Scholars Predict Demise of Great Plains

Two New Jersey scholars who predict that the Great Plains will revert back to the days when it was only a home where the buffalo roam got some discouraging words from the human herd that lives there now.

But Frank Popper and Deborah Epstein Popper say the heated reaction they got from the area’s residents recently--one called their work “Popperscock”--is tinged with a fear that the theory that much of the Plains is emptying out is prophetic.

“A region that was totally sure of itself, genuinely secure in its own future, would not have made so much of this,” said Popper, a Rutgers University urban studies professor.

The pair faced some hostile questions from about 125 North Dakota journalists and others at the University of North Dakota’s Editors and Broadcasters Day earlier this month.

Popper and his wife, a doctoral student in geography at Rutgers, suggest the federal government should eventually buy up most of the Plains to create a huge “Buffalo Commons.”

“This is a theory, and you have to ask: ‘OK, we understand what you’re saying, but what the hell do you want us to do about it? Leave?’ ” said Mark Carlson, editor of the weekly Pierce County Tribune.

Gov. George Sinner didn’t attend the forum, but he said that he believes the Buffalo Commons idea is a “passing thing,” and that the Poppers did not appreciate the importance of the region.

“A vast majority of the world’s food supply comes from these Plains states,” Sinner said. “And I think they think the food comes from the supermarket down the road and the electricity comes from the switch on the wall.”

The notion that someone from New Jersey couldn’t appreciate the Plains was expressed by some in the audience too.

“I hope they enjoy it back home in toxic Jersey,” said Lauren Donovan, editor of the weekly Hazen Star. “Foolishness and Popperscock like this could only have come from a place like that.”

But Ellen Swendsen of Hettinger, in western North Dakota, said the couple’s views were not unrealistic.

“I walk around and count the empty houses and I shudder,” she said. “I think that what the man said made a lot of sense.”

“We need to be thinking critically,” added Bismarck Tribune reporter Jeff Olson. “I think the challenge has been laid square in our lap . . . and I think we all realize that.”

The Poppers’ idea, first outlined in a 1987 magazine article, envisions a 5.5-million-acre Buffalo Commons, including large parts of North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.

The commons would come about as Plains residents gradually abandon a relatively arid region that has never been thickly settled, despite extensive federal inducements and subsidies.

The couple said the 1862 Homestead Act, which gave 160 acres to anyone willing to settle the land and stay five years, was a historic error.

Federal encouragement of settlement on the Plains, they wrote, was “the largest, longest-running agricultural and environmental miscalculation in American history.”

The Poppers are developing maps of each of the states within the commons to buttress their arguments that the region is in long-term decline. Their North Dakota maps document 16 counties with significant poverty, population losses and little building activity.

Popper acknowledges that if the counties lose all their residents, it would “involve a great deal of individual suffering and community hardship.”

But he said he does not believe the commons area will lose its entire population, nor does he advocate aggressive federal intervention in creating the preserve.

“We never advocated any kind of rural version of some horrible urban renewal project,” he said.

“If somehow our work gets the Plains so irritated at us that the region is inspired to pull up its socks, just to prove what waterheads we are, we’d be delighted. We really would.”