Buffalo Commons Revisit

This is a revisit of the Buffalo Commons that has helped shape discussion regarding the Great Plains for the past two decades and has generated restoration initiatives. We posted on the topic first around eighteen months ago and this is a fresh item on the subject. Do visit the site.

What the Poppers made clear was the rather unwelcome understanding that traditional agriculture was failing in this region. It had been failing from the beginning but this failure had been masked by human optimism.

The thesis today is better accepted and the response is now better directed for this insight. Most importantly, step by step, the buffalo is been reintroduced and properly managed. The herds are expanding steadily, but not as fast as natural expansion. Some form of the old prairie is also been established, even though that biome was driven even closer to extinction.

We can all accept that this will take decades and possibly centuries. On the other hand herd expansion can be fast if simply left alone. Biome expansion has to start with the establishment of refugia.

The other arrow in this quiver that is worth exploring is the reestablishment of the buffalo back in Asia and Europe. It was there and was simply hunted to extinction by our Ice Age ancestors. There is ample grassland and steppe that is suitable for little else.

We do not understand how vulnerable the buffalo and other wild bovines were to human hunting. The muskoxen have been hunted out of the taiga and the boreal forests and the buffalo out of Eurasia. Others such as the aurochs are extinct.

Establishing herd management districts throughout the northern taiga and boreal forest is a viable option. Expanding it into the more productive semi arid grasslands is a natural addition.

In the meantime, buffalo husbandry is now in full stride. There is a ready market for both carcasses and breeding stock and good breeding practices are been established. We now need to do the same thing with muskoxen. Caribou and the like tend to be migratory and more difficult to manage but still represent a husbandry opportunity.

As you may gather, I am a strong proponent of managed ownership of all plausible wild stocks to ensure their health and long term survival and so that we may manage the related environment properly.

Huge buffalo herds may be maintained by the simple practice of a large fall slaughter and the provision of supplemental feed for the wintering breeding stock. Beef husbandry is as simple. Minimal fencing can prevent migration.

And once a biological resource is owned, its survival becomes assured. The same needs to happen the fisheries.

Buffalo Commons
http://gprc.org/buffalocommons.html

The Buffalo Commons is a cultural and social movement for positive, restorative social and ecological change on the Great Plains.

As both model and metaphor, the Buffalo Commons includes various, sometimes seemingly disconnected components that all add up to a new healthier life for our region centered around sustainability and regained community. This restoration economy can include everything from GPRC’s Million Acre Projects and Plains Youth InterACTION program, to a small West Texas or Kansas farmer’s re-banking of the soil on his land, to a group of Lakota or Oklahoma or Colorado mothers working together to stage gang intervention or ward off a meth invasion, to a string of communities along two hundred miles of a creek or river working to establish clean, healthy water flows again, to environmental groups making ecologically-focused land purchases. It's problem solving through local, hands-on action.

The Buffalo Commons engages Prairie/Plains people to get invested in the healthful restoration of their communities and local environment wherever they live. Small businesses, housewives, big landholders, small landholders, inner-city children, Indian elders, cities, suburbs, towns and villages can all take pride in the unique identity of being and belonging to our Great Plains region, and working together in a shared sense of community, rather than the old way of every man (or woman) for him/herself.

History of the Buffalo Commons Movement

In 1987, Drs. Frank and Deborah Popper developed their bold new idea for a Buffalo Commons, (Popper and Popper, “The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust, PLANNING, 1987). Their continuing research showed that hundreds of counties in the American West still have less than a sparse 6 persons per square mile — the density standard Frederick Jackson Turner used to declare the American Frontier closed in 1893. Many have less than 2 persons per square mile.

The frontier never came close to disappearing, and in fact has expanded in the Plains in recent years. The 1980 Census showed 388 frontier counties west of the Mississippi. The 1990 Census shows 397 counties in frontier status, and the 2000 Census showed 402. Most of this frontier expansion is in the Great Plains. Kansas actually has more land in frontier status than it did in 1890.

Great Plains Restoration Council mounted a Plains-wide mapping project at the county level, using a series of economic and social indicators, to show exactly where the frontier is and how much further it has expanded. GPRC than did more sophisticated mapping that scrutinized these and other factors down to the Census Block level, allowing for a much more rigorous and exact understanding of ecological, biological, geographical, topographical, demographic and political conditions. Since then, we have specifically honed our focus onto a few, key target ecological areas while developing a new model of youth education.

There once were over 400 million acres of wild prairie grasslands in the central part of North America. The backbone of the Buffalo Commons movement is the work — over a period of decades — to re-establish and re-connect prairie wildland reserves and ecological corridors large enough for bison and all other native prairie wildlife to survive and roam freely, over great, connected distances, while simultaneously restoring the health and sustainability of our communities wherever possible so that both land and people may prosper for a very long time. Future generations may choose to expand these reserves and corridors, as the new culture of caring and belonging we have started today becomes an integral, ingrained part of life in the world of tomorrow, especially as extensive grasslands become needed to help absorb carbon from the atmosphere. (Highly biodiverse native prairies are excellent carbon sequesters.)

Below is the original short scholarly paper that started it all:

“The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust.”

http://www.planning.org/25anniversary/planning/1987dec.htm

Below is another, more recent, short scholarly paper by the Poppers.

THE BUFFALO COMMONS AS REGIONAL METAPHOR AND GEOGRAPHIC METHOD \

- by Drs. Deborah E. Popper and Frank J. Popper
The Great Plains and the Buffalo Commons
by Deborah E. Popper and Frank J. Popper

Make Way for the Buffalo

It is good to see this topic a little boost. There has been scant coverage this past year, but the industry itself is steadily growing. In fact, it would take a modest effort to expand the current North American herd ten fold over the next several years. It might be as simple as funding a marketing board or a dedicated meat production facility in the right places.

All the right things are happening. Now we just need to get the herds big enough to put buffalo meat on everyone’s table. We may even see pemmican restored as a staple.

The latest burst is promoted by an enthusiast who sees merit in selling far western land to provide capital to buy down the failing lands of the buffalo commons. I guess the idea is for a giant unfenced open plain covered with huge herds. I will pass on that thank you.

We need those fences to manage herd size and provide grazing control. We may never fully restore the prairie back to the original buffalo grass of the past, but we can certainly try. In the meantime, a monoculture of buffalo is not smart either. We have already shown success in mixing cattle and buffalo. And once the deep rooted grasses are reestablished we may even have luck handling a few goats and sheep on those grasslands.

Recognizing that these lands are superb fodder lands for well managed animal husbandry that survives principally on live fodder, even sometimes in the winter with appropriate augmentation from hays is the only viable protocol for these poorly watered lands.

Make Way for Buffalo

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: October 29, 2003

This forlorn farm town Rawson, population 6 -- is a fine place to contemplate the boldest idea in America today: rescuing the rural Great Plains by returning much of it to a vast ''Buffalo Commons.''

The result would be the world's largest nature park, drawing tourists from all over the world to see parts of 10 states alive again with buffalo, elk, grizzlies and wolves. Restoring a large chunk of the plains -- which cover nearly one-fifth of the lower 48 states -- to their original state may also be the best way to revive local economies and keep hamlets like Rawson from becoming ghost towns.

Rawson used to be a bustling town with a railroad depot, two stores, a hotel, a bank, a post office, a gas station, a Lutheran church, a lumber yard, a grain elevator and a school. It had its own newspaper, The Rawson Tribune, and its slogan was ''Rawson, where opportunity awaits you.''

It has been downhill ever since. Two years ago, after the election for mayor ended in an exact tie (one vote for Nels Heggen and one vote for Garvin Gullickson), after the four adult residents tired of taxing themselves to pay for seven streetlights, they dissolved the city and turned it into an unincorporated village.

''My children won't come back here to live,'' admitted Mr. Heggen, whose grandfather ran the hotel in town.

''There isn't much to do here. Right around here, it's kind of desolate.'' (Some journalists reach judgments about a place after interviewing just a few inhabitants; I boast that I talked to half the town.)

It sounds cruel to say so, but towns like Rawson are a reminder that the oversettlement of the Great Plains has turned out to be a 150-year-long mistake, one of the longest-running and most costly errors in American history. Families struggled for generations to survive droughts and blizzards, then finally gave up and moved on. You can buy a home out here for $3,000, and you can sometimes rent one for nothing at all if you promise to mow the lawn and keep up the house.

The rural parts of the Great Plains are emptying, and in some cases reverting to wilderness.

It's immensely sad to travel through the Dakotas' ghost towns or Nebraska's cattle country -- where Loup is the poorest county in America -- because they are full of warm, hard-working, honest farmers and ranchers who are having their hearts broken. How can one not admire the people of Sentinel Butte, N.D., where there is no attendant at the gasoline station but the townspeople all have keys and pay on the honor system?

Yet honesty and sweat aren't enough to make farming and ranching successful in marginal lands. The farms produce plenty of grain and beef, but they will never make much money, even with billions of dollars in agricultural subsidies. The economic model will be even less viable as underground aquifers run out in the next two or three decades. Much plains farming relies on the vast Ogallala aquifer, which is dropping at a rate of four feet per year.

So it's time to reach for something bold, like the Buffalo Commons idea, proposed in 1987 by Frank and Deborah Popper, two New Jersey social scientists. This would be the biggest step to redefine America since the Alaska purchase. Pushing it would give the environmental movement a chance to be known mainly by what it's for instead of for what it's against. But it would take close cooperation with the people with the most at stake: struggling farmers and ranchers, who for now are irritated by East Coast city slickers trying to turn their land into a buffalo playground.

''Why not let us manage our own affairs, just as people in New York would want to manage their own affairs?'' asked Keith Winter, a veteran rancher, during a break from working with his calves.

It's a fair question, and a Buffalo Commons can be achieved only if it benefits North Dakotans more than New Yorkers. That should be possible, for states like Colorado, Utah and Idaho have boomed by branching out from their traditional economic base to embrace tourism and recreation, and Buffalo Commons would become one of the world's wonders.

If Buffalo Commons comes about, perhaps a hotel can reopen in Rawlins, and Mr. Winter's ranch could draw German tourists who would pay to herd cattle. If the thunder of buffalo hooves is again heard on the open plains, that will not be the death knell for towns like Rawlins -- it will be their last, best hope.

E-mail: nicholas@nytimes.com