SF, history, and the depopulation of the Great Plains

I remember reading a short SF story once -- can’t remember who wrote it, but it was probably in Analog or Asimov’s in the 80s or 90s, when I was reading those publications regularly -- that suggested that intelligent, social, civilization-building dinosaurs could have evolved and thrived for as long as humans have, tens of thousands of years, and all record of them would be nothing more than the tiniest sliver in the geological record, one we could easily miss. That chilled me, to think that everything that that we -- all of us, all of the billions of people who have ever lived and loved and fucked and raised children and made art and planted crops and pondered the night sky -- have thought and done will be all but eliminated in the course of time in the short run, say, 100 million years, and absolutely eliminated in the long run, say, by the heat death of the universe.

Anyway, these depressing thoughts were brought on my stumbling today across an article, via Slashdot -- where I always find lots of provocative stuff -- about how

A spacesuit prototype designed for Mars exploration is bounding across the North Dakota badlands this week in a series of field tests to check its mobility and performance.

Engineers and university students are putting their North Dakota Experimental Planetary Space Suit through a series of challenges, including mock-Martian hikes, sample collections and... a simulated sandstorm.

[from Space.com]

And I thought, Man, are the Great Plains really that desolate that they’re now a good place to simulate other planets? Maybe they are. That’s another thing that has fascinated me in recent years, the idea that maybe the idea that we white invaders had to settle the Great Plains with our farms and our towns was a bad one, and the experiment is now coming to an end, in failure:

The change has been building for decades. The western Great Plains contain the country's greatest demographic anomaly: Its human population is emptying out. The trend, the 2000 census shows, has really gained force over the past decade with the drying up of the ranching economy.

But as people move away, wildlife is starting to fill the vacuum. In an unexpected way, a vision of the Great Plains as a wild commons is taking hold....

The concept of the Buffalo Commons was floated by New Jersey sociologists Frank and Deborah Popper in 1988. The Poppers observed that agriculture had failed miserably on the Great Plains, and noted that the region would probably be almost wholly depopulated save for a few cities by the mid-21st century.

[from SFGate.com]

Oh, and there’s so much more. From the Christian Science Monitor:

The region is losing so many rural people that 261 Plains counties hold fewer than six residents per square mile (an old census yardstick for "frontier"). That represents more than one-eighth of the contiguous US - an area larger than France and Germany, but more sparsely populated than any nation on earth. You'd have to travel to places like the North Pole or Greenland to find fewer people per square mile....

Even more broadly, the spreading frontier is challenging America's sense of itself. After all, this is the place where the local barbershop and corner drugstore still exist, where neighbors really do look out for one another, and people cling to small-town values of hard work and keeping one's word. While it's easy to romanticize these places, they nonetheless represent a bedrock of American character - a bedrock that's eroding away.

"This is a region full of mainstream white Americans who played by the rules," says Frank Popper, a land-use planner at Rutgers University, who has publicized the frontier's reappearance. "If that region declines, it makes you wonder about the moral validity of the American success drive."

And there it is, in a way, the idea of history in progress, the science fictional concept of figuring out what makes a society work and what makes it fail. There’s the one line from a 31st-century history textbook: “The grand project of settling of the Great Plains, begun in approximately 1800, was abandoned by 2150.”

But there’s more science fiction at work on the Great Plains today, as an article in the New Zealand Herald suggests:

In 1805, when explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark made their epic journey through the American West, the prairies teemed with large animals, from buffalo that trampled their campsite, to elk, wolves, mountain lions and grizzly bears.

Yet fossil records show this was merely the rump of a much greater megafauna (large vertebrates) population, which included lions, mammoths, mastodons, cheetahs, horses and camels that had vanished many millennia before humans arrived.

But what if these animals, still found elsewhere with the exception of the proboscidians (elephant), returned to the Americas?

Several scientists, writing in Nature, have proposed just that. Instead of using 1492, when Columbus arrived, as a restoration benchmark, Re-wilding North America advocated pushing the clock back 13,000 years to create "an alternative vision of 21st-century conservation biology".

Its authors say that the gradual release of large vertebrates, as proxies for Pleistocene species, into the US southwest and the Great Plains, would revitalise threatened ecosystems and boost depressed economies. Given threats to megafauna elsewhere, its supporters believe "re-wilding of American sites carries global conservation implications".

(The Nature article referenced is here.)

Maybe those 31st-century Martian kids will take a field trip to the ruins of Lincoln, Nebraska, where lions and elephants roam free...