Where the Buffalo Roam

The notion that people living on the Plains should cede their land to bison is rooted in a deliberately heretical 1987 article in the academic magazine Planning, titled “The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust.” Authored by professors Frank and Deborah Popper (he teaches at Princeton and Rutgers; she teaches at Princeton and the City University of New York), it suggested that a large portion of the Great Plains—comprising most of Montana, the Dakotas, Wyoming, and parts of six other Western and Midwestern states—would become almost completely depopulated within a single generation, and should therefore be “returned to its original pre-white state,” i.e., a bison range.

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Apr 4, 2011
Length: 21 minutes (5,326 words)
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