Buffalo Commons Again

A cousin, Lawrence Brown, no longer living, wrote "Buffalo Commons Memoirs" in 1995. He spent a lot of pages on the debate of what should be 'done' with the Great Plains in the beginning of his book. He not only wrote to the Poppers, Frank who taught Environmental Studies at Rutgers University and Deborah who taught Urban Studies at New York University at the time, but he invited them out to his ranch in northwestern South Dakota to have a look at the land and people for themselves, which they did.

A Google alert led me to a hit this morning that starts "Summers are scorching and winters frigid. The wind whips through the grasslands year-round, its wailing adding to the hypnotic desolation of the Great Plains." Immediately under this statement is a photo of the animals of the Serengeti, while the text reads about our Great Plains and Kevin Costner's location of Dances With Wolves. How irritating I find it.

"It’s vindication of sorts for East Coast professors Frank Popper and his wife, Deborah Popper. The two were maligned by residents here for predicting 20 years ago that Plains population losses would be so dire that government one day would take over large expanses of the region and return them to their natural state by creating a “Buffalo Commons” — a national park where bison would roam." “Now, the Buffalo Commons has become a lot more plausible,” says Frank Popper, a land-use planner and professor at Rutgers University. “There are five to eight different ways this is all going on right now."

I found it interesting that the writer includes this statement of the location of my family reunion this summer. "Rural areas continue to grapple with young people leaving and old people dying. In Vale, a tiny town near Rapid City, S.D., the school closed and the Last Call Bar moved into the old schoolhouse. Alumni still gather there for reunions, owner Kathy Wood says. Weddings and banquets are held in the old gymnasium. Local children now are bused to a school 5 miles away."

My defensive feelings well up in me as I read through the article; it started with the zebra and gnu in the first picture and never got softened up by the last paragraph; "The Poppers are happy about the changes on the Plains."

“It’s got to be better economically,(Economic opportunities now include energy — oil wells are being drilled throughout the western Dakotas and investments in renewable energy sources (wind, solar) and bio-fuels are up — and tourism.) even if it’s a gamble, than the continued slow-leak decline,” Frank Popper says. “It’s got to be better than things like casinos, prisons and hazardous waste dumps. … What we’ve got is a Plan B for a region whose Plan A has been failing it for well over a century.”

This is probably true, albeit indelicately put by someone obviously not living in the area. I couldn't find the author. My name was required to leave a reply but I didn't know to whom I would be replying.