Future of the Southern Plains, The

Environmental History, Jul 2004 by Macalady, Alison

The Future of the Southern Plains. Edited by Sherry L. Smith. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003. 288 pp. Illustrations, maps, index. Cloth $29.95.

Scholarly and general audiences alike will be interested in this collection of eight essays on the economic, political, and environmental histories of the Southern Plains-a region the authors center in northwestern Texas, with slices of New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, and the Oklahoma panhandle added on. The volume's authors, participants in a 2001 symposium-all also offer possible futures for the region.

Like the larger Great Plains region, many counties in the Southern Plains are depopulating, and more than a few have slipped back into Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier" definition of less than six people per square mile. But unlike in the plains country to the north, editor Sherry Smith claims, journalists and others have glossed over the Southern Plains version of shifting demographics and economy. Smith notes that while Frank and Deborah Popper's Buffalo Commons idea is gaining press and some acceptance in the northern plains, Texas and Oklahoma remain largely off the map. The writing in this volume is offered as a partial antidote.

Intensive resource extraction, for example, is a theme common in the Southern Plains. Fossil water from the Ogallala aquifer, a 3.3 billion acre-feet reservoir that stretches from Texas north through Nebraska, continues to be the basis for agriculture across the region. John Opie's essay about two underwater management districts elucidates the challenges of managing this communal water, a fundamentally limited resource that has shrunk by over a third since the advent of pumping in the 1940s.

Oil-a more famously fossil resource-is the topic of Diana Davids Olien's essay. Big oil companies have largely abandoned the once lucrative fields of the Permian Basin, and the plains communities in its midst. Despite the loss, some smaller, independent companies continue to survive and even prosper. Surprisingly, Olien does not mention carbon sequestration in depleted oil fields as an additional factor in future oil-based economies on the Southern Plains.

Jeff Roche traces the evolution of Anglo political identity in the Texas Panhandle and the Llano Estacado. A melding of Midwestern farm values, frontier individualism, and southern race politics bred a new variety of grassroots and conservative Republicanism starting in the 1960s. This formidable political identity is not, however, unchallenged. Yolanda Romero documents the growing Mexican-American presence in northwestern Texas, and the growing political and social force Hispanics are adding to the political landscape.

Dan Flores writes about the nation's changing perceptions of the Southern Plains-its downfall from wild American Serengeti to the "nothing" between Interstate destinations. Glossed over for national park or monument status by the vertically oriented administrators of the early Park Service, remaining portions of the southern short-grass prairie are the focus of renewed interest from ecologists and conservationists. In this interest Flores sees hope of a restoration-based future for the Plains.

Despite some disconnect between the pieces, the essays reveal a common appreciation and love for the Southern Plains, one that surely will stir interest and inspire further investigation in the region's human and natural environments. Missing was a larger comparison to the situation across the agricultural states of the American Midwest and Great Plains, and to the larger state of Texas.

Alison Macalady is a former environmental journalist from Colorado and a Master's student at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.