{"id":85534,"date":"2025-03-17T09:37:17","date_gmt":"2025-03-17T14:37:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/?p=85534"},"modified":"2025-03-17T09:37:19","modified_gmt":"2025-03-17T14:37:19","slug":"science-cafe-discusses-idea-of-buffalo-commons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/?p=85534","title":{"rendered":"Science Cafe discusses idea of Buffalo Commons"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By CONNOR KEATING<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tiger Media Network<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last Monday, the 140th Science Cafe was hosted at The Venue inside of Thirsty\u2019s and featured guest speaker Robert Channell, who discussed the idea of the Buffalo Commons.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMost of my research is in declining populations in threatened and endangered species, and normally when I talk to a group that\u2019s what I\u2019m pitching, but my wife and I have been trying to pick what we want to do research-wise towards the latter part of our careers,\u201d Channell said. \u201cWe decided we\u2019d work on a project together, and the project we wanted to do was looking at the idea of Buffalo Commons.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Channell, who is a professor of biological science at Fort Hays State Univesity, began his speech by talking about his own experiences as someone who grew up in the Great Plains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe droughts of the 1980s were very severe. As a teenager in Hays, you could feel the impact,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He also mentioned the collapse of the oil industry in the 1980s and the impact that that also had on the region, leading to a mass exodus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSo the oil industry had a major recession,\u201d he said. \u201cLots of jobs were lost. Lots of people left the plains, and while this had been a problem, almost since the original settlement of the plains, people started leaving almost immediately when the recession hit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Channell discussed the decline in population on the Great Plains, saying that most counties had reached their highest population during their original formation, and have been declining ever since. He then spoke about the main idea of the presentation, an article published in the magazine \u201cPlanning\u201d in 1987, written by Frank and Deborah Popper, called \u201cThe Great Plains: From Dust to Dust.\u201d In fact, he also mentioned that on the day of his presentation, he got an email from the Poppers wishing him luck on his talk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis is a magazine, not an academic publication,\u201d he said. \u201cSo it doesn\u2019t have citations, doesn\u2019t have any footnotes, and it doesn\u2019t get real specific on the ideas they\u2019re discussing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He then went on to explain the ideas that the article was trying to present, starting with the historical and economic turmoil of the region like the Dust Bowl as well as numerous bank closures, particularly during the great depression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat was the setting that they put it in,\u201d Channell said. \u201cBut they saw the real problem as, that as the population declined in the Great Plains, that the quality of life for people that were left has to decline, and they noted particularly a lack of services.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Channell mentioned bank failures causing remaining banks to tighten up their loans and a lack of medical services for those who live in the region. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He said the article saw the Great Plains as a failure of private interest, as most of it was part of the Louisiana Purchase, before going through the homesteading process. However, without subsidies, living on the Great Plains would be very difficult, leading to a decline in population.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a certain level of population density, and below that is considered frontier and above that population is considered resettled,\u201d Channell said. \u201cAnd much of the Great Plains has gone back below that level in which they\u2019re considered frontier. So the frontier has reemerged for large parts of the Great Plains.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Channell then went over some of the article’s proposed solutions, starting with the return of the Commons; a shared piece of land that everyone in the community owns and is used for the common good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cExamples of this, the one I use in class all the time is the Boston Commons,\u201d Channell said. \u201cBoston Commons was an area in Cambridge, which was a big square area, and it was owned by the general people and what it was used for was grazing your livestock, because if you lived in Boston you didn\u2019t have a place to graze livestock, but you needed them to survive.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The article proposed that the federal government should buy back this land, and the silver lining to this was the reintroduction of the bison, and the reestablishment of the grassland ecosystem. This is where the name Buffalo Commons comes from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAs a biologist trained a lot in mammalogy, calling this \u2018buffalo\u2019 really burns my mouth,\u201d Channell said. \u201cThey\u2019re bison. They\u2019re not water buffalo.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Channell then talked about the reception of this idea. People outside of the Great Plains generally loved it, but people who lived on the Great Plains generally despised it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey didn\u2019t expect this to be as big of an idea as it was,\u201d Channell said. \u201cThey didn\u2019t think, \u2018this is what\u2019s going to make our name, this is what we\u2019re going to base our careers on for the next 40 years\u2019. This is a paper that they thought, \u2018It\u2019s quick! It\u2019s dirty! We\u2019re going to put it on our CV and get tenured!\u2019 But they did identify a lot of real challenges.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Channell then laid out some of the challenges that the article discusses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne of the things that they have to do to get this to work is to reestablish grasslands on areas that have been farmed for almost 100 years, and this is really, really difficult,\u201d Channell said. \u201cThey said this is going to take 20 or 30 years. I know of a wildlife conservation area up in Rooks County where they stopped farming 40 years ago, and it\u2019s what we call in ecology an \u2018old field\u2019 that\u2019s what you get when you don\u2019t do anything with the crops and you just let it go. So these don\u2019t come back as quickly as they thought.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He also mentioned that this would have to be done on a larger scale, spanning much of the Great Plains and not just a single field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne of the things that really bothers me about this set of ideas is they settle around this idea of reintroducing the bison but reintroducing the bison does not address the problem,\u201d Channell said. \u201cIt\u2019s decoration. It\u2019s what they say, \u2018okay if this is our idea\u2019, which is kind of depressing and the solution that they\u2019re saying is \u2018Federal Government, buy it!\u2019 Isn\u2019t something that\u2019s likely going to happen, but to make this all look better they\u2019re adding the bison.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Channell did mention that bison are being reintroduced into some parts of the Geat Plains, but these are areas where cattle are being taken off and swapped out for bison, and not areas of reestablished grassland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Channell then discussed the economic and environmental challenges that the article had presented and also brought up the impacts of climate change and the effects that it may have on the Great Plains in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI do a lot of climate change data in my modeling for the Great Plains, and we expect warmer temperatures, and it doesn\u2019t sound like a lot when you say two or three degrees, but for Ellis County, that\u2019d be going from having seven to eight days a year with temperatures above 110 to going up to 15,\u201d Channell said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He also mentioned the environmental impacts that over-farming can have and said that 1.9 million acres of grassland was converted to agriculture in 2022, primarily in the northwestern section of the great plains and parts of Texas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Channell wrapped up his presentation by looking at the inconsistent definition of the Great Plains map, and showed his own map for future endeavors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAs I said, this is a little bit of a different type of thing, I\u2019m not talking about research I\u2019ve completed, I\u2019m talking about ideas that have kind of inspired me, ideas that I want to look at, things that are near and dear to my heart,\u201d Channell said. \u201cThis is the area that I lived in, the area that I grew up in, so I wanted to look at it and see what kinds of things that we can look at.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Channell was fairly harsh on the article he discussed, he did say that it was from a place of respect as the article puts forth some real problems, but doesn\u2019t give quite the best solutions. With his wife, Kim Perez, Channell said that he hopes to look further into these issues in order to be able to provide information and answer questions to help improve the quality of life on the Great Plains.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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