good burns and the grasses were back - the little blue gramas waving about for all the world like thousands of little quarter-notes stabbed into the ground, the side-oats gramas growing heavy with seed-heads that resembled rows of feathers on a lance. It was beautiful.Then the weather started changing. The period that we associate with classic American wilderness description, 1500 to 1850, was a time of climate anomaly, the Little Ice Age. It was great for grass, great for big animals. Now there is global warming, with its tendency in the Southwest, at least, to produce droughts broken by almost unprecedented gullywashers, so that annual rainfall is up while soil moisture is dropping. Fifteen years later, I'm watching the cactus and the kangaroo rats march onto ground Indian-era photos show was a waving empire of grass.It's one small for instance of what we're likely to face at every level of restoration in the 21st century, and a further demonstration of that old maxim of history: what happens next is going to be awfully interesting....
