Saving US grasslands: a bid to turn back the clock on desertification

In the hills north of Hell Creek "you could see the sand between the sagebrush from a mile away. Whenever we got hard south winds, you could see the sand blowing."

For a rancher whose livelihood depended on those diminishing grasslands, it was an oncoming economic and ecological disaster in slow motion. For the wider world, it was one more example of how prairies and savannas from Alberta to Africa are inexorably being swallowed by growing global wastelands.