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Great Plains

Shelterbelt

Trees that helped save America’s farms during the Dust Bowl are now under threat

Environment

The Great Plains were the nation’s breadbasket, but drought in the 1930s created the Dust Bowl. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s solution was to plant trees as a shelterbelt to help hold back the dust. The plan worked, but now some farmers, forced by economic necessity to maximize crop yields, are cutting them down.

Black-footed ferrets.

The black-footed ferret is making a comeback in the Great Plains

Environment
The World

Can Prairie Dogs Save Mexico’s Prairie From the Desert?

Prairie dogs could be saviors of Mexico’s former prairies

Environment

New Ken Burns documentary looks at Dust Bowl, ‘worst sustained environmental disaster’ in U.S. history

Arts, Culture & Media

T. Boone Pickens at TED Conference, advocates for alternative energy plan

Environment

Energy tycoon T. Boone Pickens has a plan to end America’s dependency on foreign oil, he says. At the 2012 TED conference in California, Pickens outlined his “Pickens Plan,” a vision to boost the American economy by investing in domestic clean energy sources.

The World

Can Prairie Dogs Save Mexico’s Prairie From the Desert?

Prairie dogs once numbered in the billions across the prairies of the West and Mexico. Today there is a fraction of the original population left but activists are working to bring back the prairie dogs and possibly the prairie along with them.

The World

Ode to Ogallala

A Kansas writer on America’s giant, underappreciated and overexploited groundwater formation.

The Living on Earth Almanac

This week, facts about…the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, as documented in John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” and in songs by Woody Guthrie.

The World

Buffalo Commons

Scott Schlegel reports on a plan to reclaim the ecology of the wild West by turning the Great Plains into a commons where the buffalo roam. The plan has cattle ranchers, farmers and ecologists divided.