Bull Commons - Powerline leads

Bull Commons - Powerline leads us to this piece in the Times by Nick Kristof, who is espousing a very old idea - give the Dakotas back.

Hindrocket, by the way, says about the column:

As a native of South Dakota, it's easy for me to go along with the proposition that North Dakota should be given back to the buffalo. But certain questions nag at the back of my mind.

Tsk, tsk.

Congratulations to Mr. Hindrocket on escaping SoDak, "The Appalachians of the Great Plains", but let's deal with Mr. Kristof, shall we?

As Hindrocket allows, Kristof is one of the NYTimes' better columnists. And this column captures some key facts about life among North Dakota's dying small towns.

And it misses just as many.

He starts in what is by no means an uncommon sight in North Dakota - a town that 80 years ago had a high school, a post office, a main street and a town band and maybe 200 people, but now has a tiny handful of residents, mostly in walkers. It could be Pingree or Edmunds or Bordulac or Drayton, or a hundred others. In this case:

This forlorn farm town — Rawson, population 6 — is a fine place to contemplate the boldest idea in America today: rescuing the rural Great Plains by returning much of it to a vast "Buffalo Commons."

The result would be the world's largest nature park, drawing tourists from all over the world to see parts of 10 states alive again with buffalo, elk, grizzlies and wolves. Restoring a large chunk of the plains — which cover nearly one-fifth of the lower 48 states — to their original state may also be the best way to revive local economies and keep hamlets like Rawson from becoming ghost towns.

Let's reserve judgement - whether this is good or bad - until later in my article. For the moment, let's just hang on to this idea: turning most of the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, Utah and Oklahoma into a vast nature preserve.

Kristof describes the decline of towns like Rawson - a story that may strike his east-coast audience as sad or pathetic:

Rawson used to be a bustling town with a railroad depot, two stores, a hotel, a bank, a post office, a gas station, a Lutheran church, a lumber yard, a grain elevator and a school. It had its own newspaper, The Rawson Tribune, and its slogan was "Rawson, where opportunity awaits you."

It has been downhill ever since.

Well, yeah. It has.

And there was a time when towns like Rawson were the engines of growth in the nation's interior; they sucked up the flood of immigrants and East Coast economic refugees who the railroads fed out onto the Plains in seach of their 160 acres of homestead. At a time when over 3/4 of the United States lived on farms, and that farmland was getting tired and farmed out, the Great Plains were where the nations food was going to come from!

This was at a time when a farmer could feed, statistically, a few other people at most, and when worldwide surpluses of food- to say nothing of massive exports - were unheard of.

In fact, there was a time when each farmer, statistically, could feed maybe one other person; during all of human history through the Middle Ages. When agricultural technology consisted of branch plows and windlass-powered irrigation, 95% of humankind worked the land. And then, over the last few hundred years, a dizzying chain of advances - the metal plow, the internal combustion engine, genetic breeding of seed stock, herbicides and pesticides, massive and relatively inexpensive irrigation - meant that fewer and fewer farmers could feed more and more people.

1000 years ago, over 95% of the population supported the thin crust of merchants and royalty that lived in the cities - nearly 100% of peoples' resources (time more than money) went to feeding themselves, and famines were common. 100 years ago, 70% of Americans lived on farms or in small towns that served farmers. Today, a total of 10% of Americans are involved in Agribusiness, and that includes as many cubicle dwellers at Monsanto and Cargill as it does actual farmers. The Department of Agriculture estimates that fewer than half a million of us actually earn all of our income by working on farms. And each working farmer feeds hundreds of other people, working on highly-mechanized farms of thousands of acres. When I was a kid driving across North Dakota, all the land between Bismark and Fargo seemed to be cultivated - and even though you could see thirty miles from horizon to horizon, you could see the lights of 2-4 farmhouses glowing in the distance. Today, while most of the land is still either under the plow or has been set-aside in one government surplus reduction plan or another, any given vista will show you maybe one or two farms, if any. Fewer farmers - bigger farms.

Kristof says:

It sounds cruel to say so, but towns like Rawson are a reminder that the oversettlement of the Great Plains has turned out to be a 150-year-long mistake, one of the longest-running and most costly errors in American history. Families struggled for generations to survive droughts and blizzards, then finally gave up and moved on. You can buy a home out here for $3,000, and you can sometimes rent one for nothing at all if you promise to mow the lawn and keep up the house.

So where did those refugees from the land around Rawson go? Did they starve and die in the snowbank?

No. They went to Fargo.

During the heyday of towns like Rawson (and Kensal, and Ypsilanti, Fried, Kief, Tokio, Ellendale and Windsor and more), farmers weren't mobile; they rode horses, or balky cars on wretched trails. "Going to town" took all day, even if "town" was five miles away. Today, the worst roads are a very navigable gravel, and nobody is more than two hours from a city with a mall and enough supplies to run a thousand farms.

Some demographers have said that in fifty years, North Dakota will consist of eight cities (Fargo, Grand Forks, Devil's Lake, Bismarck, Minot, Dickinson, Williston, and my hometown of Jamestown) - and not much else. Small towns will either have died off, or become (like Rawson) retirement villages with their own highway exits - or have found some other means of livelihood, like Carrington (pop 2000, whose farmers built a co-op pasta factory) or Valley City or Wahpeton (with thriving state colleges and small industries). The net population will shrink, but not by much; there will still be farmers, and someone will need to sell them seed, fertilizer, draperies, videotapes and Kix. Someone needs to load the grain onto trains and trucks.

Was this an "error"? Then I have two questions for Mr. Kristof:

• If it was an "error", then why do 1.3 million people still live in the Dakotas? They're free to leave - right?
• If we define "error" as "an area's inability to prosperously sustain the same number of people that it did 100 years ago", then aren't the Appalachians, the South Bronx, South Central Los Angeles, and every single steel town also errors? Isn't every inner-city in America an "error"?

By Mr. Kristof's logic, should buffalo be roaming most of Manhattan north of 120th Street?

Kristof follows this:

The rural parts of the Great Plains are emptying, and in some cases reverting to wilderness.

...with this:

So it's time to reach for something bold, like the Buffalo Commons idea, proposed in 1987 by Frank and Deborah Popper, two New Jersey social scientists. This would be the biggest step to redefine America since the Alaska purchase. Pushing it would give the environmental movement a chance to be known mainly by what it's for instead of for what it's against. But it would take close cooperation with the people with the most at stake: struggling farmers and ranchers, who for now are irritated by East Coast city slickers trying to turn their land into a buffalo playground.

To the extent that the Plains ever were over-settled, it was as a result of government social engineering in the 19th century.

Most importantly - as noted by Kathleen Norris in her wonderful book, "Dakota: A Spiritual Geography" (an essential book to understand the place, even if you grew up there, and especially if you didn't) - parts of the state are doing that, more or less, already. On their own, without the need for "social scientists from New Jersey" or, worse, the government to do it again. The market will level things out; the government will only make things worse.

Kristof notes:

Some journalists reach judgments about a place after interviewing just a few inhabitants; I boast that I talked to half the town.

Three people.

Did he talk with anyone in nearby Williston? In Bismarck, 200 miles away? Did he note that Rawson is west of the Missouri, a part of the state that was sparsely-populated even in the best of times? That the land west of the Missouri was never good for farming (unlike the east, especially the Red River Valley), that it's always been cattle country, and that ranching is the most unstable of agricultural businesses?

Kristof notes that the Ogalala Aquifer, which provides much of the state's irrigation water, is drying up over time. He fails to note that the project that would have prevented this - the effort to divert water from the Missouri River for irrigation - was derailed by environmentalists in the '70s and '80s.

Despite his best efforts, Kristof created a cartoon of life on the desolate plains, for the benefit of an audience that largely has no idea what state the Dakotas are in.

The market will decided the future of the Dakotas - in fact, it has been ever since the beginning. The people who can earn enough of a living to make it worth the while will stay. The people who can't will move on.

Just like I did.

UPDATE: The NYTimes' copy-editing continues to suffer; As I write this, in the last graf of the column Rawson is spelled "Rawlins".

Posted by Mitch at October 30, 2003 07:34 AM