Colorado’s Dead Land Started Recovering After Thousands of Prairie Dogs Were Released

In 1989, the United States government released 714 prairie dogs onto a stretch of ground ten miles outside Denver that had been declared biologically dead. The soil had absorbed forty years of mustard gas, nerve agent, and over 600 distinct toxic compounds. 2.1 billion dollars had already been spent just to stop the poison from spreading into the city's drinking water. Nothing was supposed to grow on that dirt for centuries. The prairie dogs had one small, technical job. Stabilize the soil. But what those rodents did next, on the most contaminated ground in America, would resurrect an entire ecosystem the cleanup engineers thought was gone forever.

Видео Colorado’s Dead Land Started Recovering After Thousands of Prairie Dogs Were Released канала Optic Expedition