When Europeans arrived in North America in the 16th century, one-fifth of the continent was covered by grasslands. Roaming the treeless Great Plains, Spanish troops routinely got lost in what they called a “sea of grass.” The name stuck. But those grasslands are threatened today. The sea of grass has largely become a “sea of crops,” write Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty in their superb exploration of the region, Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie (Random House, May 27). “The western shortgrass prairie, in states such as South Dakota, Montana, and western Kansas, is disappearing at the rate of one million acres a year as farmers plow up grass to plant corn, wheat, and soybeans,” they explain. “That’s an area the size of Connecticut disappearing every three and a half years. With little notice, these grasslands are vanishing faster than the Amazon rainforest.”
Sea of Grass also documents how multinational food manufacturers and agrochemical corporations have been polluting the land. In fact, agriculture has supplanted industry as the country’s leading source of polluted river water. “As a result,” the authors write, “hundreds of communities across the Corn Belt have water that is unsafe to drink.”
Several other new books take the measure of an often-overlooked America—areas not unlike those that William Least Heat-Moon toured in his celebrated 1982 travel book, Blue Highways.
James Dodson, who has written numerous books about golf, walks far longer than any 18-hole course in his latest work, The Road That Made America: A Modern Pilgrim’s Journey on the Great Wagon Road (Avid Reader Press, July 1). The Great Wagon Road is a centuries-old trail that extends from Pennsylvania to Georgia. “The Great Wagon Road is probably the least known historic road in America,” Dodson writes. Once a Native American trail, it later served immigrants moving out of Philadelphia. The author encounters a historian who speaks of new arrivals to the region: “The good news,” he says, “is that many of the migrants we see coming here from Central and South America are hardworking folks eager to make a living.…This is a place that has welcomed immigrants for hundreds of years.”
In his first book, Stephen Starring Grant hits the road for work. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Grant chronicles his life as a Blacksburg, Virginia, letter carrier in Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home (Simon & Schuster, July 8). Grant celebrates the landscape and takes pride in providing a public service: “When I carried the mail I was never just me, but something much larger.”
On the other side of the country, first-time author Josh Jackson makes a pilgrimage to what some call “leftover lands.” While many flock to California’s national parks, often forgotten are the state’s 15 million acres that are managed by the Bureau of Land Management. Jackson writes about them thoughtfully—and includes his lovely photographs—in The Enduring Wild: A Journey Into California’s Public Lands (Heyday Books, June 24). Campers don’t need reservations to stay on the land, and this book just might have readers packing their gear: The great outdoors awaits.
John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.
