BUFFALO COMMONS Deborah E. Popper And Frank J. Popper

Buffalo Commons as a metaphor An effective means to pursue a traditionally central task of geography. An inclusive way to make thinking about regions and the probable changes in them accessible.

The Purpose Of the Buffalo Commons A large scale land restoration project.

Region For The Buffalo Commons The Great Plains Lying between the Rockies and the tall grass prairies of the Midwest and South. Extend over large parts of ten states. Produce significant quantities of cattle, wheat, cotton, sheep, coal, oil, natural gas, and metals. Region’s history shows a basic cyclical pattern of growth and decline. Periods of high rainfall and federally subsidized settlement initially induce a boom. Overgrazing and overflowing erode the soil and lower the water table; a bust ensues, with heavy depopulation.

Economic/ Environmental Cycles Two cycles have already occurred First began with the 1862 Homestead Act that gave 160 acres of free land if it could be farmed for five years. The cycle reached it’s zenith in the heavy rain years of the 1870’s. It ended in the 1890’s with widespread starvation and large convoys headed east out of the Plains. The second cycle began in the early 1900’s with new homesteading laws that gave settlers up to 640 acres. It reached it’s height during World War I when American wheat replaced European production lost to the battlefields. It ended in the 1930’s with the Great Depression, drought, the Dust Bowl, and the abolition of homesteading.

The Third Cycle The upswing occurred from the 1940’s to the 1970’s It had featured the first introduction of large scale federal subsidies; both agricultural and energy development. By the mid-1980’s large parts of the Plains’ farm, ranch, energy, and mining economies were in near depression as the national economy, federal policies, and global markets shifted. Population losses had accelerated; young people in particular had left.

How Buffalo Commons Would Work In land-use terms: an umbrella phrase for a long term restoration project to counter the long term effects of the three cycles. Where land uses were not working well, replacement land uses that treated the land more lightly would become inevitable. The federal government would oversee the replacement, and the new land uses would fall between intensive cultivation/extraction and pure wildness.

Reaction to Buffalo Commons People variously interpreted the metaphor as a general assault on their way of life. Many Great Plains people intensely disliked the commons portion of the metaphor. Sometimes the only point a group could agree on was that they didn’t like the Buffalo Commons.

Adaptation of the Metaphor The Buffalo Commons was specifically set up as a metaphor so that different people in different regions could use it for their specific problems. – North Dakota sees buffalo production and buffalo tourism as vital to it’s growth. – Rural Pacific Northwest has similar problems to the Great Plains. It has adopted the salmon metaphor in place of the buffalo to alter certain practices.

“A treasure of insight can be unlocked via metaphorical rather than literal or rational thinking… because metaphor performs a poetic as well as conservative function in ordinary language, preserving as well as creating knowledge about actual and potential connections between different realms of reality.” Anne Buttimer, geographer