According to a 2022 Journal of Applied Ecology research paper, in the past three decades, tree cover has increased by 50 percent across the western United States. A 2013 study found that, in Kansas, full cedar woodlands—a closed canopy of interlocking conifers—increased at a rate equivalent to 2.3 percent per year over four decades. The NRCS’s Nebraska Great Plains Grassland Initiative suggests that almost 8 million acres of intact grasslands are at risk of being overtaken by woody encroachment.
All told, 62 percent of the North American grassland biome —tall-, mixed-, and short-grass prairie—has been lost, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior. Here at the eastern edge of that region, the supremely ravaged tallgrass prairie might be the first of those grasslands to completely disappear.
This is why, on our bit of land, we destroy trees.
When Tree Cover Causes Harm
WE DON’T JUST CUT THEM DOWN when they’re mature; we pull them out by the root when they sprout, or take loppers to them when they’re a little bigger. Most crucially, for a project of this scale, we burn them when they’re young.
Before European colonization, Native Americans set the immense prairie ablaze for a host of reasons; as a result, the grasslands thrived—and so did the bison who grazed upon them, and the peoples who hunted those bison. Thanks to the prairie’s impressive root system, after fire, new growth would soon emerge from the blackened earth, and herds of bison, who then numbered in the millions, would follow. These fires killed young cedar trees and preserved the grass and forbs from which tribes also obtained fibers, medicine, and nutrition.
European Americans did not just kill, cheat, and remove Indigenous peoples and their cultural burning practices from these lands. They did not just hunt to near extinction the large grazing mammals who ate young woody plants before they grew tall. They actively planted and cultivated the trees those people and bison held back. They planted cedars—I played among them on the struggling wheat farm where I grew up—in rows as shelterbelts against the powerful wind, and all manner of tree species to mitigate the open space and visible horizon that terrified them. More recently, the increasing carbon emissions their industrial society produced also contribute to woody encroachment as atmospheric carbon privileges trees over grasses. Researchers have found that a warming climate allows eastern red cedar, in particular, to outcompete nearby grasses in savannas where the two intermingle.