Phthursday Musings: Cemetery Prairies

Over the weekend I read a truly magnificent piece, and what I would really like this week is if you would all read it as well.

This is a long piece of science journalism focused on the very obscure topic of pioneer cemeteries in Iowa, and how such cemeteries for various reasons are almost the only extant pieces of true prairie in a state which used to be nothing else.

The way this story is woven is exemplary. Among the things explained are why the prairie existed at all; what it actually means for there to be a prairie; why the prairie was so very ideal for conversion to farmland; why pioneer cemeteries are about the only places left in Iowa where prairie can readily be found; why Iowa is different from Illinois, a state which has done more to conserve and restore prairie; explaining why the prairie existed at all, what it means for there to be a prairie, why the prairie was so ideal for conversion; how modern theories of land management enter the picture; the synergies but also the complications for different people interested in preservation and conservation; what rare and beautiful plants can be found in preserved prairies; and, ultimately, a very profound take on the entire question of what it means for modern humans to intersect with nature. While not at all explicitly so, I feel like this piece is a masterwork of metaphysics on top of everything else.

The writer is Christian Elliott, an Illinois-based science journalist who’s been published in a lot of places like National Geographic and Scientific American and Smithsonian and who among other things is a member of something called the Midwest Association of Interdisciplinary Science Expositors (MAISE) which sounds like the group of people who should probably be running this damn country. Also, it seems takes mostly his own photographs, and they’re great, like this one from the article:

By now you should be convinced. Read the wonderful piece and send him some kind words if you’re so inclined.

I’ve actually been working on a longer piece of my own this week and so as not to overwhelm you all (or myself) I’ll keep this week’s Musings very short and just urge you to read “Where The Prairie Still Remains”.

I’ll just chip in that when I read something like this, I don’t just want others to read it too, I want to be able to talk about it, to share with each other in more than a passive manner. I’ve been kicking around some ideas and the one I came up with this week which I would love to hear your feedback on is to find book swaps in the wild (like one which the Cook County Forest Preserve hosted nearby last summer) and use them as an anchor for mini-meetups. My thinking goes that I want other people to read some of the things I’ve read and vice-versa, but a lot of it isn’t readily available at the library, and shipping books around as one-offs is surprisingly expensive, and wouldn’t it be nice to just have a book swap, and hey they already exist so let’s just find one somewhere and have people meet up and get coffee and swap books and also swap buttons or prairie grass seed or Pokémon or whatever. One example of an upcoming book swap is at the Chinatown branch of the Chicago Public Library but maybe you know about others!