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magazine / ja07
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July/August 2007 issue |
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FEATURE
Grasslands splendour
An endangered network of savannah plains in the heart of British Columbia
Photography by Chris Harris with essay by Don Gayton
Beauty, in the form of isolated plateaus and carved river valleys.
Silence, except for a welcoming meadowlark. Timelessness, but for the
knowledge that I'm a temporary guest in the fabled grasslands of
British Columbia. Wind trickling through the bunchgrass carries with
it the clean scent of sage.
Natural grasslands have an understated elegance — no soaring
peaks or crashing waterfalls here. It is a beauty you have to work for,
but also one you can touch. We tend to equate grasslands with the
Canadian prairies, but they can occur wherever drought or soil conditions
prevent the growth of trees, from Arctic meadows to southern
Ontario tallgrass prairies and these tawny hills in British Columbia.
The issue of scale is perhaps why B.C. grasslands are unfamiliar.
Open grasslands and the sparsely treed "savannah" grasslands associated
with them represent less than one percent of the province's land
base. About 15 percent of that has been whittled away by urbanization
and intensive agriculture, particularly the productive and biodiverse valley-
bottom grasslands. And decades of fire suppression have turned
many savannahs into dense forests. The remainder are plagued with the
perennial problems of weed invasion, overgrazing and ATV abuse.
For the rest of this story, visit your local newsstand or go to our store to buy this issue.
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