When I had first read the title of this book I wasn't entirely sure what it was going to be about. I do know that this is not entirely what I was expecting. The idea of buffalo potentially being a vital to helping some of the issues surrounding climate change and global warming was fascinating to me. I won't pretend to understand too much about farming, but the author did a good job explaining how some of it works. The part that stood out to me the most was that due to the size of the buffalo, the prairie plants moved a lot of their innerworkings underground more which in turn caused the carbon to be ingrained further into the soil than most places. The migration patterns were also interesting to hear about. I know other species have similar practices, but it was upsetting to hear the effects of how cutting back on this played out, especially once barbed wire came into play. Years and years of recognizing patterns, teaching practices, and helping the land was practically destroyed to be moved to better suit the Americans. More specifically the idea of splitting up the land to for the Native Americans so that they could be more "White" and fit in better to what the Americans wanted.
Another thing I found interesting was the term "Carbon Cowboys". By looking back at yesterday's methods these people have worked towards having animals mimic the natural migration patterns of other herbivores, like the buffalo, as a way to help the land grow in a natural way and even allow for plants to properly recover. Another way they are working to help with this climate crisis is reducing and even eliminating plowing so that the microbes can diversify in the soil and become better for agricultural purposes. This would promote better plant growth and would prevent unnecessary carbon from being released from the soil. These ideas they have adopted seems like a wonderful start to helping put things in a better natural state. We just need to make this something that is practiced more than it is now.
2 comments:
I was interested in the term "carbon cowboys", especially that the term seems to have been around for a while. For my environmental biology lab, we've been at North Park and seen the buffalo on top of the hill. They are so beautiful and cute!
I really like how you mention the changes that occurred after the Europeans started settling on this land, specifically, the implementation of barbed wire and fences. The main reason buffalo were so important to the functionality of their ecosystem was their ability to migrate throughout the plains. This allowed a very diverse group of plants and animals to exist over a very large area which in turn helped improve soil health. Using barbed wire to confine the buffalo to a specific area which eliminates their ability to migrate was a large factor that led to the declination of soil health.
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