From the January 15, 2001 issue of High Country News 

Plains Sense
by Florence Williams

When the county-by-county census data for the year 2000 are
complete, analysis will reveal bad news for the Great Plains:
substantial population loss in rural counties, an aging demographic
and declining fertility rates.

Deaths vastly exceed births, schools are closing, their contents
auctioned, and families are selling the farm. While rural areas
across the U.S. have grown overall, the Great Plains, along with
parts of the Mississippi Delta and western Corn Belt, remains
uniquely forlorn.

None of this grim news is really new. Rural Plains' counties peaked
in 1920 and have lost over half a million people - a third of their
population - since then. Remarkably, hardly anybody on the outside
noticed, despite the recent quickening of the decline. The region
is largely invisible - or was, until a pair of academics named
Frank and Deborah Popper came on the scene a decade ago (HCN,
9/26/88, 12/16/91).

Since then, the Poppers have more or less been on a roll, like Wall
Street's Motley Fools or analyst Henry Blodgett, who had the good
fortune to predict the early rise of Amazon.com. The Poppers are
the Faith Popcorns of the Prairie. Not only did their dire
prognostications materialize, they actually accelerated due to
tanking commodities prices.

"We clearly hit a nerve through luck and common sense," says Frank
Popper. "It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out this
region will continue to de-populate, age and face further economic
declines."

Nor did it take a rocket scientist to predict the reaction, which
ranged from anger to rage. When the Poppers spoke in Plains towns
in the early 1990s, police were often present to protect the
couple. The nicest thing they were told in those days was: Go back
to New Jersey and solve your state's problems.

Yet this summer, the amiable Poppers rode a manure spreader in a
centennial parade down the Main Street of Gwinner, N.D. That the
soft-palmed New Jersey academics would ever mount such a machine
seems unlikely; that they would do so in a position of honor in a
small town on the Great Plains seems nothing short of stupefying. 

It's been 13 years since the couple first pitched their idea of
turning the ailing plains into a vast "Buffalo Commons," a venue
for bison and prairie restoration, ecotourism and niche marketing
of bison products. Since then, they have gone from being "East
Coast academic Martians" (in the words of Frank) to being, well,
almost local.

"The Poppers don't have horns any more," pronounces Jack Zalenski,
editorial page editor of North Dakota's Fargo Forum.

So pervasive is their influence that the term "Buffalo Commons" is
now the name of a chamber music society, an enviro-novel, a
furniture cabinet store in Oberlin, Kan., a road bypass in Oklahoma
City, a birding safari group, a Web design firm, a University of
North Dakota adult outreach program, a North Dakota medical
heliport, and a North Dakota company specializing in heavy
machinery, named by its owners with thumb-nosing irony, but now,
significantly, out of business.

"We started off being very threatening," says Deborah Popper, the
geographer and number-cruncher of the pair. "People thought we had
power, that we were some sort of front for the government. One of
the reasons attitudes are changing is that we really did serve some
useful function in causing a discussion. People typically thanked
us for giving them a wake-up call, even if they disagreed with
everything else. Now we're getting invited back. This has been a
really busy year."

The Buffalo Commons concept went from a poetic idea (an exalted way
to end a paper on regional geographical decline) to an astoundingly
publicized provocation to a useful land-use metaphor and back to a
poetic idea, one that is haphazardly but undeniably creeping toward
reality. Since the Poppers' proposal, buffalo numbers have
increased exponentially, to the point where some 300,000 animals
now live in North America, mostly on the Plains. Originally, the
Poppers suggested a preserve of 130,000 square miles, nearly the
size of Montana. While that hasn't happened, today one man alone -
Ted Turner - runs bison over an acreage larger than Delaware, and
other ranchers have followed suit (see story page 10).

After a few years of relative peace and obscurity in the mid-'90s,
the Poppers are back, in full New Jersey regalia, spending lots of
time on and talking about the Plains. "This concept has become an
intellectual annuity for ourselves," jokes Frank Popper.

Like most of their triumphs over the years, the Poppers' Gwinner
parade ride was tinged with ambivalence, complexity and some
awkwardness. They came to town in part to watch a local play, a
satire called "Professor Prank's Proposal, or Don't Let the Doctor
Buffalo You," about a New Jersey professor who drugs the
country-folk and then swindles them out of their land for his
buffalo herd.

"We just poke fun," says schoolteacher and playwright Dolly Winger.
"Out here, we never trust folks from out East."

Winger says that at first she was suspicious of the Poppers, but
now agrees with their assessment of decline. "I grew up in a
farmhouse north of here built in 1920," says Winger, 54. "Now you
can't even tell it was ever there. Nobody goes any more. My father
sold the farm to a bigger farm. It's like we never existed."

Meanwhile, there's a cafe in Gwinner (pop. 1,000) that sells
buffalo meat. The town even served some up for the centennial
picnic.

The Poppers took in the melodrama with good grace and a dose of
academic distance. "It struck me as a nice instance of the
grassroots cultural penetration of the Buffalo Commons idea," says
Frank.

It was Deborah Popper's geographical research that showed huge
chunks of the Plains as lacking large hospitals, interstates and
nearby retail service centers, chunks that had lost more than half
of their residents between 1930 and 1980, where poverty and median
age significantly exceed national averages. Seventy-two percent of
the Great Plains lost population between 1960 and 1990. Kansas has
6,000 ghost towns, some still warm.

It's Manifest Destiny in reverse.

In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner both overstated and
over-anticipated the closing of the American Frontier. He saw
westward migration occurring in orderly yeoman-filled waves, first
to the Mississippi River, then to the Rockies and on to California.
But if you use Turner's definition of frontier - two people per
square mile - all censuses after 1890 show the sparse frontier
returning to the Plains. Thousands of disillusioned homesteaders
picked up and left. Those who stayed either consolidated the land
into larger farms or ranches, or eked out a substandard living.

Demographically, the frontier reversed itself early in the 20th
century, making a U-turn east. Kansas has more frontier counties
now than a hundred years ago. By 1998 population estimates, 35 of
North Dakota's 53 counties meet the frontier definition. Forty-six
of them have lost, rather than gained population. The only places
that have grown surround metropolitan areas, where rural people are
moving for jobs.

Over a third of the Plains' counties - 900,000 square miles - hold
fewer than six people per square mile, and nearly half of those
counties hold fewer than two people per square mile.

The frontier is not only surviving, it is also expanding at rates
unprecedented since the Dust Bowl. If Turner thought taming the
frontier helped define American values and character, what does it
say about us that we have failed? Did Western communities ever
really exist as separate and insulated from urban markets and
corporate or federal capital?

Most Americans are so used to grumbling about the problems of
growth that we are stunned, and not a little excited, to learn that
a fifth of our interior looks post-apocalyptic. In a voyeuristic
sort of way, the Great Plains just got interesting. Sparseness and
abandonment now seem like a novelty. The Poppers have been doing
the most American thing imaginable, turning a reversal into an
opportunity: a clean slate for the next new myth.

An evolving metaphor

In Souris, N.D., just shy of the Canada border, no one is in at the
Cenex gas station. A bulletin board advertises a "canola risk
management meeting" and haircuts for $7. The post office, hardware
store, grocery, and cafe all share the same low-slung
aluminum-sided, red-roofed building. No one is there, either. This
is Bottineau County, which had 17,295 people in 1910. It had 7,241
people, and dropping, in 2000. In the 1990s alone, 10 percent of
the county either died or moved. Two counties to the West, Burke
County lost 24.5 percent of its population in just a decade.

The change is mostly gradual, but the difference on the land and in
the towns is huge, from four homesteading families per square mile,
to mile after mile of marginal farmland owned by one aging family
or efficiency-minded company. Driving north of Minot and the
sustenance of a military installation, one sees increasingly empty
roads, derelict farm machinery, tilting, gutted-out farm houses,
some still with their hopeful Formica kitchens intact.

Some country roads see so little traffic that tufts of grass sprout
in their asphalt center.

It's not that this land is empty; it's that it's post-industrial.
Weeds have taken over the road-sides, piles of rusting sheet metal
sit in fallow fields, and even the oil derricks have squeaked to a
halt. This is the South Bronx of the prairie. To be redeemed, it
also needs to be restored.

Ecologically, the Plains are in trouble. Only 40 percent of the
northern mixed-grass prairie ecosystem remains, along with 25
percent of the southern mixed-grass prairie, according to Daniel
Licht, author of Ecology and Economics in the Great Plains. Only 1
percent of prairie dogs' original habitat survives, and the
black-footed ferret, which depends on the prairie dog, is arguably
the most endangered mammal in North America. Some experts predict
the Ogallala Aquifer will dry up in 20 years. Record amounts of
pesticides flow onto the land and into rivers, and substantial soil
loss continues despite conservation programs.

North Dakota is the state most tolerant of the Poppers and the
Buffalo Commons idea, perhaps because it has suffered the region's
most dramatic population losses and financial blows.

With both droughts and floods, the state was declared a federal
disaster area in four of the last five years. By the year 2015, a
fifth of that state's population will be over age 65. It is not at
all hard to imagine bison herds taking over the neighborhood.

"Early on, we might have questioned the Buffalo Commons concept,"
recalled Zalenski of the Fargo Forum. "In fact, just a few years
ago they (the Poppers) were greeted by a lynch-mob mentality. But
as the process unfolded and we got into their research, you would
have to be as dumb as a stump not to realize they were right on.
It's more than just mythological nonsense about buffalo, it's the
whole concept that embraces land use of all kinds and points out
mistaken land uses."

Mythology aside, bison are, in fact, re-colonizing the Northern
Plains. Frank Popper notes that North Dakota's state bank now lends
for buffalo ranching ("the lending officer is nicknamed Buffalo
Bob"), the extension office hands out booklets on buffalo, and the
North Dakota Bison Association's processing plant turns 12,000
animals a year into sausages and steaks. "North Dakota is the
leader," he says.

Unthinkable just several years ago, a recent report by the North
Dakota state Labor Market Information Center applauded the Poppers'
ideas and even suggested that the state consider moving toward a
Buffalo Commons.

"The vilified Buffalo Commons idea could be turned on its head,
applied in measured degrees, and provide new industry in areas of
North Dakota ravaged by the rural exodus ..." said the report. "The
Buffalo Commons could fit nicely into a plan to transform our
rustic, barren landscape into a natural attraction."

If the Great Plains has evolved toward a clearer, more resigned
understanding of its plight, the Poppers' vision, too, has evolved
toward a softer, more humane proposal. The couple no longer speaks
of federal buy-outs on the Plains, or of massive, communally owned
preserves and herds.

"Our thinking became more nuanced as we talked to more people,"
says Deborah Popper. "Our initial insights were more sweeping. Now
there's more room for different solutions."

Indeed, some would say their initial papers were almost nihilistic,
positing a worst-case scenario of total community loss with only
the occasional safari emerging from the darkness to watch the
buffalo. "We wouldn't do that sort of thing anymore," says Frank
Popper. "We've become more responsible, more mature or something."

The Poppers say the Buffalo Commons is still more a metaphor than
a prescription. If their language has changed, so has the substance
of their concept. "We've learned over the years to be more
sensitive and to write more carefully, avoiding words like "empty"
and trying to qualify it when we say, 'Your ancestors made
mistakes.' Now we say they were responding to the incentives of
their time and doing the best they could."

Moreover, their Buffalo Commons no longer resembles a
government-run human relocation scheme, where buffalo totally
replace people. "We now see the federal government as unreliable,"
says Frank Popper, not to mention a political liability in rural
America. "Now," he says, "we see the effort as largely taken up by
private groups, NGOs, states, provinces and tribal groups with room
for all sorts of possibilities."

"We're not against keeping people on family farms," reasons Deborah
Popper. "It's just that it's so difficult for the Plains to
maintain a population base. What's attracting people to it? Where's
the jobs? Young people can't afford to go into farming even if they
wanted to, and most don't."

"It's a done deal"

While a few remaining detractors tire of what they see as the
Popper's we-told-you-so smuggery, most everyone admits they are
impressed by the concept's Velcro-like properties. Still, it's one
thing to point out the now-obvious problems of the region and
another to espouse a large-scale ecological solution. The Poppers
have come a long way since the days when police patrolled their
speaking engagements, but no, the Great Plains is not yet wholly
ready to offer up its farms and ranches to a giant buffalo range.

Frank Popper, through sheer logic, humor and persuasion, keeps the
heat on. He speaks with a casual matter-of-factness about a vague,
inevitable future in bison.

Last April, he went to Lincoln, Neb., as a guest of the Center for
Great Plains Studies, appearing amid the Wranglers and cowboy boots
in a purple button-down shirt and chinos. Before addressing a
Popper-friendly conference on bison, he spoke to a graduate-level
range management course at the University of Nebraska. This is a
challenging group, full of plaid shirts, farm-machinery baseball
caps and work boots. A sign above the water fountain outside the
third-floor classroom reads: "Please do not spit tobacco in the
sink."

Frank Popper speaks fast and gets to the point quickly. "I'm
delighted to still talk about the Buffalo Commons, because
intellectually, it's a done deal. The idea has serious legs, and
it's going to happen as far as we are concerned. The question is
how."

Predictably, some postures shift, as people seem to ask, Who does
this guy think he is? "The people here will find their own
solutions," retorts one woman."

Popper: "Yes, the people are resilient and stalwart" - he doesn't
say "blah blah blah" but you can tell he's heard this argument many
times before - "but for many, the solution seems to be in buffalo.
The Plains' resourcefulness actually fits this. They are going to
buffalo. It's already happening."

Another student, so blond and thin she looks born of wheat: "If
there aren't farmers and ranchers here, we'll have to import food."

Popper's response is typically to the point: "We already do. To say
we're America and we produce food doesn't cut it anymore. I hate to
say it, but it's true. It played in 1940, 1950, 1970, but it
doesn't play anymore. I have complete sympathy that there's value
in this way of life. The Buffalo Commons is an out-of-the-box
attempt to preserve those values."

When someone argues that the Plains are a great place to live, that
people are bound to come and start new businesses, Popper lays out
more blunt news:

"Americans, on the whole, don't see the Great Plains as a very
attractive place. They will go to places with trout streams and
mountains. They don't go to western Kansas. I don't see it
happening."

The students look glum. These are the ones who didn't go off to San
Jose or choose a major in liberal arts, business or foreign
affairs. They are putting years and dollars into being Nebraska's
next food producers. Buffalo burgers are not what they have in
mind.

Down the hall, Popper stops in at an ag sciences faculty lunch
discussion. He starts out by speaking of the region's "permanent"
instability.

"The Plains were settled less securely than governments or
societies are willing to admit. There's been a slow population leak
here for a hundred years," he says. The Great Plains have suffered
repeated large economic and social collapses since European
settlement, beginning in the 1880s with the heartbreaking
inadequacies of the 160-acre homestead policy, followed by the
1930s drought and depression, and now the agricultural collapses of
the 1980s and '90s. Such regional decline is not a historical
singularity, notes Popper. It happened, for instance, in post-Erie
Canal New England after 1830, which rebounded to become a
conservation stronghold.

His listeners are as dismissive as their students, but more
articulate.

"What you would call de-population I would call production-rate
efficiency," says James Specht, a professor of agronomy.

Popper's not buying. "The contradictions in the land of increased
efficiency stick out like a sore thumb. What about declining water
tables, dying towns?"

Specht: "You can only have so many Westins and so many tourists
looking at so many bison."

Popper shrugs. These are details for others to work out. A planner
by discipline, Popper is more interested in big-picture trends,
projections and possibilities. "Plan A has not worked. It's time to
look at Plan B."

Beyond bison

The Indians, ranchers, humanists and scientists at Lincoln's bison
conference see a future for the region not in continued
corporatization but in restoration, both of native ecosystems and
of native cultures. The Poppers are icons in this crowd, but the
two-day conference agenda also illustrates how far beyond the
Poppers the restoration vision has traveled.

"In the '80s, the Poppers basically hit all these white people on
the head with a two-by-four with this idea," says geographer and
Rosebud Sioux member Edward Valandra. "Way back when, they were
onto something really powerful that resonated really well with us.
When I first heard them, I thought maybe the ghost dancers'
prophecy of the returning buffalo might be coming true."

Several years ago, Valandra sought out the best place to run a
large, inter-tribal bison herd. He looked at such county indicators
as populations' average ages, degree of soil erosion, long-term
population loss, and low agriculture income, and he ultimately
proposed a 2.2 million-acre zone in the Bad River area of
southwestern South Dakota.

Ironically, Ted Turner recently bought a 60,000-acre ranch in that
exact spot. "I would love to think that Ted Turner read my study,"
says Valandra. "He zeroed right in."

Does Valandra's bison vision have room for Ted Turner? Here
Valandra is circumspect. "I think bison restoration has room for a
lot of people. Turner is a man of many contradictions. Remember, he
owns the Atlanta Braves, the team with the tomahawk chop."

Although regional tribes have not acted on Valandra's proposal,
their own herds are growing. The InterTribal Bison Cooperative
supports 50 tribes and 10,000 bison, a six-fold increase since
1992. The Gros Ventre and Assiniboine tribes, for example, run a
herd of about 600 bison on Montana's Fort Belknap reservation. The
animals are used for meat, trophy hunts and ceremonial and
educational purposes. The same tribes are reintroducing
black-footed ferrets on the bison range in cooperation with the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (HCN, 12/8/97).

The Nebraska bison-fest also yields the Poppers' most thoughtful
critics, and shows how complicated the nitty-gritty of ecological
restoration really is. Many bison advocates and scientists bemoan
the rise of domesticated bison herds.

Treating bison as managed livestock, rather than as free-roaming
and free-breeding herds, can jeopardize both genetic health and the
condition of the range. Confined bison may overgraze a patch of
grass just as hard as cattle (HCN, 6/8/98). Moreover, nearly all
the counties the Poppers identified as distressed and, therefore,
likely bison-range candidates, lie within the same short-grass
ecosystem type. Setting those counties aside for restoration
wouldn't accomplish much in terms of preserving diverse prairie
ecosystems, according to Plains economist Licht.

In other words, bison may be sexy, but they're not necessarily a
magic bullet for saving the Plains. Mark Guizlo, an environmental
historian at Montana State University, for example, thinks that a
better future on the Plains - bison or no bison - is impossible
without first enacting fundamental changes in agriculture policies.
He'd like to see a shift from corporate domination toward a more
culturally and environmentally sustainable model.

And although The Nature Conservancy runs over 3,000 head of bison
on 80,000 acres of grassland, working with cows can be just as
effective a tool for conservation.

"As it is, we do way more prairie conservation with cattle people
than with bison people," says Al Steuter, director of science and
stewardship for The Nature Conservancy's Nebraska office. "Given
land ownership patterns and conservation priorities, there are
places where cattle is a more appropriate tool. Our best strategy
is to give the people who own the land now - cattle people - tools
and incentives they need to conserve public values. The Poppers'
vision is culturally and aesthetically driven, but it's not
necessarily scientifically driven, and it's not necessarily best
for conservation, at least not in the near future."

The Poppers are clearly thrilled these discussions are on the
table. As Frank Popper points out, planners are used to dealing
with issues of growth, but not with issues of decline. They talk
about smart growth, never about smart atrophy, or even smart
stability. Which is why the Poppers are excited about their next
project, working with the state extension agent in Kansas to help
compile data on such variables as natural and human capital - the
good stats rather than the grim ones.

In places like Nebraska, North Dakota and Kansas, people are
wrestling with fundamental change. Borrowing from Elisabeth
Kubler-Ross, Frank Popper calls it the bargaining phase of the
multiple stages of grief, from denial on to acceptance.

"Assuming that people are paying attention at all, lots of Plains
places and people are still in denial or anger," he says. "But I'd
have to say that a good chunk of the Plains is in bargaining ... I
do think widespread acceptance (of a Buffalo Commons) is just a
matter of time, however long that turns out to be. Personally, I
expect to live to see it. But I come from long-lived stock."

Florence Williams, a former HCN staffer, freelances from Helena,
Mont.

You can contact ...

Great Plains Restoration Council, Box 46216, Denver, CO 80201,
303/573-6569, www.gprc.org. InterTribal Bison Cooperative, 124 E.
St. Joseph, Rapid City, SD 57701 (605/394-9730); Sam Hurst, Wild
Idea Buffalo Company, 605-721-9250