Prairie Spring（ISBN=）

　　A portrait of spring in the heartland of North America In this
first of four seasonal narratives, Pete Dunne sends a postcard from
the prairie in his characteristically puckish style.The prairie is
an exciting place to explore an unfolding drama–man versus the
environment–and as Dunne and his wife travel through the
heartland, the fleeting nature of the season comes to symbolize the
precarious balance between the two. At the Sandhill Crane Festival
in Nebraska, Dunne observes the struggle between maintaining the
cranes’ habitat and meeting farmers’ needs for water. As in other
habitats, human encroachment is only one of the challenges facing
the preservation of the Pawnee National Grassland in
Colorado.Climate change, invasive plants and animals, and mineral
exploitation are just a few of the others. Conflicts over the
grassland habitat continue between ranchers and prairie dogs and
between oil companies and prairie chickens. Yet Dunne finds
affirmation on the prairie: people putting their lives back in
place after a tornado; volunteers giving their time to conservation
efforts; the drive of all species to move their genes to the next
generation, which manifests itself so abundantly on the prairie in
spring.