Got the video of Grist. It is good to see working ranches adopt
practices that emulate the original wild conditions. We are a long way from significant
restoration but seeing this informs us that it is happening and that attitudes
support it fully. The Buffalo Commons
will be restored one rancher at a time and it is the only way possible.
Importantly, buffalo herds are
expanding and also improving as modern husbandry takes hold out there.
We presently have a herd
population in excess of 500,000 animals and it is reasonable that present slow
expansion is allowing a steady improvement in general animal quality. Of course, the next census may show a sharp
increase since there has been bursts of positive press noticed.
I would like to see the herds
quickly expand to a size large enough to make the meat readily available. Yet herd improvement may simply be necessary
first. This is not like the fish farming
industry which has exploded in a couple of decades. Yet doubling every five years is reasonable
which means that it becomes possible to have a herd of five million animals in
2030 and fifty million animals in 2050 or in numbers approaching historical
levels.
A policy supporting this could be
well placed though the economic arguments may simply not yet compelling enough
though the buffalo certainly has the edge in the long term. We really do have to accept that we also need
to enhance edibility. We are all spoiled
after all by our tender beef. Does
anyone still know how to handle tough old cow?
It was never in the cards to
revert to original conditions outright. It
is going to take a steady evolution and rebuild with the full contribution of
landholders. At least someone cares for
every acre that matters.
Perennial Plate: Where the buffalo roamed [VIDEO]
BY DANIEL KLEIN
15 SEP 2011 6:00 PM
Almost halfway through our six-month, food-focused journey across
America, we found a place we didn't want to leave: the stunning J Bar L Ranch,
situated on 30,000 acres in southwest Montana in one of the most important
wildlife corridors in the country. Gently shepherding cattle across the
landscape, ranch manager Bryan Ulring, a former hunting and fishing guide,
tries to replicate the bison's role in shaping this habitat. The result is an
area packed with wildlife, fertile soil, and plenty of healthy and delicious
meat. Best of all, the folks who run this place became our friends.
Daniel Klein is a chef, activist, and filmmaker living in Minneapolis
Geographers revisit Buffalo Commons
BUFFALO COMMONS—Frank (left) and Deborah Popper, the East Coast
geographers who in 1987 posited the theory of the Buffalo Comments, discuss how
well their theory is holding up during the recent Kansas Farmers Union
convention held at Salina. The Poppers admit their initial analysis that
federal intervention should be used to return the Plains to the buffalo isn't
needed because the area is evolving toward depopulation on its own.
By Larry Dreiling
The New Jersey geographers who posed
the concept of the Buffalo Commons over 20 years ago returned to the Great Plains recently to speak to a group they called
"the last bastions of romantic capitalists."
The group was the annual convention of the Kansas
Farmers Union held at Salina
The couple teaches at Rutgers and Princeton Universities
"Romantic capitalism has a long history on the Great Plains,"
Frank Popper said. "It's a lot of how and why the land was settled by
whites in the first place, not long after the Civil War via the Homestead Act.
"This romanticism has been proven out through the Dust Bowls of
the 1890s and 1930s and through the period of time around 1987 when Deborah and
I first published our piece on the Great Plains ."
The Poppers settled on one thing that most of their critics had leveled
upon them in their early research. That is, that the federal government would
create a large project to steer people out of the Plains and replace them with
bison.
"The only thing we got wrong was that it was going to be primarily
a federal project," Frank Popper said. "We were wrong, but we saw the
Buffalo Commons as a sort of environmental end state to which the Plains were
moving and that it would be a place where traditional agriculture would become
more environmental, where ecotourism would become more important, and where the
land would be treated more lightly, more gingerly than in the past. Settlement
on the Plains would exist in an altered form. The word sustainable has been
overused but it applies."
It's been a generation since the Poppers became infamous for their
work. Dozens of articles, as well as books and documentary films were made
about the couple and their theory.
"It was mainly a piece so Deborah and I could work together,"
Frank Popper said. "Deborah was a graduate student at the time. We had
been writing on the Midwest and the West
before, but we wanted to do something together.
"We never really expected it to have the impact it did and does.
We would have recoiled then that we would still be talking about it 23 years
later. It's clear that in the intervening years a quiet muscle of reality, a
lot of the trends we saw in the depopulation of the Plains has continued."
Those trends have been born out in two censuses since the Poppers'
initial research was published, the couple contends.
"Young people leave and the people who stay are getting older. The
Plains has for a long time had one of the highest median ages of any place in
the country," Frank Popper said. "More positively, though, the
Buffalo Commons has begun in clear ways to materialize."
For one thing, he mentioned that buffalo production has increased.
Banks are financing buffalo producers in increasing numbers and many Indian
tribes use the Buffalo Commons as a central part of their land use planning.
For another, the couple offers the increase in development of land
easements.
"You are seeing land purchases from The Nature Conservancy,
(non-governmental organizations) like American Curry Foundation, the Grassland
Foundation, and the Great Plains Restoration Council all are pursuing Buffalo
Commons style buyouts," he said.
The biggest buyout, Popper believes, could come in Kansas
"It was one of the most startling reversals I've ever seen from a
working politician. The Great
Plains National Park Kansas
That's because of what Frank Popper observes from the writings of
historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who in the 1890s, declared the American
frontier was closed.
"That declaration was adopted by most Americans, and it
complicated history in several ways. If you used Turner's measures, there is
more land in Kansas
"Turner thought that American agriculture would keep the
population expanding. More people, more railroads, more livestock, more cities
would be created and incomes would go up. It didn't happen. What's happened
throughout the Great Plains, particularly Kansas
For her part, Deborah Popper said a new social order is needed to keep
the Plains sustainable.
"The current scale of grasslands agriculture is mammoth. That
conquest of natural systems must instead become the target of American
innovation," she said. "It must find room for small, mid-sized and
low input farms as well as find room for efforts that make their economic
system work with a very different set of social goals."
She said that higher crop production yields, particularly for
corn--which she calls an industrial product rather than a food--have not
protected "grassland communities."
"Economic efficiency fit its time and place. Today's situation is
different," she said. "Children of the rural poor who grow up amid this
country's amber waves of grain are the least likely to have a proper diet. Main
Streets have nothing there. What we are talking about is the creation of rural
ghettos."
She complained about the large investment producers make in land and
equipment in order to be fruitful.
"No small farmer can afford this. Instead he sells out to the
megafarmer next door, making the megafarmer even bigger.
This has placed long-term impacts on rural communities, she said.
"These efficiencies made rural populations drop. As a result,
the farm town has to get more out of every person left, whether for volunteer
fire departments, schools, churches or charities--and you all know this."
The challenge, she said, is to turn the theory into a management
principle within a larger social system.
Her husband agreed.
"The Buffalo Commons represents a different way of thinking, one
where growth doesn't have to occur every year or decade, where you have growth
until the bubble bursts, but one that tries to get away from the bubble,"
Frank Popper said.
He also stood up to the theory's critics.
"I've been accused of having a slightly un-American approach to
the land and the environment, where growth is not always the be-all and
end-all, where growth can go too far, and the Buffalo Commons implies a
quietism or defeatism," Frank Popper said.
"Instead, the Buffalo Commons implies too much growth can be a
mistake, overburdening the land, overmastering the environment and in the end
always getting kicked in the rear or the pocketbook--or someplace else.
"I realize there is a social comedy in two people from back east
who are telling people in the Plains what to do with their land. I've enjoyed
it, but there are important things to look at in how we treat this vast,
characteristically American chunk of land. There are lessons here on how to
live on the land that can be applied to the Corn Belt, the lower Mississippi delta, and parts of our largest cities--like Detroit
Larry Dreiling can be reached by phone at 785-628-1117, or by e-mail
at ldreiling@aol.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment