Where have all the prairies gone?

Here's a quick quiz: Recall three names in Kane County containing the word "prairie."

Easy, right? There's Prairie Street, Wild Prairie Lane, Prairie View School, and a bunch of subdivisions and businesses that lay claim to "prairie" in their titles.

Now, name three native prairie plants. How about prairie mammals?

If this part of the quiz has you stumped, you're not alone. Nor are you to blame. While the word "prairie" is everywhere, prairie is not. You may not see three prairie plants, or three prairie animals, or anything prairie in your comings and goings.

Some say we have a propensity to name places after what we have lost or destroyed. This is true for the prairie. The North American prairie is nearly gone. In Illinois (the Prairie State), it's nearly nonexistent.

Ecologists estimate that less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the original Illinois prairie remains today.

The North American prairie was an ecosystem - big, diverse, dynamic and complex. It was more than a treeless field, more than flat, boring land along the interstate. It was a vast and magnificent landscape of interconnected parts. The prairie comprised grasses and wildflowers by the thousands; animals, from tiny insects to large, grazing herbivores; rich soils of varying texture and color; and fire - BIG fire.

This description only scratches the surface of a prairie. Most of the prairie's life is underground. In a prairie, an estimated 80 percent of the biomass, or living matter, is under the surface. There's an entire world down there, where roots, bacteria and fungi mingle, predators and prey interact, and dirt isn't a bad word.

It's hard to wrap our minds around the magnitude of the prairie ecosystem, both above and below ground. We can envision a sea of rooftops more easily than a sea of grasses. We can imagine thousands of automobiles in rush hour more easily than a million bison rumbling across the land.

But the prairie was bigger than our biggest parking lots, and more vast than our biggest mall. The prairie stretched a thousand miles from the forests of Indiana to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. In Illinois, approximately 61 percent of the state - or 22 million acres - was prairie.

A common metaphor used by Europeans to describe the newfound land was the ocean, or sea. An observer in 1854 wrote, "In the summertime, the prairie was all grass and flower, and you could see as far as the strength of your eyes would let you see, and the tall grass, when the wind blew, was like the waves of the sea, beautiful to behold." Prairie, in the words of contemporary author Wallace Stegner, had "the smell of distance in it."

The immensity of the sea of grassland was formidable to European settlers. Prairie fires, too, put the fear of God in the newcomers. Whether set by American Indians to manage game or ignited by lightning, raging fires swept over the grasslands every year. These fires, though fearsome, nurtured and rejuvenated the deep-rooted plants that made up the prairie.

The prairie was rugged, indeed, as were the humans who inhabited it. The force of American expansion proved toughest of all, however, and in just 150 years, the prairie sod succumbed to the plow, bison fell to rifles, native peoples were displaced, and seamless horizons were broken by barbed wire.

Today, only remnants of the grand prairie hold their ground in the shifting shadows of wind turbines and cell towers.

If rarity imparts value, then prairie is priceless. (Joni Mitchell nailed it when she sang, "Don't it always seem to go, you don't know what you've got til it's gone?")

The good news is efforts are underway to restore, preserve and protect prairie. The Forest Preserve District of Kane County is actively engaged in prairie restoration. Partner agencies, such as park districts and conservation districts, are similarly managing land for prairie. There are lots of volunteer opportunities for those who want to pitch in and help preserve our native prairies.

For information, contact the district's volunteer coordinator at (630) 762-2741 or volunteer@kaneforest.com.

The places and things we name "prairie" reflect our heritage. There's precious little prairie anymore, and we're in charge of what we have left. Let's leave more than just a name on a street sign. May there always be a sea of grassland where children can watch clouds sail across the big blue sky.

• Valerie Blaine is a naturalist with the Kane County Forest Preserve District. Contact her at blainevalerie@kaneforest.com.