Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1995
Abstract
"Grasslands" was the subject of the seventeenth annual symposium of the Center for Great Plains Studies, held at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, in April 1994. Grasslands are so basic to the Great Plains experience as to be invisible. If you stand here in eastern Nebraska, it is so far in any direction across grasslands to any other landscape (a cornfield is a planted grassland, after all) that the role of grasslands in our lives does not seem worth considering. Local variation is much more visible. You can't see the prairie for the grasses, to adapt the idiom. And yet, grasslands played and continue to playa guiding role in the development of this region. They shape economics, architecture, and social interactions, as well as weather, agriculture, and native species.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 15:3 (Summer 1995). Copyright © 1995 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.