William Stanek's The Living Badlands Biography
Erosion, Fossils, and the Long Memory of the Prairie

Badlands is a landscape being dismantled in public. Rain, frost, wind, and gravity strip away sediment and expose worlds that disappeared millions of years ago. Fossils emerge as cliffs retreat. Around those eroding formations, prairie lives on. William Stanek's The Living Badlands Biography follows ancient environments, fossil life, erosion, grasslands, wildlife, Lakota homeland, settlement, federal power, conservation, tourism, and the continuing meanings attached to a landscape where natural history and human history remain inseparable. The formations look permanent from the highway. They are not. This is the biography of land that remembers by disappearing-each season of erosion exposing evidence of what came before while carrying part of the record away.