The Buffalo Commons: Its Antecedents and Their Implications

Abstract

Since 1987 we have contended that the future of much of the Great Plains lies in a vision that we call the Buffalo Commons. A combination of literary metaphor, public-policy proposal, futurist prediction and ecological restoration project, the Buffalo Commons foresees a Plains whose land uses fall between cultivation on the one hand and wilderness on the other. The Buffalo Commons suggests a way for the region to avoid the excesses of its past boom-and-bust cycles--in particular, its repeated pattern of successive oversettlement, overuse, economic and ecological collapse, and eventual population decline. To us the Buffalo Commons means that many short- and mixed-grass Plains places will have more buffalo and fewer cattle, more environmental protection and less extraction, and more ecotourism and less emphasis on conventional rural development. We have argued that because it draws on the most evocative parts of the region's past, the Buffalo Commons offers the Plains substantial future economic, environmental and community benefits (Popper and Popper 1987, 1994, 1998a, 1999, 2004, and 2006). This paper explores the antecedents of the Buffalo Commons idea and their implications for creating the region’s future. As a phrase the Buffalo Commons originated with us, but as an idea it has a long history. In the Native American period large chunks of the Plains were a Buffalo Commons. So are today's much smaller federal, state and Canadian provincial wildlife reserves for buffalo (Isenberg 2000, 165 and 178-185). But in this paper we show that throughout the Euroamerican period many prominent observers of the Plains, coming from strikingly diverse backgrounds, proposed grand-scale versions of Buffalo Commons-style preservation, conservation or set-asides--usually long before our work and in one case more than 160 years ago. The bulk of the Buffalo Commons proposals appeared after 1920, after the vast majority of the Plains was homesteaded or otherwise put into private hands. An exploration of the Buffalo Commons' predecessors aids in understanding both the reactions to it and the consequences of it. The Buffalo Commons concept provoked much debate, misunderstanding and opposition (see, for example, Matthews 2002 [1992], Ettling 1996, and Vogel 2006), and also led, mostly indirectly, to many public and private initiatives, especially in the northern Plains. New buffalo-focused organizations emerged: for example, The reactivated American Bison Society, American Prairie Foundation, Great Plains Restoration Council (F.J. Popper chairs its board), Honor the Earth's Buffalo Commons Project, the InterTribal Bison Cooperative, and the North American Bison Cooperative. Plains acquisitions by land-preservation groups such as the Nature Conservancy, the Sierra Club, and the Grassland Foundation rose (for example, Stegner 2000, 46 and Herring 2006). Embryonic federal and state government efforts appeared (for instance, U.S. Department of Agriculture1999, 1-23). There were mini-booms in the buffalo industry, buffalo artifacts and buffalo nonfiction (such as Matthews 2002 [1991], Brown 1995, Dickenson 1995, Manning 1995, Callenbach 2000 [1996] and Licht 1997). Online Journal of Rural Research & Policy