The Impressionists
InApril 1870, an art exhibit opened in Paris featuring famous and priceless works of art. However, at the time, no one knew that these paintings would one day be considered masterpieces. The paintings and the painters were virtually unknown at the time and would remain that way for several years.
In the nineteenth century, French art was dominated by theAcademy of FineArts.Every year the academy held an art show called Le Salon. In 1863, theAcademy rejected one of the paintings ofEdouard Manet. Manet and a group of other independent artists organized their own show, which they called Salon des Refuses (Salon of the Rejected), which opened onApril 15,1874.A、newspa per critic named Louis Leroy visited the gallery and was not pleased with what he saw. One painting of boats in a harbor at dawn byClaude Monet particularly enraged him. It was called Impression: Sunset. Leroy wrote that this piece, and in fact most of the pieces in the show, looked like impressions--a term for a preliminary, unfinished sketch made before a painting is done. Leroy’s newspaper review was jokingly called "TheExhibition of the Impressionists". Within a few years of Leroy’s review, the term "Impressionists" had clearly stuck, not as a term of derision but as a badge of honor, and a new movement was born.
The Impressionist movement included the French paintersEdouard Manet,Claude Monet, PierreAuguste Renoir,EdgarDegas, PaulCezanne, and theAmerican painter MaryCassatt. The techniques and standards employed within the Impressionist movement varied widely, and though the artists shared a core of values, the real glue which bound the movement together was its spirit of rebellion and independence.
This spirit is clear when you compare Impressionist paintings with traditional French paintings of the time.
Traditional painters tended to paint rather serious scenes from history and mythology. "Many Impressionist paintings feature pleasant scenes of urban life, celebrating the leisure time that the Industrial Revolution had won for the middle class, as shown in Renoir’s luminous painting luncheon of theBoating Party. In that famous painting, the sun filters through the orange-striped awning bathing everything and everyone at the party in its warm light. Renoir once said that paintings should be... likable, joyous, and pretty. " He said, "There are enough unpleasant things in this worlD、We don’t have to paint them as well. " It is this joy of life that makes Renoir’s paintings so distinctive.
The Impressionists delighted in painting landscapes (except forEdgarDegas, who preferred painting indoor scenes, and MaryCassatt, who mainly painted portraits of mothers and children). Traditional painters, too, painted landscapes, but their landscapes tended to be somber and dark. The Impressionists’ landscapes sparkle with light.
Impressionists insisted that their works be "true to nature".
When they painted landscapes, they carried their paints and canvases outdoors in order to capture the ever-changing light. Traditional painters gener ally made preliminary sketches outside but worked on the paintings themselves in their studios.
"Classic" Impressionist paintings are often easy to spot because of the techniques used by the painters. One of the first "rules" of the Impressionists, that the colors should be dropped pure on the canvas instead of getting mixed on the palette, was respected by only a few of them and for only a couple of years, but most Impressionists mixed their paints as little as possible. They believed that it was better to allow the eye to

NorthAmerican Grasslands
In NorthAmerica, native grasslands occur primarily in the Great Plains in the middle of the continent. The NorthAmerican prairie biome is one of the most extensive grasslands in the world, extending from the edge of the Rocky Mountains in the west to the deciduous forest in the east, and from northern Mexico in the south toCanada in the north.Average annual rainfall ranges from about 40 cm (16 inches) in the west to 80 cm (31 inches) in the east.Average annual temperatures range between 10 degrees and 20 degreesCelsius (50 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit). In the moist regions of the NorthAmerican grasslands, especially in the northern Great Plains, rainfall is distinctly seasonal, and temperatures can vary widely from very hot in summer to bitter cold in winter.
One hundred years ago, the Great Plains grasslands were one vast, unbroken prairie.
Much of the prairie is now farmland, the most productive agricultural region in the world, dominated by monocultures of cereal grains.
Wheat, barley, soybeans, corn, and sunflowers occupy the land that was once prairie.
In areas given over to grazing lands for cattle and sheep, virtually all the major native grasses have been replaced by alien species.

An important feature of the northern Great Plains grasslands is the presence of millions of glacial depressions that are now small ponds known as prairie potholes. They were formed during the most recent IceAge, when streams flowed in tunnels beneath glacially formed sandy ridges. When the IceAge ended around 12,000 years ago, the retreating glaciers created about 25 million depressions across a 300,000-square-mile landscape--about 83 potholes per square mile.As the ice blocks melted, much of the water was left behind, forming wetlands ranging in size from a tenth of an acre to several acres. The wetlands were soon surrounded by fluttering waves of grasses: shortgrass, mixed grass, and tallgrass.
Today these small wetlands still cover the prairies, although much of the landscape including both native grasses and potholes has been transformed to cropland and grassland for grazing. What does remain of the wetlands, however, still serves as an important breeding area for more than 300 bird species, including large numbers of migrating shorebirds and waterfowl. The potholes fill up with water during spring rains and usually dry out by late summer.Every spring, birds arrive in great numbers--northern pintails, mallards, coots, and pied-billed grebes--4 to 6 million strong, to mate in the seasonal wetlands that dot portions of Minnesota, Iowa, North and SouthDakota, Montana,Alberta, Saskatchewan, and ManitobA、Prairie pothole country produces half of NorthAmerica’s 35 to 40 million ducks and is renowned worldwide as a "duck factory".
Recently biologists have discovered that the prairie pothole region is potentially a vast carbon sink: a natural sponge that absorbs carbon dioxide emissions from cars, factories, and power plants.Carbon dioxide is the most common of all the pollutants acting as greenhouse gases that heat up the atmosphere. Fortunately, however, carbon dioxide is captured naturally and stored in trees, soil, and plants. Scientists have termed this "carbon sequestration". They have determined that prairie potholes hold an average of 2.5 tons of carbon per acre per year when not being farmeD、This means that if the entire pothole region in the United States andCanada were to stop
being farmed, the region would store about 400 million tons of carbon over 10 years--the equivalent of taking almost 4 million cars off the

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