REGINA, SASK. (Nov. 2, 2016) - Canada needs to conserve, and even expand, its grasslands. This is the message Trevor Herriot, a Regina naturalist, artist, writer and grassland advocate, will deliver at the Canadian Forage and Grassland Association's 7th annual conference in Winnipeg Nov. 15 to 17.

 

Herriot has written four books on culture and nature on the northern Great Plains and his fifth book, Towards a Prairie Atonement , set on Manitoba's Spy Hill-Ellice Community Pasture, comes out this fall. He is a frequent guest on CBC Radio Saskatchewan, writes a column on environmental issues for Farming for Tomorrow and posts regularly on a site he calls Grass Notes.

 

During his presentation, Grassland Matters: Some Thoughts on Grassland, Native and Tame, and Why We Need More of It , Herriot will speak about why perennial grasslands, both native and tame, are important not only to the animals that graze them but for everyone; why they are overlooked as lands that must be conserved and fostered; and how producers and consumers, rural and urban, Indigenous and settler people, can work together to conserve, and expand, Canada's grasslands.

 

"Grasslands remind us of our home as children of the savannah, the upright hominids who came down out of the trees," Herriot says. "If we overlook them and their cultural and ecological value today, it is only because their gifts of soil, water retention, biodiversity and fertility have been colonized by the European imperative to grow annual crops on all arable land."

 

Complete details about the conference are available  here.