#white mountain

[the-barn-rat]

new mustangs who dis

[rabbitcruiser]

National Prairie Day

National Prairie Day, on June 6 this year, celebrates the beauty and ecological value of this often-overlooked ecosystem. Spanning more than a dozen American states and several Canadian provinces, the North American prairie is a vast grassland that offers more biodiversity and beauty than most people realize. With their endless, gently rolling plains and highly productive soils, prairies have been a valued location for farming and ranching for thousands of years. Today, only 1% of tallgrass prairie in the United States remains untouched by farming or development. National Prairie Day promotes the appreciation and conservation of America’s native prairies.

History of National Prairie Day

The United States is home to a dazzling array of geographies and environments. Some, like the towering redwoods of California or the majestic cascades of Niagara Falls, enjoy worldwide reputations as media darlings and tourist hotspots. Other ecosystems, like the humble prairie that covers much of the interior United States, receive fewer accolades but play crucially important roles in the development of the nation.

Defined as a flat grassland with a temperate climate and derived from the French for ‘meadow,’ ‘prairie’ has become almost synonymous with the expansion of the American frontier. Flanked by the Great Lakes and the grandiose Rocky Mountains, the North American prairie extends across 15% of the continent’s land area. Other examples of similar grasslands around the world include the pampas in Argentina, the Central Asian steppes, and the llanos of Venezuela.

There’s more to the prairie than meets the eye. In fact, tall grass prairies host the most biodiversity in the Midwest and provide a home for dozens of rare species of animals and plants, including bison, antelope, elk, wolves, and bears.

Native prairies face extinction as more and more land is converted to agricultural and ranching use. Due to its rich, fertile soil, prairie land is prized for agricultural use. Around the world, almost three-quarters of agricultural regions are located in grassland areas. With only 1% of tallgrass prairie in the U.S. remaining untouched, the American tallgrass prairie is now one of the most endangered ecosystems on the planet. The Missouri Prairie Foundation launched National Prairie Day in 2016 to raise awareness and appreciation for the nation’s grasslands. The organization seeks to protect and restore native grasslands by promoting responsible stewardship, supporting acquisition initiatives, and providing public education and outreach.

National Prairie Day timeline

6000 B.C. The Prairie Forms

The North American prairie forms roughly 8,000 years ago when receding glaciers give way to fertile sediment.

1800s The American Prairie Decimated

Throughout the 19th century, farmers and ranchers, excited about the rich potential of prairie soil, convert almost all of the American prairie to farmland and grazing land.

Early 1930s The Dust Bowl

The combination of years of mismanagement, the stock market crash, and drought conditions come to a head as thousands of families in Oklahoma, Texas, and other parts of the Midwest lose everything when their farms fail, driving them to California and elsewhere to seek work in more fertile fields.

2016 First National Prairie Day

The Missouri Prairie Foundation launches the National Prairie Day campaign to promote awareness and conservation of the vanishing ecosystem.

National Prairie Day Activities

Learn about the prairie

Donate to a conservation group

Plan a visit to a famous prairie

Do a little research to learn about this important American ecosystem and the role it has played in the cultural and economic development of our country.

If you're concerned about the loss of the American prairie, donate to a grasslands conservation group to support their work.

Do you live near a prairie? Try finding the grassland nearest you and plan a visit.

5 Interesting Facts About Prairies

‘Prairie schooners’

Dogtown

Where the buffalo roam

Carbon hero

Rising from the ashes

During the 1800s, when Americans embarked on the long journey westward, their covered wagons were often referred to as ‘prairie schooners.’

Prairie dogs live in vast networks of underground burrows called ‘towns,’ which can cover hundreds of acres and house thousands of prairie dogs with complex social relationships.

When Europeans first arrived in North America, up to 60 million bison roamed the plains — by 1885, there were fewer than 600.

Prairies can help fight climate change — one acre of intact prairie can absorb about one ton of carbon each year.

On the prairie, wildfires can actually be a healthy thing — with more than 75% of their biomass underground, prairie plants are uniquely suited to surviving and thriving after a fire.

Why We Love National Prairie Day

The prairie often gets overlooked

Native grasslands are critically endangered

It reminds us of the diversity of America's ecosystems

It's not often we remember to celebrate grasslands, yet the prairie plays an important role in America's cultural past and environmental future.

With only 1% of America's native prairie remaining, it's more urgent than ever to conserve and protect this vital resource.

The United States has more environmental variety than almost any other country on earth. Celebrating each unique ecosystem reminds us to appreciate and protect all the beauty our country has to offer.

Source

[wouldyourathervisit]

Would you rather visit

Jabal Abyad, Saudi Arabia 🇸🇦

White Mountain, Alaska 🇺🇸

Baishan, China 🇨🇳

Montaña Blanca, Canary Islands 🇮🇨

Belaya Gora, Russia 🇷🇺

Weißenberg, Germany 🇩🇪

Voting ended onMay 20

[jigsawjo]

2024-04-08, 1000, “I Love Michigan”

[downfalldestiny]

Fly further 🌊🏞️❄️ !.

[theroguequeenaniki]

December Day 2: Red ❤️

#KimickaPhotoADay

We went thrifting today and I picked up these burgundy/maroon (they’re darker without the filter XD) boots!

[zoeflake]

"WARNING Hiking this trail often results in a call to search and rescue. It does NOT lead back to Wesley Forest. It takes hours to exit the mountain via this route. The trail is often brushy and hard to follow. Be prepared."

[sixcitiesofficial]

The Heart of the Mountain

Long ago, in the depths of a mountain that had yet to be named, there was a god, and that god had questions. 

It was an odd thing for a god to have questions, because it was a god. It possessed limitless power based on manipulation of cosmological forces. It didn’t need to ask why the sun rose. The sun rose because the god’s sister had birthed a great and fiery dragon. In several millennia, the god would approve as an elven sage became so incensed with this explanation that she would ascend in a ball of incandescent magic to argue with the dragon for the rest of time, and there would be two suns. But at this moment, there was only one sun. 

If the gods were all abstract concepts made manifest and given limitless power, did anything truly exist. If all of creation was a reflection of the limitless power of the gods, why then was it bound by seemingly mundane laws, such as gravity? The Mountain paused, and made note of the notion of gravity, because it had noticed that things typically only fell in one direction, drawn towards a greater mass.

Understandably, the other gods sometimes needed a break from their querulous sibling. 

Still, the Mountain had questions, and it needed someone to help it look into these questions. Someone had to understand the workings of reality -- insofar, it noted, as reality existed, and was not just a consensus reached by observation, a mass delusion that all living beings agreed upon in order to not go mad in the face of the infinite -- and, more importantly, make notes on reality. 

At first, the Mountain considered recruiting some of its siblings’ creations for this very important task of Making Notes On The Nature Of Physics -- the Mountain paused, and wrote another note reminding it to invent physics, and then while it was at it, the other sciences, and also mathematics. But some of these projects might take more time than was allotted to its siblings’ creations. Worse, while the abyss would take their souls and return them to new bodies, the newly returned souls wouldn’t remember where they’d left off in the process. 

No, the Mountain decided, as it made a series of other notes about things like chemical interactions and the use of acidic compounds, and why some rocks radiated a dangerous energy, and tucked those away for later, it would have to take matters into its own hands. The Mountain made a note to determine if it did, in fact, have hands, or just the abstract concept manifested in the most functional form for its purposes. It was, after all, a god, and therefore could have easily just moved the matter with its will.

When the gods had made the world, they had populated it with a variety of living things. Some of those things were relatively hairless and bipedal, and the Mountain’s siblings had quite leaned into that form, just tweaking little things to suit their needs. The Mountain dismissed the humanoid form for its purposes. There were only so many variations before one ran out of ideas, after all. It did consider the notion of a long-lived slime mold capable of advanced calculations but suspected that, while this would be efficient, it would also be quite disgusting.

The Mountain began to review its notes on the various living things in the world. Not trees, it thought. Though they were long-lived and very good at recording their immediate conditions, they were also immobile, which would make observing things not near them very difficult. Fish were similarly restricted to aquatic observations, and as the Mountain looked deeper into the oceans, it discovered that it was in fact quite concerned about what life had gotten up to in the trenches, and decided to leave all of that alone, even if a squid could take notes on ten different topics at once. Birds did have the advantage of exceptional mobility and eyesight, but the Mountain’s preliminary experiment to see if birds could take notes on the wing did not end well. Also, the crows kept writing naughty words instead of taking notes. 

After much deliberation and careful experimentation, the Mountain reached the conclusion that the optimal form for research and development was something with clever hands, a diligent work ethic, and ample fat stores to survive long-term stays in a library or other academic setting. With much solemn ritual and even more solemn observation of lab safety, the Mountain bestowed upon the creatures of the woodlands the light of knowledge. Unto the humble creatures of the field, the mice and rats, the foxes and badgers, the beavers and squirrels, the moles and shrews, the Mountain gave wisdom and understanding. It granted them the ability to ask questions of the natural world, to dig as metaphorically deeply as they had previously done quite literally. It granted them exceptionally long lifespans, so that they would have plenty of time for their experiments. It also made necessary biological adjustments so that they could properly handle lab equipment -- once they had invented lab equipment, of course, and the Mountain made a note to impart through a prophetic vision the concept of a laboratory. 

Unfortunately, the Mountain only realized too late that it had left a little bit of the light of knowledge lying around, and that, while that was on a very high table, and the Mountain had only turned its back for a moment, that was long enough for the raccoons. If nothing else, the Mountain supposed, the raccoons would ask questions that no one else dared to ask. There was, of course, a reason why no one dared to ask some of these questions, but the Mountain rationalized this by telling itself that at least the raccoons smart enough to not be blown to smithereens when they discovered white phosphorous would pass that knowledge along to their descendants. 

The Mountain could have hidden the white phosphorous deep beneath the earth, of course, but while it had been chasing down the raccoons, the moles had invented a preliminary mining process, and the squirrels were well on their way to a well-organized storage system. This pleased the Mountain. Though progress might bear casualties, someone would write down what went wrong, and eventually find a solution