by johan

Tallgrass prairie once covered almost all of eastern Kansas, as well as parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan, 170 million acres in total. Today, the ecosystem has been dramatically reduced; just four percent of the historic range remains, scattered across the continent in slivers and fragments. The largest of those fragments is here, in the Kansas Flint Hills, a landscape of gentle grassy hills that seem to roll, like ocean waves, to the horizon, and whose uplands are almost entirely given over to cattle grazing. 1 The region comprises roughly 10,000 square miles, stretching north to south, from Nebraska into Oklahoma, in a 50- to 100-mile-wide swath that bisects the state between the 96th and 97th meridians. Our home, a modest ranch house with a leaky basement, sat just within the western edge. My parents still live there. I left the state in 2008, after getting my journalism degree, bound for Chicago, a place that had once been prairie. Shortly afterward, my brother moved to Los Angeles. It didn’t feel like we were fleeing, but we were. In fact, we were typical. As the historian Leo E. Oliva once noted, “A major export of Kansas has been its talented youth.”