AUDIO FILE: BUFFALO FIELD CAMPAIGN INTERVIEW

Hopefully, someday the whole great plains will be reconverted to a national park for the bison and birds the way it was before white man came. This area is subject to killer tornadoes and is losing population anyway.
 http://darwin.bio.uci.edu/~sustain/global/sensem/patel97.htm

GREAT PLAINS RESTORATION-BUFFALO COMMONS
In 1987, as part of their famous, controversial proposal for a "Buffalo Commons," Drs. Frank and Deborah Popper of Rutgers University showed that hundreds of counties in the American West still have less than a sparse 6 persons per square mile -- the density standard Frederick Jackson Turner used to declare the American Frontier closed in 1893. Many have less than 2 persons per square mile!
The frontier never came close to disappearing, and in fact has expanded in recent years. The 1980 Census showed 388 frontier counties west of the Mississippi. The 1990 Census shows 397 counties in frontier status, and the 2000 Census may show even more. Most of this frontier expansion is in the Great Plains. Kansas actually has more land in frontier counties than it did in 1890.
Great Plains Restoration Councial is currently mounting a Plains-wide mapping project, using a series of economic and social indicators, to show exactly where the frontier is, and how much further it has expanded. This will be followed with a more rigorous analysis of ecological, biological, topographical, political and other conditions.


Map below, showing "frontier" counties (in yellow), and Indian Reservations (in black). Copyright Zoltan Grossman, courtesy of Honor the Earth.

 http://www.gprc.org/Buffalo_Commons.html