An Old Norwegian Saying: "It Could Be Worse"

From Planning Magazine -- December 1987, Deborah Epstein Popper and Frank J. Popper:

To begin:

At the center of the United States, between the Rockies and the tallgrass prairies of the Midwest and South, lies the shortgrass expanse of the Great Plains. The region extends over large parts of 10 states and produces cattle, corn, wheat, sheep, cotton, coal, oil, natural gas, and metals. The Plains are endlessly windswept and nearly treeless; the climate is semiarid, with typically less than 20 inches of rain a year.

The country is rolling in parts in the north, dead flat in the south. It is lightly populated. A dusty town with a single gas station, store, and house is sometimes 50 unpaved miles from its nearest neighbor, another three-building settlement amid the sagebrush. As we define the region, its eastern border is the 98th meridian. San Antonio and Denver are on the Plains' east and west edges, respectively, but the largest city actually located in the Plains is Lubbock, Texas, population 179,000. Although the Plains occupy one-fifth of the nation's land area, the region's overall population, approximately 5.5 million, is less than that of Georgia or Indiana.

The Great Plains are America's steppes. They have the nation's hottest summers and coldest winters, greatest temperature swings, worst hail and locusts and range fires, fiercest droughts and blizzards, and therefore its shortest growing season. The Plains are the land of the Big Sky and the Dust Bowl, one-room schoolhouses and settler homesteads, straight-line interstates and custom combines, prairie dogs and antelope and buffalo. The oceans-of-grass vistas of the Plains offer enormous horizons, billowy clouds, and somber-serene beauty.

And then, the crisis looms:

The 1980s punctured the illusion of prosperity. Today the pressures on the Plains and their people are as ominous as at any time in American history. The region's farm, ranch, energy, and mineral economies are in deep depression. Many small towns are emptying and aging at an all-time high rate, and some are dying. The 1986 outmigration from West and Panhandle Texas, for instance, helped make the state a net exporter of population for the first time ever.

And then there is the ripple effect:

The local collapses reverberate. When local banks fail or are endangered, the remaining ones lend more conservatively and charge higher interest. When a heavily agricultural county's farmers and ranchers cannot make a living, neither can its car dealers, druggists, restaurants, and clothing stores. Local public services, which have never been exactly generous in the Plains, fall off. Items like schools, roads, law enforcement, and welfare are always relatively expensive to provide and administer in large, lightly populated areas; they are especially expensive because of the traditional Plains pattern of many comparatively small local governments, which cannot take advantage of economies of scale.

And it became the "tragedy of the commons:

But private interests have proved unable to last for long on the Plains. Responding to nationally based market imperatives, they have overgrazed and overplowed the land and overdrawn the water. Responding to the usually increasing federal subsidies, they have overused the natural resources the subsidies provided. They never created a truly stable agriculture or found reliable conservation devices. In some places, private owners supplemented agriculture with inherently unstable energy and mineral development.

And a bleak future:

It is hard to predict the future course of the Plains ordeal. The most likely possibility is a continuation of the gradual impoverishment and depopulation that in many places go back to the 1920s. A few of the more urban areas may pull out of their decline, especially if an energy boom returns. And a few cities -- Lubbock and Cheyenne, for example -- may hold steady as self-contained service providers. But the small towns in the surrounding countryside will empty, wither, and die. The rural Plains will be virtually deserted. A vast, beautiful characteristically American place will go the way of the buffalo that once roamed it in herds of millions.

The Popper solution: Bring Back the Commons

The most intriguing alternative would be to restore large parts of the Plains to their pre-white condition, to make them again the commons the settlers found in the nineteenth century. This approach, which would for the first time in U.S. history treat the Plains as a distinct region and recognize its unsuitability for agriculture, is being proposed with increasing frequency.

We believe that despite history's warnings and environmentalists' proposals, much of the Plains will inexorably suffer near-total desertion over the next generation. It will come slowly to most places, quickly to some; parts of Montana, New Mexico, South Dakota, and Texas, especially those away from the interstates, strike us as likely candidates for rapid depopulation. The overall desertion will largely run its course. At that point, the only way to keep the Plains from turning into an utter wasteland, an American Empty Quarter, will be for the federal government to step in and buy the land -- in short, to deprivatize it.

Yes, The Buffalo Commons

Creating the Buffalo Commons represents a substantial administrative undertaking. It will require competent land-use planning to identify acquisition areas, devise fair buyout contracts, and determine permitted uses. It will demand compassionate treatment for the Plains' refugees and considerable coordination between huge distant, frequently obtuse federal agencies, smaller state agencies whose attention often goes primarily to the non-Plains parts of their states, and desperate local governments. To accomplish these tasks, the federal government will, for the first time, have to create an agency with a Plains-specific mandate -- a regional agency like the Tennessee Valley Authority or a public-land agency like the Bureau of Land Management, but with much more sweeping powers.

By creating the Buffalo Commons, the federal government will, however belatedly, turn the social costs of space -- the curse of the shortgrass immensity -- to more social benefit than the unsuccessfully privatized Plains have ever offered.

And, so, despite the dust, the traffic, the housing, as our Norwegian ancestors always said, "It could be worse."

P.S. I can only assume when this proposal did not work out, the Poppers moved on to fanning the flames of global warming.

Oh, you ask about the Poppers? At the time this was written, Deborah Epstein Popper was a graduate student in geography at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Frank J. Popper chaired the university's urban studies department.