquired in over a half-century of photography, the total exposure times for all these images would add up to only a few brief seconds of one’s life. Effectively choosing how and which of those tiny slices of time should be saved for visual posterity is the mark of a great photographer. Mike has chosen very well.

Dan O’Brien is a rancher-falconer-writer who, in the words of Shakespeare, truly knows a hawk from a handsaw. He is also a great storyteller and in this book recounts some of his experiences with Mike, with the bison that he has been raising commercially for more than three decades on the shortgrass prairies of South Dakota and with the Great Plains generally. He points out the critical importance of water in sustaining life on the Plains; the true Holy Grail of the Great Plains is not some mythical chalice, but rather the subterranean reservoir of our region’s purest water, the Ogallala aquifer.

David Wishart is a University of Nebraska geographer who has been documenting geography and human history for several decades, with a special interest in the near-destruction of the Native American culture following European settlement. Professor Wishart provides historical overviews for each of four major sections, which consist of an overall historical introduction plus separate accounts of the northern plains, the southern plains and the tallgrass prairies that form a dynamic eastern boundary connecting the grass-dominated plains with the deciduous forests of America’s Central Lowlands. There are also four accompanying maps that identify national grasslands, national parks and monuments, prairie preserves and similar natural attractions in the Great Plains.

Wishart’s text is laced with many historic photos, dating from as early as 1859. One especially memorable one is a 1933 photo of some 1,600 dead prairie dogs, their corpses artistically arranged so as to spell out U.S. BIOLOGICAL SURVEY across a badly overgrazed landscape. Now part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and renamed the Division of Animal Damage Control, poisoning prairie dogs and coyotes is still a favorite pastime for many government employees, while other federal and state biologists are trying equally hard to protect prairie dogs in order to preserve the nationally endangered black-footed ferret. Speaking of irony, Dan O’Brien describes how the nests of some threatened least terns and endangered piping plovers, for which the U.S. Corps of Engineers had constructed artificial nesting islands at great expense in the Missouri River, were flooded and the chicks drowned when the Corps raised the river level high enough to let a barge pass to provide a load of turkey feed to a downstream farm. About the same time, Mike managed to photograph a hawkmoth pollinating some nationally threatened western prairie fringed orchids just a few days before the ditch-growing orchids were all cut down by a mowing crew. Such heartbreaks are all too common experiences for those people who love spending time in the natural world.

The book concludes with a list of addresses, phone numbers and Web sites of 41 private and governmental organizations concerned with the conservation and management of our natural resources, plus 23 literature citations that relate to Professor Wishart’s introductory sections. Assuming that your bookshelf is strong enough to withstand the book’s weight (over four pounds), this is a volume that any lover of the Great Plains should certainly have. Considering the hundreds of marvelous color plates, the book’s relatively low price is probably a reflection of subsidies by The Nature Conservancy and many private benefactors. One cannot view these natural treasures, even if only vicariously, and fail to appreciate that, in the facing of ever-mounting environmental crises, we must preserve as many of these remnants of our grassy Eden as is humanly possible.

“Great Plains: America’s Lingering Wild”
Photographs and Field Journals: Michael Forsberg, Foreword: Ted Kooser,
Essays: Dan O’Brien, Chapter Introductions: David Wishart
Publisher: University of Chicago Press (2009)

 

Published Tuesday November 15, 2009

Forsberg, Michael with Dan O'Brien & others. Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild. Univ. of Chicago. 2009. 256p. photogs. index. ISBN 978-0-226-25725-9. $45. NAT HIST

Comprising 1,000,000 square miles and stretching 1800 miles from southern Canada to northern Mexico, the American Great Plains is one of the world's largest grassland ecosystems. Increasingly, the biodiversity of this historically resilient region is threatened by human population growth, agriculture, and climate change. In an effort to address the environmental plight of his native region, Nebraska-based photographer Forsberg has created an exquisite, bittersweet love song to the Great Plains. This magnificent pictorial collection represents three years of field work, and every image is worth lingering over. Readers unfamiliar with the Great Plains will appreciate historical geographer David Wishart's extensive introduction, which illuminates the region's often overlooked significance in American history. Award-winning novelist O'Brien (The Contract Surgeon) contributes a series of short essays reflecting his trademark mix of sentiment and cynicism, and the lyrical foreword by American poet laureate Ted Kooser is not to be missed. VERDICT Essential for readers interested in Midwestern history, ecology, and wildlife; fans of Midwestern literature will also enjoy.—Kelsy Peterson, Prairie Village, KS

STARRED REVIEW.
Great Plains: America’s Lingering Wild
Michael Forsberg with Dan O’Brien, David Wishart, and Ted Kooser.
Univ. of Chicago, $45 (260p) ISBN 9780226257259

The increasingly bi-coastal citizenry of the U.S. and Canada know less and less of the great central plains of the North American steppe, but this engrossing book from photographer and naturalist Forsberg, with ecological and geographical essays by O’Brien and Wishart, fills that need in overflowing excess. Forsberg’s photography is spectacular, capturing the wide-open spaces of locales like the South Dakota Badlands and the fluid movement of its wildlife. As Wishart points out, the Great Plains are far from flat, comprised of rugged river valleys, outcrops of old volcanoes, glacial potholes and buffalo wallows, and formerly-vast marshlands. Univ. of Nebraska geography professor Wishart contributes historical and geographic overviews of three major ecological regions: the Tallgrass Prairie, the Northern Plains and the Southern Plains. The authors also look at the history of cross-continent exploration by the Spanish and the French, as well as 18th century fur traders who traversed the Rockies decades before Lewis and Clark. Author O’Brien (Buffalo for the Broken Heart) provides vivid, precise, and emotional essays that describe the ecological present and the hope for future developments in grasslands restoration. Wonderful maps of the entire Great Plains and individual regions add a great deal to this informative overview, making it a coffee table book worth studying. (Oct.)

 

Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild
Forsberg, Michael with Dan O'Brien & others.. Univ. of Chicago. 2009. 256p. photogs. index. ISBN 978-0-226-25725-9. $45. NAT HIST

“The Great Plains, flowing from Canada to Mexico and embracing a dozen American states, is a ‘complicated and critical mesh of ecosystems,’ a vast region containing tall prairies, steppes, wetlands, badlands, tablelands, mountains, and canyons. The plains’ beauty is by turns dramatic and subtle, its environmental damage severe. It takes a big book to portray such an immense, complex place, and this spacious volume, vividly introduced by poet Ted Kooser, fits the bill. Intrepid photographer Michael Forsberg presents breathtaking images of wide-open spaces and portraits of wildlife from bison to butterflies, bobcats to frogs. Historical geographer David Wishart contrasts the lives of the region’s Native peoples with the deleterious impact of settlers, who plowed up the grasslands, sending countless species into decline and losing precious topsoil to wind erosion. Wildlife biologist, rancher, and writer Dan O’Brien—flinty, funny, and skeptical—dissects the mythology of the Great Plains, the ‘monumental hubris, greed, and lack of common sense’ that led to its near destruction, and, on the upswing, today’s bold restoration efforts. In all, a quintessential and crucial American story, powerfully told.” (October 2009)