Word: tallgrass
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...case in point: of the 5 million acres of tallgrass prairie that rippled to the horizon when settlers first forged west across what is now Iowa, only 200 remain, much of it in bits and pieces along highways. Butterflies are the main pollinators of those grasses and flowers, but the variety of vegetation is rapidly decreasing as the butterflies are forced to forage for nectar in ever smaller prairie fragments. Prairie phlox, for example, one of the most common Great Plains flowers, depends on the butterflies to reproduce. But if the phlox is broken up into small stands, the butterflies...
...Life on the Mississippi. The author's visceral decision to explore one American locality was an intuitive leap from the restlessness of Blue Highways. And it was a leap toward the nation's center. He had seen Chase County's Flint Hills and the bits of remaining tallgrass prairie as a boy. He was attracted in part because the historical past was very recent (white settlement began in 1856) and because the present is isolated from shopping- mall modernity, so that both are faded like old jeans...