http://www.onpointradio.org/2010/07/the-great-plains-boom

It seems like only yesterday that the Great Plains, the
magnificent center of the country, was being written off as an economic basket
case. Towns boarding up. People leaving.

The case was made to give the region back to Mother Nature. To make it a
“buffalo commons” again.

Oh, how things change. Today, while so much of the country is struggling
economically, the cities of the Great Plains are booming. Don’t laugh at Fargo.
It’s got jobs. Agriculture and the energy biz, low costs – and low wages.

Buffalo Commons

At the center of the United States, between the Rockies and the
tallgrass prairies of the Midwest and South, lies the shortgrass expanse of the
Great Plains. The region extends over large parts of 10 states and produces
cattle, corn, wheat, sheep, cotton, coal, oil, natural gas, and metals. The
Plains are endlessly windswept and nearly treeless; the climate is semiarid,
with typically less than 20 inches of rain a year.

The country is rolling in parts in the north, dead flat in the south. It is
lightly populated. A dusty town with a single gas station, store, and house is
sometimes 50 unpaved miles from its nearest neighbor, another three-building
settlement amid the sagebrush. As we define the region, its eastern border is
the 98th meridian. San Antonio and Denver are on the Plains' east and west
edges, respectively, but the largest city actually located in the Plains is
Lubbock, Texas, population 179,000. Although the Plains occupy one-fifth of the
nation's land area, the region's overall population, approximately 5.5 million,
is less than that of Georgia or Indiana.

The Great Plains are America's steppes. They have the nation's hottest summers
and coldest winters, greatest temperature swings, worst hail and locusts and
range fires, fiercest droughts and blizzards, and therefore its shortest growing
season. The Plains are the land of the Big Sky and the Dust Bowl, one-room
schoolhouses and settler homesteads, straight-line interstates and custom
combines, prairie dogs and antelope and buffalo. The oceans-of-grass vistas of
the Plains offer enormous horizons, billowy clouds, and somber-serene beauty.

During America's pioneer days and then again during the Great Depression, the
Plains were a prominent national concern. But by 1952, in his book The Great
Frontier, the Plains' finest historian, the late Walter Prescott Webb of the
University of Texas, could accurately describe them as the least-known, most
fateful part of the United States. We believe that over the next generation the
Plains will, as a result of the largest, longest-running agricultural and
environmental miscalculation in American history, become almost totally
depopulated. At that point, a new use for the region will emerge, one that is in
fact so old that it predates the American presence. We are suggesting that the
region be returned to its original pre-white state, that it be, in effect,
deprivatized.