2017 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize Winner: Dan Flores's American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains

In a corner of northeast Nebraska, at Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park, twenty-first-century visitors can view the startling articulated remains of some of the area's abundant ancient wildlife-various species of rhinos, camels, horses, dogs, and deer-that gathered to drink and bathe at a subtropical watering hole where they succumbed to the deadly ash and were buried in it.[...]began the great chemical and bounty war against wolves, boosted by livestock associations, territorial and state legislatures, and federal agencies like the Bureau of Biological Survey, strychnine being the cheap and effective weapon of choice.Emboldened by passage of 1973 s Endangered Species Act, a broad range of regional and national NGOs, along with some state and federal assistance, has taken up the cause of restoring and re-wilding the Plains.[...]American Serengeti asks us to become enlightened and morally engaged citizens of the Great Plains.Officials who deny the influ- ence of human-generated carbon dioxide on global warming or who mock the very idea of climate change now head the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture.