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166 chapter six Hell of a Vision Though Regionalists are marginal, Regions have no margins. max cafard (a.k.a. john p. clark), THE SURRE(GION)ALIST MANIFESTO (1989) In 1990, the nation was treated to a spectacle unique in the history of American regionalism: the “Buffalo Commons” road show, starring Frank and Deborah Popper. The two Rutgers University professors were touring the Plains states—sometimes in the company of network TV news crews, sometimes with police escorts—to speak to civic groups about their entirely hypothetical plan to restore much of the region to the condition of open bison range. The Poppers had first proposed the idea in a 1987 article for Planning magazine, “The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust,” and they were riding a wave of sudden fame unexpectedly released from the zeitgeist. As one colleague later declared, the Buffalo Commons had “caught fire unlike any other title I can think of in the history of land-use management.” Another marveled, “The Poppers accomplished with one article what few in academia can accomplish with multiple books. . . . They’ve gotten people to think about the Plains as a region and address problems from a regional perspective.”1 Whether the response had such positive direction is difficult to say, but the Buffalo Commons debate surely seemed to indicate that regional consciousness was alive and well in the late twentieth-century American West. Not all of the “fire” that greeted the Poppers was enthusiastic, as they soon discovered; much of it was angry. Writer Anne Matthews, who chronicled the road show in her book Where the Buffalo Roam (1992), depicted scene after scene of regional resentment erupting out of discussion of the Poppers’ proposal, at least once to the point of physical threat. During one meeting, Matthews reports, a woman in Oklahoma City remarked, “These Hell of a Vision • 167 Easterners, coming in here, saying, ‘The land is all of ours. One nation.’ We’re not used to thinking that way, is all.” A man in Nebraska who had to be ushered out of a gathering yelled, “Don’t try to come in and use our land for common property for people from New Jersey and California. Don’t you do that!”2 That so much ire could be vented against two academic experts with no official governmental standing was curious on the face of it. In part it was a product of American celebrity worship, which conflated fame with power—the Poppers were on national TV, so their ideas must carry weight and be taken seriously (such things loomed larger in the years before the Internet). The reaction also expressed an alarming sense of powerlessness and disconnection from the federal government and the national establishment in general. A decade or more of post-Watergate, Reagan-era rhetoric declaring the federal government to be essentially harmful had taken its toll on the nation’s political will and unity. In all of this, the Poppers themselves—two middle-class college professors with an idea—were totally obscured. The focus was on what they represented: the wave front of cultural change attending environmentalism, which must radically challenge much that Americans traditionally held dear—unlimited growth, sovereign property rights, command over nature, individual liberty. As had occurred during the Sagebrush Rebellion, the threat to these sacred, inherited traditions was spatialized as an alien force from the East, a conspiracy by quasi-aristocratic, elitist outsiders. It also didn’t help that the Poppers were of Jewish heritage, confronting one of the most Protestant, ethnically homogeneous regions of the country with some unpleasant facts and a “revolutionary” plan. The Buffalo Commons concept itself seemed perfectly calibrated to press a wide variety of mythic and ideological hot buttons. The Plains were the setting of “the largest, longest-running agricultural and environmental miscalculation in American history,” the Poppers wrote in their original article. Twice before, the busts had been so bad that the region was severely depopulated—in the 1890s, when Rose Wilder Lane and her parents fled Dakota to go back East; and in the 1930s, when Caroline Henderson held on for dear life in the Oklahoma Panhandle. Now the Plains were in another downward spiral that could leave them “almost totally depopulated.” Rather than renew the cycle of economic futility, the Poppers suggested that “the region be returned to its original pre-white state, that it be, in effect, deprivatized.” Much of the Plains would be reinhabited (to use the bioregionalist term) by bison and...

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