لنستخرج كنوزا من المعرفة و الإبداع و العلم و الأفكار
Late one afternoon in the winter of 1987, a pair of academics named Frank and Deborah Popper were inching their way down the New Jersey Turnpike when the idea hit both of them at once. Or anyway, that’s how Frank tells it. There they were, puttering along, chatting about the conundrum of the Great Plains, whose rural population has been dwindling for nearly a century, when they were overcome by a shared epiphany, and turned to each other in giddy rapture to cry out the words that have defined them ever since.
Deborah, typically, recalls no such thing. No epiphany, no rapture, no spontaneous outburst — all of which she regards, with apologies to Frank, as the grandiose mythmaking of an old romantic. In her version, the two were simply arguing. Bored and irritable, they were passing the time by throwing out ideas for how to repopulate the plains, and dismissing each other’s proposals in turn. Deborah thinks she may at last have blurted out, “Fine, just give it back to the buffalo!” And Frank, who is rarely at a loss for words, stared out the window for a long moment before whispering, “The Buffalo Commons.”
Today, the idea of a return to nature, which the Poppers first described twenty-five years ago in a scholarly article entitled “The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust,” has become central to almost any conversation about the region’s future. The suggestion that residents embrace their own decline and convert their land into a vast national park known as the Buffalo Commons has sparked the enthusiasm of conservationists and the wrath of local farmers in equal measure.
It’s easy to understand why. Stretching along the eastern steppes of the Rockies from Montana to Texas, the plains constitute nearly a fifth of the land in the lower forty-eight. In the late 1800s, they were the very symbol of our country’s expansionist ambitions, flush with homesteaders drawn to the promise of 160 acres of free land, and a blank page on which to rewrite their lives. But over time the plains have also come to reflect the more modern habit of overdevelopment. By 1930, the agricultural boom in the region had already begun to stretch the limits of sustainability. Groundwater dried up. Drought set in. And under a billowing prairie wind, the shallow roots of annual crops proved incapable of holding the topsoil in place: with massive dust storms darkening the horizon, the migratory exodus began.
For the past eight decades, it has continued. Although many cities on the plains have grown, rural communities across Kansas and Nebraska, Montana and Texas, Oklahoma and the Dakotas have shrunk each decade since the Great Depression. In Kansas alone, more than 6,000 towns have vanished altogether. Nearly a million square miles of the American heartland currently meet the definition of “frontier” used by the Census Bureau more than a century ago.
Since their breakthrough on the New Jersey Turnpike, the Poppers have undertaken dozens of missions to the plains, preaching the gospel of the Buffalo Commons and a philosophy they call “smart decline.” Their trips do not always go well. They have been shouted down at community meetings from the Canadian border to West Texas; at times, they have required police protection. Still, the Poppers persist. In 2010, they were invited to address the annual convention of the Kansas Farmers Union by the group’s president, Donn Teske, who farms the same land his family has owned for five generations.
“We’re not sure what to expect,” Frank told me shortly before he and Deborah left. Teske, he explained, had told them that their appearance would be “controversial.”
When I reached Teske, he was even more blunt. “Anytime you get somebody talking about a government takeover of the land,” he droned in a voice like a didgeridoo, “people around here are going to start grabbing their guns.”
Communities on the plains, he said, were already stretched to the breaking point. Teske suggested I come see for myself, and offered to let me stay on his farm in exchange for help with the chores. So, on a cold December day, I tossed a few things in my duffel and headed west.
Teske turned out to be a lumbering man with a prodigious belly and a mustache so thick it could pass for a gag. I arrived at his house late on a Sunday, after a long drive through the Stygian blackness of the Kansas night. Hoisting my bag from the trunk, I followed him up a short flight of stairs to the living room, where he settled into an easy chair surrounded by stacks of books. He motioned to a seat nearby, and I offered him some whiskey I’d brought along, which we nipped at in companionable silence. Periodically, Teske would clear his throat and say something like, “Well, I guess it’s cold back there in New York City,” and I would explain that, although this magazine is based in New York, I don’t live there or visit often, to which he would nod thoughtfully and furrow his brow, as if this made a great deal of sense.
In the morning, we drained a pot of coffee and headed outside to see about the cattle. The early light sparkled on the open fields, and a pair of farm dogs lapped at our ankles as we crossed the frozen ground to a paddock. The calves inside were young but sturdy, with broad heads and straight backs, and Teske smiled almost imperceptibly at them rustling in the pen.
“These just got weaned,” he said, puffing on his second cigar of the morning. “Took about three days for them to stop bellyaching.” He tossed a few pellets of wheat middlings into the lot and rested his elbows on the top rail, his eyes darting over the contours of each animal. Then he nodded toward a nearby freight truck, its bed loaded with huge sacks of grain. “Best get moving,” he said, clambering up into the cab, and we bounced down the driveway for the eighty-mile trip to the seed cleaner.
Along the way, Teske explained why, in a state filled with silos and cleaners, we had to drive so far to deliver his clover. The seed, it turned out, was organic, as were all of Teske’s crops — though he was quick to clarify that this was “not just for moral reasons.” On the contrary, organic farming seemed to him the only sensible option left. Decades of innovation had turned conventional farming into such an expensive and technical proposition that it was hopeless for anyone but agribusiness conglomerates to attempt it. This, he said, was the real cause of depopulation. Modern technology made it possible, and more or less obligatory, for a single owner to work fifty times as much land. So neighbors got to buying out neighbors, and then were bought out themselves. The only way forward, Teske figured, was to reject all those modern innovations, at which point you were basically “organic.”
“Most of us who do organic,” Teske said, “are only doing it because we went bust at conventional farming. We learned the hard way.”
For Teske, that lesson had come in the 1980s. While he was growing up the farm had done pretty well, but after a raft of bad breaks descended in the late 1970s — surging interest rates, plummeting property values, and a sequence of droughts and floods — many of Teske’s neighbors started struggling. Then the U.S. government froze grain shipments to the Soviet Union in January 1980, in response to that nation’s invasion of Afghanistan.
“Before that,” Teske said, as we headed down the highway in the freight truck, wind whistling through the floorboards, “I wasn’t much more than a hired hand to my dad.” The old man had always managed the farm with an unassailable calm, but as the debt piled up and the bank began to threaten foreclosure, tension in the family mounted. Soon his father was showing signs of fatigue, forgetting things, lapsing into downright confusion. Eventually, Teske had to step in. “And I’ll tell you,” he said, “I had no idea what to do.”
For two years, he tried anything that might work: poring over the books, shuffling debt, transferring the title to his own name and back. In time, almost without knowing how, he brought the farm back to solvency. But Teske’s father never recovered. The frustration gave way to disorientation, then dementia. “For the last ten years, he couldn’t even recognize me,” Teske said, gripping the wheel and glaring straight ahead. “To this day, I can’t help wonder if the debt brought it on.”
At the seed cleaner, we pulled up the driveway and parked in front of a small granary, watching through the window as the tiny silhouette of the owner’s son, Jack Geiger, rolled toward us across the undulating fields on a vintage tractor. When Geiger arrived, he grinned and nodded, then hauled Teske’s seed bags into the granary. Once this was done, he shut off the tractor and hurried over to shake hands vigorously.
He was a sturdy man in his early forties, with a dusting of stubble and tan coveralls. He spoke in a slightly formal manner. “Well, Donn,” he said, raising his chin, “I’m very glad to see you. Why don’t we step inside?”
We entered the granary and came upon the looming seed cleaner. It was made of steel and white oak, with a lustrous glow even in the unlit barn, and Geiger spread his arms at the sight of it. “She’s still running, Donn,” he said proudly. “She’s still running.”
Teske grunted. “Good thing,” he said, crouching to study something near the base.
Geiger ran his palm over a sleek curve of wood. “This was originally built in the 1940s,” he said. “It was no longer in service when we bought it. We stripped the wood and waxed it, replaced all the belts. I made only one small modification to the gear-and-chain system. Other than that, it’s exactly as it was.”
I walked in a circle around the old machine, studying its lines and surprised by its beauty. The merger of industrial gearing and burnished hardwood gave it a certain steampunk chic, and I could easily imagine it adorning a hedge-fund manager’s loft or a museum. For Teske and Geiger, however, the beauty went much deeper. Without the organic cleaner — one of the few in Kansas — they could neither process nor sell their seed.
Back outside, Geiger explained that his friendship with Teske was rooted in common experience. As a teenager during the 1980s, he too had watched his family business implode and had stepped in to save the farm. Now he ran the place with his father and brothers, turning to the old machines and methods that industrialized farming had left behind.
“It used to be, when one family was struggling, all the other families would help them out,” Geiger said. “But now, if somebody’s in trouble, everybody else is looking to see if they can buy their land.”
Teske nodded. “These days, you’ve got to grow to survive,” he said. “It changes how people relate.”
In the dystopian future that Teske imagines, the cycle of farm dissolution and amalgamation will continue to its absurdist conclusion, with neighbors cannibalizing neighbors, until perhaps one day the whole of the American prairie will be nothing but a single bulldozed expanse of high-fructose corn patrolled by megacombines under the remote control of computer software 2,000 miles away. Yet even this may be optimistic. Farming on the plains may survive in the near term, even without the communities it once sustained. But soon the water will run out.
Sprawling beneath eight states and more than 100 million acres, the Ogallala Aquifer is the kind of hydrological behemoth that lends itself to rhapsody and hubris. Ancient, epic, apparently endless, it is the largest subterranean water supply in the country, with an estimated capacity of a million-billion gallons, providing nearly a third of all American groundwater irrigation. If the aquifer were somehow raised to the surface, it would cover a larger area than any freshwater lake on Earth — by a factor of five.
Until the Second World War, the Ogallala went almost entirely untapped. Nomadic tribes such as the Comanche and the Sioux had long adapted to the vagaries of the plains by avoiding permanent settlements. They drew water from ponds and streams and gullies, and when those ran dry, they followed the buffalo elsewhere. Even when European settlers began to run massive herds of cattle on the plains in the nineteenth century, they relied largely on native plants for grazing.
It wasn’t until the 1940s, when a variety of new technologies coalesced on the plains, that large-scale irrigation sprang up for the first time — but from there, the transformation was quick. Within a decade thousands of wells were drilled, creating a spike in productivity as unprecedented as it was unsustainable. Land that had been marginal became dependable; land that was dependable became bountiful. Even as the U.S. population surged, with soldiers returning and babies booming, the output of the plains rose fast enough to meet and exceed demand.
No one worried about the aquifer. To farmers it seemed a bottomless reserve, generating the same outlandish volume no matter how many straws went in. Soon there were hundreds of thousands of wells producing the same reliable flow, year after year, without any evident stress.
Then, during the early 1990s, farmers throughout the Great Plains began to notice a decline in their wells. Irrigation systems from the Dakotas to Texas dipped, and, in some places, have been abandoned entirely.
One day last spring, I stopped by the office of Kevin Mulligan, a professor at Texas Tech University who is leading an effort to monitor the Ogallala. Funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Mulligan and his team have spent the last decade examining data from thousands of irrigation wells across the Texas Panhandle. Their hope is to divine exactly where the water is, where it was, where it’s going, and when, if ever, it might come back.
I found Mulligan in the university’s geosciences department, in a conference room plastered with charts and maps and illuminated by so many fluorescent lights that it seemed as if the walls were shivering. He is a wiry man possessed of too many elbows and knees, with a shock of gray hair plastered down in places and bursting free in others. Though he wore a starched blue oxford shirt and a new red tie, the craggy lines across his face and his perpetual squint gave him the air of a man standing atop a windy summit.
Mulligan began laying out a series of poster-size maps of the Panhandle. The first showed the base of the aquifer in burgundy. During the late Tertiary Period, he explained, the region we know as the Great Plains wasn’t composed of plains at all — it was a stony terrain of cliffs and valleys. Gradually that surface was buried by erosion sediment from the Rockies, which blanketed the region with the smooth surface of today’s plains. But underneath, the hills and valleys of the prehistoric landscape remain, forming the bottom of the Ogallala Aquifer.
Mulligan spread out a second map on top, which showed the same region, but in shades of blue instead of burgundy. “This is the saturated thickness of the Ogallala in 2004,” he said. “So that’s basically the available water.” The contours of the prehistoric landscape remained clear: where there had been hills, the water was shallow, and where there had been valleys, the water was deep.
Next Mulligan spread out a map recording the impact of wells, which were represented with hundreds of tiny dots. The burnt-orange shading on the map indicated a rapid rate of depletion. Mulligan said, “What you’re looking at is a drawdown on the order of five to six feet per year. So over the last fifteen years, it’s gone down eighty, ninety, one hundred feet.”
None of which, he went on, is likely to come back. For complex reasons involving wind, weather, and soil composition, the Ogallala does not recharge in the way one might expect. In fact, of the eight states above the aquifer, only Nebraska, with its sandhill dunes, is permeable enough to contribute any serious replenishment.
Now Mulligan spread out the last two maps of the region. The first was covered with crimson spots. “So what we did is, we highlighted all the areas that are less than thirty feet,” he said. “Thirty feet is kind of a magic number. You’re down to so little water that you’re not going to be able to pump nearly enough.” The map was almost a quarter red. “So that’s 2004,” he said, turning, “and this is 2030.”
In the last map the Panhandle was nearly all red. “I look at that,” Mulligan said, “and I can only surmise that there will be very little irrigated agriculture on the high plains twenty years from now.”
“It’s hard to imagine what there will be,” I offered.
Mulligan smiled. “Just because we’re all born into this, we think that’s the way it’s supposed to be. But our human perspective is very biased.”
As we continued speaking, I began to realize that Mulligan wasn’t particularly concerned about the disappearing aquifer. “Why save it?” he asked. “What for?” As Mulligan saw it, the water had been hidden for millions of years, and if it disappeared again, this was a return to normal. The apt comparison was not to a reservoir, but to a seam of gold: you could take it or leave it, but you couldn’t expect to harvest forever. “It’s being mined,” Mulligan shrugged. “When it’s gone, it’s gone. The interesting question is: What comes next?”
But here, for the first time, Mulligan looked troubled. “What scares me,” he said, “is wind.”
Mulligan went to a nearby computer and brought up a satellite photo of central Texas, mottled in shades of beige, and overlaid with bright-green digital markings. “This is down in Nolan County,” he said. “We’ve mapped about four thousand turbines as of 2008. There’s probably six thousand down there now. If this continues, how many are we going to have? Forty thousand? Maybe fifty?”
“What would that look like?” I asked.
Mulligan snorted. “I think this environment’s destroyed,” he said. He punched a few more keys on the computer and a panoramic view of the same region came up — a vista of one hundred miles reaching toward the far horizon, strewn all the way with a multitude of turbines standing like an army at attention.
“This whole G.E. commercial, with the green grass and the turbine and the cow grazing?” Mulligan said. “Looks very aesthetically pleasing. But it’s a completelyindustrialized environment. They’re everywhere. You’re always in it. You can’t get away. A little wind farm — fine. But the whole landscape is like this? And you drive and you drive, and there’s endless machinery as far as you can see, in every direction? That scares me.”
Until recently, most of the wind farms on the plains have been clustered below the Texas Panhandle, but not for any meteorological reason. The winds in that area are no better than those further north; they are simply easier to sell.
That’s because most of Texas is tied into a special power grid that feeds only Texan homes and, in true Texan fashion, is cut off from the rest of the country. (Elsewhere in the continental United States, electricity is supplied by either of two grids, the Eastern Interconnection or the Western Interconnection.) But since the Texas grid also encompasses many of the largest cities in the region — Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston, Austin — a wind farm anywhere else on the plains is barred from those prime markets, and must instead ship its electricity across long distances at great cost. Predictably, as wind developers have approached the plains, they have begun with the flats of central Texas.
That situation is about to change. In August, crews in New Mexico are scheduled to break ground on the first intergrid connection to link the eastern, western, and Texas grids. Though the Tres Amigas SuperStation is not expected to be complete until 2018, it has already transformed the market for wind on the plains — promising to open not only the cities of Texas, but also the rest of the Sun Belt, from Albuquerque to Phoenix to Las Vegas. Faced with such a huge new market, developers have begun scrambling to secure wind rights throughout the region. One of these planned megafarms, the Mariah Project on the New Mexico–Texas border, is slated to produce at least three times more power than any wind farm currently in existence.
One bright Texas morning, I met up with a poet named Andy Wilkinson to visit the Mariah Project and see the Tres Amigas area. I had first encountered Wilkinson outside a bar in Kansas, after one of his poems was read aloud by a young cowboy in a thousand-gallon hat, and I’d been struck by his passages on the Poppers and the Buffalo Commons:
learned professors have studied the exodusmade by our people, our water, our resources,calling our depopulation a certainty,saying why fight it? let’s recognize lost causeswhen they are lost causes, let’s give the prairie back,back to the ruminants, back to the grasses . . .
Wilkinson cut a gentlemanly figure, with a mane of white hair swept back from his forehead, a tidy goatee, and spectacles perched near the tip of his nose. With a Moleskine ledger tucked under one arm, he looked like a banker in a Gary Cooper western. He also happened to be royalty on the plains. A century ago, he told me, one of his distant uncles, Charlie Goodnight, became famous for his exploits as a Texas Ranger and his innovations as a rancher, including the invention of the chuck wagon. Today, Goodnight’s lasting fame has given his descendant an unusual entrée among a motley assortment of plainsfolk, from the orneriest cattleman to the crunchiest hippie — all of whom Wilkinson was in the process of interviewing for an oral-history project. He was particularly interested in documenting the rise of wind power on the plains, which he, like Mulligan, had come to regard as the inevitable next step.
We decided to spend a few days exploring, so we piled into a large white van loaned to us by the university, pointed its great chrome nose west, and set out across the landscape of the Llano Estacado.
Like the Ogallala basin, the Llano is a vast geologic expanse that is virtually impossible to see. The difficulty is not that the Llano is underground — on the contrary, it rests on top of the plains, a vast slab of caliche that covers 37,000 square miles and eludes perception only because it is so huge that it seems less like something than likeeverything. In fact, the only place the Llano is really apparent is along parts of its boundary, where the edge of the mesa suddenly drops away in a steep escarpment to the floor of the plains.
As we barreled across this undifferentiated expanse, Wilkinson furnished a landscape of his own, drawn from a lifetime spent on the plains. He shared private details of Charlie Goodnight’s history, which he had soaked up as a child in his grandmother’s lap; he recalled the rise of cotton in the 1950s, and the days he missed school for the harvest; he laughed at the gaping disbelief of tourists arriving on the high plains for the first time. He pointed out the strange, ubiquitous green circles called playas, which fill with rainfall to form intermittent wetlands for migratory birds, and recalled being on an airplane once, near a guy from Minnesota who looked down at the playas and cried out to his wife, “Oh my God, look at those lakes! We’ve got to come back here and do some fishing!” Wilkinson laughed and shook his head. “I didn’t have the heart to tell him they were a foot and a half deep and would be gone by the time he got there.”
