# What impact does the American prairie have on our climate?

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/climate-cast-316665/what-impact-does-the-american-prairie-have-on-our-climate
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/climate-cast-316665/what-impact-does-the-american-prairie-have-on-our-climate.md
Podcast: [Climate Cast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/climate-cast-316665)
Published: 2026-01-30T10:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://www.mprnews.org/episode/2026/01/30/climate-cast-what-impact-does-the-american-prairie-have-on-our-climate
Audio file: https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/5/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/tracking.swap.fm/track/VnCzW2iO9G8z4eDWfXCd/play.publicradio.org/podcast/o/minnesota/podcasts/climate_cast/2026/01/29/climate_cast_sea_of_grass_01292026_20260129_128.mp3?awCollectionId=apm-ClimCast&awEpisodeId=01KG5VCRQZB2R87WQ1S2RXF0BE
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/climate-cast-316665/episodes/what-impact-does-the-american-prairie-have-on-our-climate
Duration seconds: 288

## Resource

Minnesota’s prairie, in the southwestern part of the state, is a biodiverse ecosystem that’s home to buffalo, bees and tall grass. In the book, "Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie," Josephine Marcotty and Dave Hage dig into the significance prairies have to the climate. MPR News chief meteorologist Paul Huttner talks with Hage in depth about the American prairie. The following has been edited for length and clarity. Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation. What drew you to write about the American prairie? The book grew out of a series that Josephine wrote when we were both working with the Minnesota Star Tribune. She was the environment reporter. I was her editor. She had come across a pair of remarkable studies, which showed that today, we are plowing up the continent's remaining grasslands. That's grasslands west of here, into the Dakotas and Montana. We're plowing them up at the rate of a million acres a year. That's about as fast as we're destroying the Amazon rainforest. It's an environmental catastrophe, but nobody's paying attention. It's bad for wildlife, it's bad for clean water and it's especially bad for climate change. How do you think about the prairie in a climate context? These grasslands are one of the greatest carbon sinks on the planet. Grasses inhale carbon dioxide from the air. They exhale oxygen. They take the carbon from that carbon dioxide, and they store it deep underground in Prairie soils. You know, these grasses can have roots that go 8-12 feet deep. It’s estimated that the world's grassland soils hold about a third of all terrestrial carbon stocks. Jo Handelsman at the University of Wisconsin says grassland soils hold more carbon than human beings have emitted since the In…

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