Grass one step up on life's great pyramid

Grass is a type of plant growth that nearly everyone takes for granted, but which is today absolutely vital to the existence of most human beings, not to mention wild and domestic animals. Almost every major world food crop maize, wheat, barley, rye, millets, sorghum, rice is a grass: even sugar and rum are made from the grass called sugar cane. If you eat meat wild or domestic or drink milk, the odds are that it is mainly grass fed, even sometimes when it comes from a goat or a camel. Neither are supposed to eat much grass, but they do. So next time you dine give thanks for the existence of grass. Grass is easy on the eye, with its fresh green, as a lawn, a cricket pitch, or a golf course. It is beautiful when it stretches in a wide sweep to the horizon, rippled by the wind, as on the last African plains of Red Oat Grass, russet in sunset light. In the giant forms known as bamboo grass is used for building, basket-making, walking sticks, fishing rods, fencing, its values and uses are practically limitless, and hardly a human being or animal on this earth does not daily see or use some form of grass. Yet the debt we owe to the grass and to grasslands is often forgotten, even abused, to our own detriment Men often burn it when it is dry, either to make walking easier or lo get new green shoots for livestock: but many grasses have adapted to that regular process and are not harmed by it, withdrawing, as it were, into a root system dial is actually heavier and more extensive than the dead growth above ground. Fire even helps grass compete with trees that would otherwise shade it out of existence. More seriously, men thoughtlessly, and at their own peril (which they ignore), overgraze it with their livestock, so causing water loss and soil erosion