Great Plains: America’s Lingering Wild

By Michael Forsberg with Dan O’Brien, David Wishart, and Ted Kooser

University of Chicago Press, 2009; 260 pages, $45.00

One of Michael Forsberg’s most arresting photographs shows a female bobcat staring at the camera. The felines are relatively common in parts of the Great Plains, we’re told, but being shy of humans and well camouflaged, they’re rarely glimpsed. The bobcat is emblematic of the Great Plains—both are natural treasures that most Americans are barely aware of. We travel over or through the vast swath of Midwestern landscape as fast as we can, missing the beauty of seasonal flowers, secretive wildlife, and prairie wetlands. Thanks to Forsberg and his essayist collaborators, we now may linger and learn. The images range from panoramic cloudscapes over seas of grass to group portraits of bison, bighorn sheep, and sandhill cranes. The book’s subtitle calls the region “America’s Lingering Wild,” but Forsberg sounds a note of caution: “only a fraction of the habitat from a century ago remains.”

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