Joe C. Truett 
Grass 
In Search of Human Habitat

Part autobiography, part philosophical rumination, this evocative conservation odyssey explores the deep affinities between humans and our original habitat: grasslands. In a richly drawn, anecdotally driven narrative, Joe C. Truett, a grasslands ecologist who writes with a flair for language, traces the evolutionary, historical, and cultural forces that have reshaped North American rangelands over the past two centuries. He introduces an intriguing cast of characters—wildlife and grasslands biologists, archaeologists, ranchers, and petroleum geologists—to illuminate a wide range of related topics: our love affair with turf and how it manifests in lawns and sports, the ecological and economic dimensions of ranching, the glory of cowboy culture, grasslands and restoration ecology, and more. His book ultimately provides the background against which we can envision a new paradigm for restoring rangeland ecosystems—and a new paradigm for envisioning a more sustainable future.

Table of Content

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Prologue


1. Promethean Legacy

2. Out of the Forest

3. Science and Faith

4. Playing God

5. Pleasing to the Eye

6. Where the Short Grass Grows

7. Turf

8. Grass and Grazers: An Ecological Primer

9. Bison Plains and Prairie Dogs

10. Taming of the West

11. Production Science Comes to the Range

12. The Last Pariah

13. The Trouble with Livestock

14. Subsidizing John Wayne

1.Truett, Grass 5/29/09 2:49 PM Page vii

15. Collateral Damage

16. Cowboy

17. Resurrection

18. Pleistocene Park

19. Diversity

20. Long Road Home


Epilogue

Notes

References

About the author

Joe C. Truett is senior biologist with the Turner Endangered Species Fund. He is the author of Land of Bears and Honey: A Natural History of East Texas and Circling Back: Chronicle of a Texas River Valley, and coeditor of The Natural History of an Arctic Oil Field: Development and the Biota. He lives in New Mexico.