Rob:  When the idea of turning parts of the Great Plains into a very large game preserve was first proposed twenty years ago, it was seen by many as a rebuke of our way of life.  The authors of the idea, Frank and Deborah Popper, were roundly dismissed as out-of-touch academics and ridiculed in both opinion pages and in the coffee shops.  Yet, times have changed in the two decades since the Poppers rocked the Plains with their idea of a buffalo commons.  Our Alisa Hines caught up with the two authors and asked them if their original premise still holds true today.
Deborah Popper:  We struck a chord, I think, of anger, because people in fact were feeling enormous pressures.
Alisa:  So, describe to me the impact technology, such as pesticides and bio tech, plays with our environment and our demographics.
Popper:  Many of the consequences that we were pointing to in our first article, came from all sorts of technological improvements, as it were, or as it seemed at the time.  You know, pesticides looked as though they were increasing production, enormously.  And, so you can grow so much more in the same places, and all sorts of things; an intensification really of agricultural projects, that also meant that you didn’t need as many people.  You could just kind of, in fact, you could get a plane to go fly over, take care of, you know, an enormous swath of ground.
Alisa:  So, what is the ideal?  Is there a happy medium between, no one in the Plains, and someone living in a sustainable community?
Frank Popper:  There’s a whole bunch of big, grinning happy mediums out there.  Even if you take what is, perhaps, the most hostile conception of the buffalo commons, it becomes the center of a giant national, federally run, park, you know, stuck in the middle of the Great Plains.  Well, if you look at how other national parks work, here and abroad, people make livings out of national parks.  Sometimes, people live in national parks.  Sometimes, people live in national parks and make livings from them.  There are all kinds of models of this very worst case interpretation of the buffalo commons that still don’t quite empty the Plains the way we are reputed, by some people, to have thought of doing.
Alisa:  Can you separate the environment from economics?
Popper:  No!  Okay, for example, just to take something we were just talking about before, when you separate environment from economics, or economics from environment, you lay yourself open to these situations where new technologies come in, seem to have short-term, or even long-term beneficial economic effects, but have environmental effects, or social effects, that end up to be far worse, we think, than any economic benefit you would have gotten.  So that again, with all those technology examples of the moldboard plow, or the tractor, or the pesticides, or the center pivot irrigation, or, you know, the county agents and the whole land grant system of university supported agricultural research; all of that stuff, historically, has been much more economics driven than environmentally driven, than socially driven, and so on; and that separation is part of what has landed us, not just the Great Plains or Oklahoma, but landed the nation in some very nasty difficulties it’s finding very hard to get out of.
Alisa:  So, what is the goal that you hope to accomplish in all of this?
Popper:  What we hope to do in our small way is to contribute to some, on this trip certainly, to some improvement in Oklahoma’s adaptation to its environment and Oklahomans’ adaptation to each other; because all you have to do is drive around, just a little bit, or walk around, just a little bit, to see that there’s some very serious, out of whack issues.