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Posted on 09/05/2001 6:06:56 PM PDT by FairWitness

There was a time when Frank Popper needed police protection to speak at public meetings on the Great Plains.

“People have gotten friendlier,” Popper said Thursday.

Popper stopped in Rapid City on his way to the Rosebud Sioux Reservation. On Saturday, tribal officials there gave their official blessing to Popper’s controversial thesis about one possible future for the Great Plains.

Popper and his wife, Deborah, coined the phrase “Buffalo Commons” in 1987.

In a scholarly article in an obscure professional journal, the Poppers predicted a depopulation of the Great Plains from Mexico to Canada. The harsh, arid climate of the plains made them unsuitable for cattle, crops and towns, which the Poppers called “the largest, longest-running agricultural and environmental miscalculation in American history.”

The Poppers also recommended converting vast tracts of the abandoned plains into a public Buffalo Commons — a huge national park that would invite the return of once-great buffalo herds.

Westerners were mostly outraged. They viewed the Poppers, both professors at Rutgers University in New Jersey, as carpetbagging intellectual interlopers out to destroy a way of life.

But 13 years later, the Poppers are less threatening — partly because they’ve made countless trips to the Great Plains to explain away misconceptions about their thesis and partly because census data are bearing out their conclusions.

“The Buffalo Commons seemed a completely Martian idea circa 1990,” Frank Popper said. “It’s still a minority opinion, but it’s a more respected minority opinion.”

Popper talked about his work during a short trip to the Cheyenne River, southeast of Rapid City, where he walked high bluffs offering a spectacular view across the river to the South Unit of Badlands National Park. The South Unit is one of the biggest roadless areas in the American West, and few signs of human habitation were visible.

It seemed a fitting location to talk to an expert on depopulation.

Why depopulation?

Curiosity and opportunity attracted the Poppers to depopulation, a field of study some might find depressing.

“It may be perverse on our parts,” Popper admitted. “Experts in both our fields — Deborah’s a geographer, and I’m a land-use planner — are completely crazy on the subject of growth. They think that growth is the natural thing to happen — that a town or a city must be acquiring population for it to be healthy.”

The overall population of the United States has in fact grown for 225 years, but the Poppers noticed a contrary phenomenon. “If you look at a map of American counties since the 1850s and throw a dart at it, the odds are you’ll hit a county that has lost rather than gained population,” Popper said. “That’s a very counterintuitive thing to have found.”

Depopulation is most striking on the Great Plains, where 60 percent of counties have lost population since the 1990 census. But inner cities have lost population, too, including Philadelphia, Baltimore and Detroit.

The only regions immune from decline are the mid-Atlantic states and the Southwest, Popper said. “Everywhere else has suffered depopulation,” he said.

Few planners, however, study the phenomenon. “My field has been very big on growth management — particularly in sunbelt settings or suburban settings,” Popper said. “The big task, stated over and over again, is that our field has to contribute ways to manage growth.”

The Poppers took a different tack.

“What Deborah and I are saying — and I guess this makes us a little counter-cyclical — is that if you look at American history, growth is not the issue in a lot of rural America.”

Professional catatonia

That kind of talk makes people mad in the West, but planning professionals react with something akin to catatonia.

“You define zoning by maximum units in a given setting,” Popper said. “But if you start talking to planners about minimum zones, their eyes glaze over. It’s hard for them emotionally; it’s hard for them intellectually. Zoning ordinances assume growth. Decline never happens.”

It does happen, of course, but even when it does, local politicians have a hard time talking about it, whether on the Great Plains or inside the inner city.

“If a city planner or anybody involved in politics says, ‘Well, here in Michigan we should really think of Detroit in terms of decline management,’ that person would have career problems.”

The Poppers don’t have career problems on the Great Plains. They still teach at Rutgers. Deborah Popper also teaches at City University of New York, and Frank Popper teaches at Princeton University.

There are advantages to considering problems from afar, Popper said.

‘Commons’ misunderstanding

But Westerners frequently misconstrued their thesis.

The harshest critics warned that the Poppers were advocating a federal takeover, with cattle ranchers forced off their land to make room for the Buffalo Commons — a scenario the Poppers never recommended. Rather, they predicted the federal government would end up with abandoned land on the Great Plains by default.

Today, the Poppers are almost as skeptical as West River ranchers about government’s ability to manage the West.

For example, a plan to create a million-acre preserve as the core for an eventual Buffalo Commons — called the Million Acre Project — likely will include a combination of private, nonprofit and government lands.

“A Buffalo Commons doesn’t have to mean complete desertion,” Frank Popper said.

Big cities such as Denver and Omaha might continue to grow. “So could the middle-sized towns,” Popper said. “Rapid City, Lincoln, Bismarck and Billings.”

‘Metaphor as method’

Still, people here resented the Poppers’ predictions and prescriptions, even though the Poppers were vague about the specifics of both.

That vagueness also had an unexpected positive result, which the Poppers described two years ago in an article in The Geographical Review. In “The Buffalo Commons: Metaphor as method,” the Poppers wrote, “The most effective regional metaphors are ambiguous, open-ended and somewhat disconcerting.”

The Buffalo Commons thesis was disconcerting, and the controversy earned it widespread media coverage. The Poppers also got invitations to speak all over the region, and that led to another discovery they called “deeply paradoxical.”

“As we traveled, it became clear that we did not control the meaning of our idea,” the Poppers wrote.

The Buffalo Commons as a regional metaphor was short on specifics, so people were filling in the blanks themselves, they found. Private ranches were turning to buffalo. So were Indian tribes. Local politicians were paying closer attention to depopulation.

Poppers called this form of management by regional metaphor “soft-edge planning.”

A reinvention

In fact, they also welcome the paradoxes. Frank Popper often talks about regions that “suffered depopulation,” but in the next breath, he adds, “Depopulation doesn’t have to be bad.”

He said waves of depopulation in northern New England during the 19th and early 20th centuries strengthened the region in the long term. “The bright side, eventually — and ‘eventually’ is the key word — is that the region that works itself through this can reinvent itself.”

Frank Popper hopes to be part of the reinvention here. He is on the board of the Great Plains Restoration Council, which officially kicked off its Million Acre Project in Rosebud on Saturday. The Rosebud Sioux Tribe has joined the project.

“I’m very excited about that,” Popper said. “It’s the first governmental organization to take the idea seriously and to do something positive about it.”

The Poppers, who are experts in a pessimistic field, are optimistic about possibilities for the Great Plains. “The question is no longer why or whether the Buffalo Commons will occur but how,” they wrote.

Questions or comments? Call reporter Bill Harlan at 394-8424 or e-mail him at bill.harlan@rapidcityjournal.com.

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