In the 1800s, when Europeans first trundled into northwest Iowa to settle one of the country’s last uncolonized tallgrass prairies, they confronted a dramatic and harsh region. Pioneers stood on horses to find their cows among the sea of vegetation and hauled wagons through wetlands so treacherous that they earned names like “Purgatory” and “Devil’s Island.”

But then came the forward march of progress: plows ripped up the grass and laborers sliced into the earth to lay drainage systems. At the beginning of the 20th century, The New York Times pronounced the draining of the Iowan wetlands an engineering feat comparable to the Panama Canal. Former wetlands are rich in nitrogen, and today, this region, called the Des Moines Lobe, is one of the most fertile on Earth, worth billions for its corn and soybean cultivation.

Stop the story there, and it reads as a tale of human ingenuity triumphing over hostile nature. But for all the food and wealth generated by the transformation of the Des Moines Lobe, there’s a dark side: In 2014, nitrate runoff from agricultural pollution forced the Des Moines Water Works to run their nitrate removal system for a record 177 days, to the tune of $2 million dollars.

The utility sued the state’s drainage districts over the pollution — but ultimately lost when the case went to the state Supreme Court. Environmental journalists Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty cover this saga and others in “Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie.” Ultimately, they write, Iowa’s fecund farmland had “created so much wealth, so much regional pride, such a national mythology of conquest” that reversing progress in any way became inconceivable.

Inspired by a series that Marcotty wrote for The Minneapolis Star Tribune, this book tackles the momentous story of the American Prairie: the rich ecological world that existed before first contact, the European settlers who transformed that world into farmland that fed the nation, the price we’re paying now for that transformation, and the efforts to remediate damage. What emerges is a panoramic, stirring story that exhorts readers to reconsider a region that’s “feared by pioneers, shunned by tourists, dismissed today as a wasteland best viewed from thirty thousand feet” and that is also one of the ecologically richest and most endangered ecosystems on our planet.

Hage and Marcotty devote the first part of their book to a narrative familiar to most Americans: the conquest of the West and the subsequent transformation of the “sea of grass” into a “sea of crops.” During Western expansion, settlers plowed 300 million acres of grassland and transformed it using technological innovations like John Deere’s plow, whose polished steel edge sliced easily through the loamy prairie soil; large-scale tile drainage projects like the one that transformed the Des Moines Lobe; and stunning breakthroughs like the development of nitrogen fertilizer, which freed farmers from dependence on crop rotation and manure.

The result was that “in less than a century the Earth’s fundamental natural rhythms — its carbon cycle, its nitrogen cycle, its hydrology, and its wildlife migration patterns, features that had been in rough equilibrium for thousands of years — changed permanently on hundreds of millions of acres.”

It’s impossible to completely condemn this revolution in agriculture, because the plowing of the prairie fed first America and then, as the world wars broke out, Europe. Nitrogen fertilizer alone removed the upper cap on the number of people the planet can support; nearly four billion of us would not be alive without it, the authors write.

But Hage and Marcotty argue that we cannot completely celebrate the agricultural revolution, either. Besides the “moral and human tragedy” of the displacement and murder of millions of Native Americans, the transformation of the prairie into farmland was also an ecological disaster. Hage and Marcotty’s chapters on this environmental fallout are damning.

During the course of their narrative, they take us to the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico, where the Mississippi River dumps out the agricultural poisons it’s collected on its journey south, killing sea life and decimating the local fishing industry. They bring us back in time to the 1930s, when erosion erupted into the apocalypse of the Dust Bowl, and remind us that we haven’t learned the lessons of that national catastrophe: According to a 2007 study, we are losing soil between 10 and 100 times faster than nature can replenish it — and a more recent analysis confirms these figures.

The authors also bring us into the laboratories that created insecticides (like neonicotinoids) and genetically engineered seeds and explain how these and other practices, like monocultural farming, may allow destructive insects to thrive and cause catastrophic damage to beneficial insects, like pollinators.

And their book brings us west to the latest brewing ecological catastrophe: Genetically modified corn seeds are now making crops profitable on the western prairie, a region that was previously too cold and dry for farming. Farmers plowed up one million acres of South Dakota prairie between 2008 and 2016, a transformation that’s dangerous not just because of the impact on waterways, erosion, and insects but also because these untouched western prairies sequester ancient carbon underground. Plowing them up releases that carbon into the atmosphere with devastating climate effects.

Throughout Hage and Marcotty’s narrative, we meet some fascinating people: a rancher who made the novel decision to replace his cows with buffalo, a creature much better suited to the prairie; the water works manager who spearheaded the legal strategy for Des Moines’ water and whose fame rose to such proportions that T-shirts bearing his likeness became fashion items in the city; two farmers who had an epiphany about embracing conservation techniques when they saw the Dead Zone out an airplane window.

But more memorable than these people is the prairie itself. Hage and Marcotty’s writing evokes the strangeness, beauty, and wonder of this threatened landscape: the “towering stands of big bluestem” with “magenta sheaves waving alongside the lacy fronds of feather reed grass” in the eastern tallgrass prairie, the “thin carpet decorated with small cacti, spiky yucca plants, and tiny red asters” in the west. These beautiful passages stir a sense of wonder and will lead readers to the question: How can we save this place?

Hage and Marcotty tackle this conundrum throughout, especially in the last third of their book. It’s a thorny question because it’s often framed in stark terms: the prairie versus our food supply and farmers’ livelihood. But Hage and Marcotty argue that adopting conservation practices can actually help farmers. For example, no-till planting, winter cover crops, and diversified crop rotation can all improve soil health and combat erosion while also saving money in the long run. A pair of ranchers in South Dakota found the same results when they started rotating their cattle from pasture to pasture and allowed native plants and flowers to flourish, techniques which saved them money on livestock feed and fertilizer.

Saving the prairie won’t be easy, Hage and Marcotty acknowledge: Our industrialized, homogenized agricultural system doesn’t lend itself to experimentation or difference; our federal farm subsidies reward specific crops; and demand for livestock feed and ethanol keeps farmers producing soybeans and corn on a vast scale.

But beyond that, saving the prairie will require a paradigm shift both in farming communities and across America. It will require us to reframe our deeply entrenched national attitudes towards conquest, growth, and expansion. That might look like asking farmers to devote 10 percent of their land to native plant buffers, which prevent polluted runoff; or it might look like cordoning off some arable acres as protected preserves or asking consumers to pay slightly more for food.

“Sea of Grass” has its flaws: It’s extremely dense with information and it can be repetitive at times, perhaps because it’s an outgrowth of a newspaper series. Some readers may wonder at how little real estate is given to the power of vegetarianism to combat climate change or bristle at the largely absent narrative of the genocide against Native Americans (although the authors state that exploring this history is not their purpose in this book).

Ultimately, though, this is an urgent read about a region that looms large in our national ethos yet is largely overlooked by many Americans. It is clear that Hage and Marcotty have deep knowledge of and love for this region, its people, and its ecology, and their narrative will cause readers to ponder whether, now that we’ve amassed so much wealth and prosperity from this landscape, we can “restore some of what we’ve taken and heal the scars of our history.”

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