Numlock Sunday: Christian Elliott on the hidden pockets of a lost ecosystem

Photo by Joel Holland on Unsplash

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Christian Elliott who wrote Where The Prairie Still Remains for Noēma. Here’s what I wrote about it:

Iowa was once completely covered by prairie, but that native flora has been wiped off the map by the monocultures of corn and soybeans now covering 65 percent of the state’s land area. Less than 0.1 percent of Iowa’s original prairie remains, so discovering rare places where that original ecosystem survived a century of heavily industrialized agriculture is no small miracle. One such place is the “pioneer cemeteries,” or graveyards that have been relatively undisturbed since their occupants entered the pre-exploited prairie. According to the Iowa Prairie Network, there are 136 known cemetery prairies across the Midwest, and the Network is on the hunt for more. Some of those prairie remnants contain as many as 250 species. Almost all the land in Iowa is privately owned, and 60 pe…