Un-plain ways to reinvent the Plains

Another frontier proposal is federal grassland reserves, which would restore the ecosystem while attracting tourists. Dan Licht, chief proponent of the plan and author of "Ecology and Economics of the Great Plains," estimates taxpayers would spend less money buying the land for the reserves than they currently do when the US Agriculture Department pays farmers to take their land out of production for 10 years. And the Plains, unlike almost anywhere else in the United States, retain enough wide open space to re-create complete ecosystems.

Here in western North Dakota, for example, the federal government already owns more than enough land - but in piecemeal parcels - to create North America's Serengeti, where 25,000 buffalo could reestablish their old roaming patterns, Dr. Licht argues. It's "a site that would rival anything found in Africa." So far, however, the idea has few takers.

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Ironically, the frontier vision that has garnered the most publicity - dubbed the "buffalo commons" - has also generated the most disgust among residents. Sixteen years ago, Frank and Deborah Popper proposed that since people were leaving the region anyway, the federal government should buy them out. With that land, the government could then create a vast unfenced region where buffalo would roam, prairie dogs and other wildlife would return, and the ecosystem would slowly revert to the condition that white settlers originally encountered.

But the Poppers' plan came under heavy fire from many frontier communities, which resented the idea that their homes should disappear to make way for buffalo. Since then, the couple has given up on the federal government as a prime mover. Instead, they argue, the commons is coming piecemeal as private ranchers, public parks, and Indian reservations boost the number of buffalo. With an estimated 300,000 head, the US now holds more buffalo than at any time since the early 1880s, says Andrew Isenberg, author of "The Destruction of the Bison."

And it's not just buffalo. Mountain lions are beginning to move back to the Plains from the Rocky Mountains after an 80-year absence. Elk are returning to places where they haven't been seen for 100 years.

If wildlife is making a comeback and humanity is leaving, then perhaps nature and economics are imposing their own eco-vision of the rural Plains, some environmentalists argue. Maybe the rural Plains can't cannot support large-scale settlement, they add.

At least, white settlement. The decline of the frontier Plains, after all, really represents the retreat of the white man. American Indian populations, by contrast, are growing.

Perhaps, just as suburban sprawl is forcing many communities to consider "smart growth" initiatives, the frontier is a lesson about smart decline.

"It can be very difficult in many situations to come out for 'smart decline': it seems un-American," says Mr. Popper, a land-use planner at Rutgers University in New Jersey. "We like to think every place will keep growing. But all these places that have traditional agricultural economies have fallen farther and farther behind. And we've got to find something to do with these places."

Of course, the Plains remain unpredictable. They've repeatedly confounded the optimists: historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who thought settlement would conquer the frontier; Thomas Jefferson, who believed small farms were the bulwark and future of America; even the railroad barons, who believed - or pretended to believe - their new transportation technology would bring prosperity to all those new boomtowns springing up beside the track every 10 miles or so.

Maybe the frontier's resilient and innovative people will confound the pessimists, too.

Perhaps the last word belongs to Teddy Roosevelt, who experienced firsthand the joys and isolation and struggle that the Plains frontier has always doled out to its residents. At his Elkhorn Ranch, some 40 miles southwest of Watford City, Roosevelt learned to love the outdoor life, and then lost half his fortune after a blizzard decimated his cattle. He drew from those events, not defeat, but a challenge.

"I never would have been President," he later wrote, "if it had not been for my experiences in North Dakota."

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