Grandpa looked at the shattered corn leaves. “This is hail country. We don’t want to settle here,” he stated in his native Czech. He was in the North Loup Valley in the early 1880s, looking for a suitable place to homestead.

Now, more than ever, Eiseley’s message about humankind’s relationship to the environment is relevant in light of global warming, pollution, population growth, and resource depletion.

Book review of American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains and Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History by Dan Flores.

A poem.