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Lately the Great Plains seem to be getting a lot of press – more, maybe, than they have since the Dust Bowl days of the Great Depression. That would be fitting, since they haven't hemorrhaged people as quickly since then, either.
That population loss is what most of the media buzz is about, along with the economic decline that plays either chicken or egg depending on how you pluck it. An article in a recent issue of Harper's blamed the Republican party for the region's woes, asking incredulously how Loup County, Nebraska, with the lowest per capita income of any county in the country, could possibly have voted 75 % for G.W. Bush in 2000. Maybe it's because Loup County wasn't the poorest county when Clinton took office, and saw its per-capita income decline by over 40 % after that, while the national average was increasing by the same amount.
During those 8 years, only 24 U.S. counties saw their per capita incomes drop. Six of them were in Nebraska; Texas was in second place with five. Sixteen of the 24 were in the Plains.
Lest I harp too much on Harpers, National Geographic recently offered its own take on the changing Plains. Rural communities may be vanishing, it says, but at least the native grasses and buffalo are making a comeback, and Native American populations on the reservations are climbing for the first time in memory. There's a devilishly circular irony in the article's portrayal of the loss of family farms and rural communities as a tragic but inevitable sacrifice on the altar of progress. When the U.S. Army was busily clearing the Indians out of the farmers' way, the same rationale was invoked, with about as much truth, to salve the national conscience. As Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson have written, rural folk are the new "redskins" – "surplus people" in the way of progress.
In his book The Unsettling of America, Berry took exception to a 1970 Geographic article featuring "The Farm of the Future." That future farm feeds its cattle mechanically in "multilevel pens" to "conserve ground space." These days, we call that environmental and social disaster a feedlot. The current article doesn't mention that many of the changes it laments are direct outcomes of the trends so eagerly anticipated three decades ago in the same magazine.
For his part, Wes Jackson actually appears in the current article, describing his Land Institute's efforts to breed a mixture of perennial crop plants whose permanent roots will hold soil the way the current mix of annual ones can't. The story presents other visions for the Plains' future, like Frank and Deborah Popper's Buffalo Commons, which would replace defunct farms with the herds of bison that once roamed. But such visions will be realized on longer timescales, if at all.
Neither Geographic nor Harper's mentions practical alternatives that are in place today. Though Nebraska has the highest number of declining-income counties in the country, it also has more farmers under the age of 35 than neighboring states. For that fact, many thank Measure I-300, which has prohibited corporate ownership of farmland in the state for 22 years. Numbers like that should tell us that the decline of rural communities isn't inevitable – just profitable for those calling the shots.