Nature Conservancy Magazine: Spring 2010

Discover America’s heartland, the Great Plains.

Share Your Love of Nature

Share the Great Plains with your friends and family. Send an E-card of a Monarch butterfly photographed by Michael Forsberg in Webster County, Nebraska.

“If I can capture the wonder and beauty of a prairie landscape or a prairie creature through my photographs, my hope is that you, too, will be moved by it and more likely to protect and preserve it.”

— Michael Forsberg, photographer

Go Deeper

Great Plains:
America’s Lingering Wild
Michael Forsberg's book is available at The Nature Conservancy's Marketplace.

Mark Godfrey Selects
Interview with Chris Helzer, master photographer of the American prairie. Watch the audio slideshow.

Great Plains boundary, 1994.
Enlarge this map.

By Michael Forsberg

I have spent a good share of my time trying to make pretty pictures, because I think pretty pictures are important. They’re particularly important here on the Great Plains, where most people on the outside looking in still think this holds nothing but flat land and a monoculture of corn, and where progress and value too often have been measured by how much can be extracted from the land rather than by the enduring value of the land itself. If I can capture the wonder and beauty of a prairie landscape or a prairie creature through my photographs, my hope is that you, too, will be moved by it and more likely to protect and preserve it.

Granted, the beauty here is often subtle. It doesn’t knock you off your feet at a glance, the way the snow-capped Colorado Rockies or the rugged coastline of the Pacific Northwest do. But it can be every bit as remarkable. On the Plains the massive cloudscapes are our mountains and the rolling prairie our sea. This is a place of constant motion. The great nexus of life that evolved here requires freedom to roam, often over great distances, in response to a harsh climate and the ever present battle between grasses and trees, fire and flood, bitter cold, intense heat, and extreme drought. Right angles do not contain the wildness or the character of this landscape. There are no hard edges here. That is why it has always been difficult to delineate on a map where the Great Plains stop and start, but you know it when you are here because you can feel it deep in your bones.

Lately, I’ve begun to think that pretty pictures can be a trap, so I just as often include the power lines and fences, overgrazed pastures, invasive species, and development. I want people to understand that I’m photographing remnants, mere shadows of what had been perhaps the greatest grassland ecosystem on Earth. When I’m photographing wildlife, I often feel that I’m chasing ghosts, capturing surviving wild spirits of species whose numbers have been decimated or all but eliminated from these wide-open spaces. Even on the Platte, where 500,000 Sandhill cranes, millions of waterfowl, and other migratory birds find critical refuge each spring, there is the underlying reality that only a fraction of the habitat from a century ago remains. Its future role for wildlife is uncertain, forever dictated by the shifting winds of power and politics. It is a story line that plays out over and over again up and down the Plains.

For three years, photographer Michael Forsberg traveled the Great Plains, documenting what remains of this once-vast ecosystem. With financial and scientific assistance from The Nature Conservancy, Forsberg completed his new book, Great Plains: America’s Lingering Wild, in 2009.

Explore the Great Plains with Michael Forsberg and learn the region's little-known secrets in this video.