Where the Buffalo Roam

by Anne Matthews

On computer printouts, this brainchild of a faculty couple, he a land-use expert and she a geographer, sounds intellectually inspired but of course impractical, a pipe dream; yet when the calmly audacious plan of Frank and Deborah Popper to return millions of devastated acres in ten Plains states to their natural condition and to the buffalo was described in an article by Anne Matthews in the New York Times Magazine in the summer of 1990, the reaction was international and explosive. Where the Buffalo Roam is the first and fascinating account of a plan that, whether it rewrites American environmental history or is trampled underfoot by herds of developers, politicians, and local inhabitants, has stirred pro and anti forces everywhere to believe that it could happen. From the Dakotas to Texas, and from Wyoming to Nebraska, the Poppers have earmarked what they see as the core of their Buffalo Commons: 139,000 square miles drawn from 109 counties, now inhabited by a decreasing population