After the Dust Settles

By Maxwell Hartt

In their 1987 article in Planning magazine, "The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust," Deborah and Frank Popper proposed a plan to transform the Great Plains into a 10-state national reserve. Their proposal prompted a wave of letters to the editor, inspired a musical, and sparked a spirited national conversation later captured in Anne Matthews's Pulitzer Prize nominated book Where the Buffalo Roam. The Poppers sat down with Maxwell Hartt to reflect on their article, the response, and how planning has changed over the past three decades.

Deborah and Frank Popper. Photo courtesy Deborah and Frank Popper.

Your article made an impression when it came out 30 years ago. Why do you think that is?

DEBORAH: It struck a note because we focused on a vulnerable region — a region still vulnerable today in many ways — that many felt didn't get enough attention. Yet by giving it attention, a lot of people felt exploited by our article. It was as though we had trashed the public perception of that particular region. We highlighted economic problems with the agricultural economy, but also the emerging and very strong sense of environmental problems with the way farming was being done. Everybody knew that these small towns were fading, fading, fading, fading. And nobody wanted to talk about it.

I think that the transgressive nature of the piece — saying things that you weren't supposed to say — was very provocative. I think we thought of it as purely evocative, but we learned otherwise.

The Great Plains today. Photo ©Dennis Lingohr/courtesy American Prairie Reserve.

FRANK: Everything Deborah says is 300 percent true. Our article played on historic themes that by definition had already been out there for a long time. But we were at the right place at the right time, and happened to come up with some phrases that struck a chord. One particular zinger got a lot of attention. We described the white history of the Plains as "the largest, longest-running agricultural and environmental miscalculation in American history." And I think we still stand by it. And climate change will make it worse.

DEBORAH: Another reason for the tremendous response was that people saw us as having power to create something that they couldn't. Of course, we had no power over anybody in writing this article and no power to make the Buffalo Commons happen. The irony is that it did stimulate a grassroots response more significant than a lot of formal planning efforts.

Did you expect such a strong response?

FRANK: We never expected any response at all! This was a total surprise to us. And it just kept going and going! This is the first article that Deborah and I had ever written together. We didn't know that much about what to expect. We thought that nobody would actually care. We did it partly for fun, as a sort of marital exercise, as a kind of strange intellectual hobby. We never expected it to be picked up!

DEBORAH: Planning's main audience is not in the Great Plains, so I don't think that anyone expected any kind of reaction at all. And then the letters started rolling in. I think the magazine was surprised. ;Planning got more letters about this than it had up until that time. And then the invitations began, and we got to see interesting initiatives cropping up.

How has planning changed since then?

DEBORAH: Planning has changed to be much more inclusive in its mood and methods. At the time [of our article], planning was perceived as being more top down. Before visioning exercises were normal planning practice, the Buffalo Commons encouraged people to imagine and talk about change. What do you want your community to look like in five years? Ten years? Twenty years? One thing we realized and really embraced was that lots of good ideas were coming from people on the ground.

The Buffalo Commons wasn't prescriptive, it was about having a conversation. And I think that actually happened. We tapped into different groups and were part of a really interesting and productive conversation.

FRANK: And those on-the-ground people certainly knew more than us about the Plains. We were perfectly happy to have their contributions, which in turn really magnified and improved the whole thing. It was definitely not a top-down, exclusion of the bottom type of thing. Certainly the opposite. Plus a lot of the contributions came from people who didn't like the Buffalo Commons. They were happy to talk to each other even if the occasion for their meeting was us.

But one way in which planning hasn't changed is its language and vocabulary. The public is still not all that taken with hard-edge planning [terms] like zoning or environmental impact assessments. We have since advocated for storytelling-based planning, using the Buffalo Commons as an example of a metaphor in planning that has worked.

DEBORAH: For me, it is more about how do you rethink? And what are the elements that help you [do that]? The Buffalo Commons language was evocative and really did paint a picture. But it wasn't meant to be a concrete picture. It's not the Buffalo Commons. There are lots of different ways to create something that is sort of Buffalo Commons-ish. It doesn't have to look like any one thing. The Buffalo Commons was a metaphor.

FRANK: And for metaphors to score well, they need just the right amount of irritant without going over the line into offensiveness. That's what the Buffalo Commons did.

What is your outlook now? Will the Buffalo Commons come to pass?

FRANK: In the original article, we said the federal government would have to pick up the pieces if current trends continued. Of course current trends never precisely continue. Now the current federal government may in fact do a lot to create the Buffalo Commons by reducing farm supports, through tariff policies, and through the withdrawal of all kinds of subsidies. Well, we can't be as certain as we were writing our hypothetical-no-one-will-read- it marital exercise.

But we really did bite into a lot of the reality that is still unfolding today. Rural populations have continued to drop — and more positively, farmers and ranchers began running more buffalo, Native Americans increased their buffalo initiatives, and nonprofits like the Nature Conservancy and the American Prairie Reserve began their buffalo work. It's very nuanced and detailed and changeable, but I think the underlying theme is that something has happened and will keep going. Of course, being three decades older and more responsible, I'm not saying any of this "in a generation" stuff.

DEBORAH: We didn't realize how short a timespan a generation is! Not at that age. We thought a generation was a long time!

FRANK: So we may not live to see it, but I'm still convinced that despite all the other influences, something like the Buffalo Commons will happen. It could be a terrible version, a really perverse version — planning history is full of wonderful-sounding visions that turned out horribly — or it could be an inspiring one. But whatever form it comes in, it will happen.

Maxwell Hartt is a lecturer in the School of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University in Wales and a Management Board member of the Shrinking Cities International Research Network.

Resources

Read the Story That Started It All: "The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust," Planning, December 1987. www.planning.org/planning/2018/oct/thegreatplains