In 1987, Jon Bon Jovi’s ‘Livin on a Prayer’ became the #1 song in the country, The Simpsons cartoon made its first appearance on The Tracy Ullman Show, and Deborah Epstein Popper and Frank J. Popper published an essay titled, “Great Plains: From Dust to Dust” in Planning Magazine. Their essay generated little national fanfare, but incited outrage in farming communities across several Midwestern states by suggesting that much of the great plains area, including a large chunk of Kansas farmland, should be returned to its natural state. Now, as Obama’s America’s Great Outdoors Initiative offers an opportunity for communities to weigh in on how public land should be managed, one Midwest newspaper has rekindled the Poppers’ cause, championing the development of a million-acre national park in the region, and fanning the flames of a fire that has laid mostly dormant in the region for nearly twenty years.
Earlier this week, The Kansas City Star (which is headquartered in Kansas City, MO) published an essay by the editorial staff titled, “Mr. President, Kansas Needs a National Park,” proposing that “the western edge of Kansas would be a perfect home for a Buffalo Commons National Park,” that would “serve as an economic boost to counties surrounding the park, areas that have seen their populations fall by a quarter in the last 30 years.”
Citing, among other things, the need to preserve the heritage of the great plains region – an ecosystem that has shrunk by 96 percent after it “once dwarfed the scope of Africa’s famed Serengeti in size and equaled it in biodiversity,” and the Midwest’s–Kansas’s in particular–general under-representation in parkland (“The federal government owns 84 percent of Nevada, 57 percent of Utah, 53 percent of Oregon, 45 percent of California and 36 percent of Colorado. It owns 1.2 percent of Kansas, leaving the state near the bottom for federal land involvement.”), the article encourages sympathetic readers to get online and join the Great Outdoors discussion to voice their support of the park.
Predictably, the suggestion of relinquishing private farmland to the government does not sit well with many of the people who live in the region. Below are excerpts from some of the comments about the article:
Actually Mr president we don’t need another national park in Kansas. But over in Missouri we would like to donate the land that the Kansas City Star sits on. They are not being very productive with it. Tell them you are going to put your presidential library there. That will get them all hot. We are busy using the land in Kansas to help feed the nation and world.
And I thought this idea had died the death that it deserves. Here we are again, talking about an old idea thought up by two guys from New Jersey. Let’s be proud of how little of Kansas the Feds own. This column even says the feds own too much across America, but then goes on to say the feds don’t own enough of Kansas…Come on, people, this is one of the biggest land grabs in history.
In addition to touting the region’s historic significance, the article also argues the environmental importance of America’s prairie region (“the world’s most endangered ecosystem”), which “both hosts a wide range of plants and animals, and is one of nature’s most efficient carbon traps, as plants draw carbon from the air and store it underground.” Once established, The Star proposes the park serve as a home for re-introduced prairie wildlife, including herds of bison.
Established on April 16, 2010, the America’s Great Outdoors Initiative seeks to promote and support community-level efforts to conserve outdoor spaces and to reconnect Americans to the outdoors.
[Photo Via: Arthur Chapman]
National parks are always a good idea on paper. My feeling though is that the NPS budget is already stretched enough. The parks we have are already underfunded / understaffed as it is and have massive maintenance backlogs. So, I guess I would say no to any new national parks until we can do a better job taking care of the others.
Anyone who wants more information about the Buffalo Commons should look at my Rutgers website, policy.rutgers.edu/faculty/popper. Deborah and I haven’t talked about the Buffalo Commons as being solely a national park since the late 1980s. There are lots of other possible building blocks: Indian, state and NGO land, plus that of farmers and ranchers who switch to buffalo, plus Ted Turner’s Plains holdings, which are of a size and in a class of their own.
The only national group explicitly focused on creating the Buffalo Commons is the Texas-based Great Plains Restoration Council, gprc.org, whose president is Jarid Manos, greatplains@gprcc.org. (Disclosure: I chair its board.) Then there is the
New Mexico-based National Center for Frontier Communities, frontierus.org, whose executive director is Carol Miller, carol@frontierus.org. It advocates for and does research on small isolated places, not just in the Plains or the West, but nationally. (Deborah and I are on its board.)
Levi is right about national parks. But new ones always have a long lead time. It wouldn’t hurt if the NPS would start planning and maybe preliminary small purchases in the Great Plains, anticipating the possibilities of, say, a decade or more from now. Best wishes,
Frank Popper
Rutgers and Princeton Universities
fpopper@rci.rutgers.edu, fpopper@princeton.edu
732-932-4009, X689
More than 75 years ago the federal government forcibly removed the citizens (land owners) of what is now Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
This should never happen again.
If the people of western Kansas don’t want to give up their lands to the Feds, it’s their right!
Furthermore, as our population continues to increase – one way or another, we cannot give up valuable farm lands.
Jeff
Well played Texas, well played, All this hype for nothing and you get everything you want.
Agree with Jeff about Smoky Mountains, and in fact this happened in a lot of Appalachian national parks and forests in the 1920s and 1930s. But there are ways the federal buyouts can happen humanely, with conservation easements and the like, and in the most difficult cases there are the sort of permanent inholdings common on Western federal lands.
Disagree with Jeff about the link between population growth and farmlands. As a nation we now grow, especially in the Great Plains, far more than we can possibly use–that’s why we have farm surpluses and foreign agriculutural aid. That’s also why we have farm subsidies: the surpluses have dropped the free-market prices, again especially for commodities the Plains produces. In a sense farmers have been too successful–that is, too productive–for their own good, and their productivity and perverse success keeps growing. It will be many generations before the US sees the problem Jeff imagines, and it probably never will. Best wishes,
Frank Popper