Readers and writers: A sobering look at the vanishing prairie

A sweeping look at the vanishing American prairie and two crime novels set in Minnesota are this week s offerings to our readers Sea of Grass by Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty Random House Courtesy of Random House Agriculture has altered and damaged the very biological and chemical cycles that created the extraordinary prairie in the first place from the creation of soil to the flow and purity of water to the ebb of wildlife and the circulating of elements in and out of the atmosphere It s created intractable litter problems that endanger human soundness and cripple other ecosystems from its damage to insects to the dead zone in the Golf of Mexico from Sea of Grass In this timely and central book subtitled The Conquest Ruin and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie award-winning former Star Tribune writers Hage and Marcotty explore and explain the environmental problem caused by the disappearance of thousands of acres of American prairie that once stretched from Montana to Illinois eastern Minnesota to northern Texas The North American prairie they write is one of Earth s four great temperate grasslands the others being the steppes of Central Asia the Pampas of South America and the veld of southern Africa It is also one of the majority of threatened ecosystems on Earth home to small insects and big grazing mammals Before the Industrial Revolution took hold in farming the untouched prairie grasses created a web of roots that could grow as deep as two feet into the ground When white settlers arrived in the th century they brought with them plows that tore up the prairie for the first time These pioneers used rudimentary plows but when steel plows became available farmers were able to plant and harvest much more food per acre to feed a growing population This affected the prairie s biological diversity as rivers were rerouted synthetic nitrogen became a standard fertilizer and the delicate symbiosis of the prairie was uprooted Over decades the prairie was converted into various of the richest farmland on Earth but the country paid a terrible price The authors help us understand what that price means in chapters examining river dirt bugs and water For Minnesotans the discussion about rivers might be the majority of significant as we learn how the Mississippi picks up fertilizer runoff from rivers that flow into it growing more polluted as it rolls through the Twin Cities southward until the pollutants create a dead zone of chemicals in the Gulf of Mexico Now industrial agriculture is plowing up the remaining grasslands at the rate of million acres a year If the sea of grass is to be saved the authors argue it will take cooperation between farmers who care about the land help from the federal authorities and efforts by eco-conscious consumers Although we are losing everything from bees to oysters Sea of Grass ends with hope that comes from people like South Dakota writer and buffalo rancher Dan O Brien who sees the great creatures that once roamed the prairie as far as the eye could see as a way to restore the animals ancestral home Books about environmental devastation are increasingly common as we watch the natural world we once knew disappear Sea of Grass written clearly and with passion is one of the best The authors will introduce Seas of Grass during a free undertaking at p m Thursday at Magers Quinn Hennepin Ave S Mpls Rattlesnake Bluff by Cary J Griffith Adventure Publications Courtesy of Adventure Publications they hadn t anticipated a rattlesnake s denning instincts the keen skillset of a wolf dog s nose the remarkable aptitude of a DNR herpetologist DNA analysis of isolated rattlesnake populations or the use of implanted chips to track rattlesnake specimens Or that an apparently forged confession might contain the details of what in fact happened from Rattlesnake Bluff A rattlesnake determined on the seat of a Bobcat at a construction site sends U S Fish Wildlife Special Agent Sam Rivers and his wolf dog Gray into assessing a -year-old crime in the fifth book in this appealing series This is no ordinary rattler it s an eastern massasauga an endangered species that doesn t belong in Minnesota although it might have escaped from a Wisconsin research facility where a scientist is implanting snakes to track their movements Rivers is joined by local DNA personnel as he tries to figure out if he necessities to shut down the site where the snake was exposed holding up construction of expensive homes When Gray tracks the scent of two bodies buried in the bluff everything changes The readers know how the decayed bodies of a young brother and sister got to their rocky resting place but Sam does not Meanwhile Sam s boss in Denver is not happy with him staying in Minnesota and getting behind on paperwork he avoids The cast includes a mysterious person who called himself Der Furher as a teenager Sam s fiancee who just wants him to come home and a woman contractor working hard in a business dominated by men Cary J Griffith Courtesy of the author Rattlesnake Bluff gets more complicated and dangerous as Sam and others get closer to figuring out what the snakes have to do with the building site and learn new details about the night the young siblings were killed when hit by a car Rivers is a smart guy who knows his flora and fauna as well as his duty to wildlife even snakes Readers who can t stand the thought of snakes even on the page will be happy to know that the creatures are not described in great detail and one of them is dead The author who also writes nature-based nonfiction grew up roaming the woods fields and waters of eastern Iowa where he developed a lifelong love of wild places Payne Avenue by M T Bartone Modern Prose Press Eddie laughed as he tightened his grip on O s wrist before briskly yanking out the little screwdriver O screamed as he pulled his mangled hand away from Eddie He held it gingerly in his other hand close to his chest from Payne Avenue Set in the neighborhoods surrounding St Paul s Payne Avenue this is the story of the rise and fall of Eddie Bracchio a gangster who returns to St Paul from Brooklyn and sees procedures to build a criminal empire while betraying his powerful boss Related Articles A wave of new owners brings fresh potency to independent bookselling Readers and writers Immersion writing from the heart help non-Native novelist access the practices new books to send restless readers on a summer road trip Literary calendar for week of May Weird Sad and Silent Readers and writers Selections for Mental Physical condition Awareness Month Eddie begins slowly recruiting two teen boys to become his drug dealers Thoroughly and sometimes violently he replaces the neighborhoods low-level crime bosses and builds a fruitful illegal business siphoning money that s rolling in through the books of a restaurant he helps an old woman open What Eddie wants bulk though he can t have beautiful Kate De Luca who s married and has no idea Eddie wants to control and possess her When Kate suffers a tragedy the plot becomes hers as she ponders revenge Payne Avenue is long at pages which sometimes slows the plot But the author does a fine job of giving readers a sense of place with characters moving along the streets that surround Payne Avenue in this tale of a killer whose ambition is his ruin