 I want to get right to it. I'm just thrilled that you're hanging in there. I know this is a long day, but you're in for a great treat tonight, a birthday party for Theodore Roosevelt. He's 150 years old this month. And also, it's the 50th anniversary of old four eyes, and you'll see vignettes of that and other surprises. So the evening will become a little more light-hearted, beginning with the reception tonight, and we appreciate that. And we will keep you posted on tomorrow. Dan Flores teaches at the University of Montana in Missoula. He's the A.B. Hammond Professor of Western History there. I'm meeting him for the first time, but I've read his work, and we have mutual friends, including Stephanie Ambrose Tubbs. When we were conceiving this event, we wanted to have, in addition to talking about Roosevelt and conservation, we wanted to talk about the conservation of this place. And what does that mean? And the theme of this next hour and 40 minutes is what will the badlands of North Dakota, Roosevelt's beloved Little Missouri River Valley, look like 100 years from now? And what sorts of things should we be thinking about as these pressures, these events unfold in this extraordinary part of North Dakota? I couldn't think of anybody that I would rather have take the lead than Dan Flores. This book, The Natural West, Environmental History in the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, if you don't have it, I urge you to buy it today and get Professor Flores to sign it. The chapter called Chapter 9, A Long Love Affair with an Uncommon Country, Environmental History in the Future of the Great Plains, is arguably the most thought-provoking thing written about our place in the last 20 or 30 years. So I hope you will get this book. It is extraordinarily interesting about where the Great Plains were, where we are, and where we're headed. So without any further ado, I want to introduce Dan Flores. He's going to give a short lecture, basically, helping us understand how we should have the discussion that will follow his lecture. Dan Flores. Thank you for sticking it out today. It's been a fascinating conference to me, and I'm really delighted to be here. I appreciate Clay thinking of me last spring when he was planning this. And I have to say, I have never been to Dickinson, and I have not been to the Badlands before. I'm a Badlands aficionado from way back, but I have long wanted to be here and come here, and I'm finally going to get to see the place tomorrow. I'm not going to be a sissy. I don't care if it's snowing. I'm going out there. But what I'd like to do as a sort of a preface to the panel that we've assembled here is to talk to you a little bit about thinking about the future of the Great Plains. And I mean, I'm a historian. Historians commonly take a point in time and look backward, not forward. So I don't have any crystal balls to read. I think we discovered today in listening to some of the talks this morning, particularly Donald Worcester's talk, that it was difficult for Teddy Roosevelt to see into the future. However hard he tried to do so. It's just difficult, I think, in terms of translating history into the future. Hardly anyone has been successful in doing that. And I can't claim that I'm going to be able to do it today, but I think I can. I think I probably can use history a little bit, as the saying goes, that the things that are interesting about history is that it basically produces the causes of what we're interested in and what affects us in the present. So I think maybe by looking back at history a little bit, I can kind of give you a sense of what we might expect. And I've got a particular point of view here I want to share with you as well about your little Missouri and Badlands country, because, well, you'll see. I've spent a lot of time on the Southern Plains and have mostly written about the Southern Plains. And you'll see how I relate to your part of the world. I don't know how many of you know the name W.H. Auden. He was a very famous writer and literary critic from Great Written in the early 20th century. I know almost nothing useful about him, except for one thing, which is that he wrote a passage that once came across and basically just kind of committed to memory. It goes like this. I cannot see a plane without a shutter. Oh, God, please, please do not make me live there. There's an exclamation point at the end of that sentence, by the way. And I would have to say that Auden's sentiment there in a lot of ways is sort of how the rest of the world, especially the rest of America, tends to think of the Great Plains today. The Great Plains just isn't loved in the same way that the Rockies or the Sierra Nevada's or the Colorado Plateau country or the Southwestern deserts get love, at least not in a sort of a general way. Now, certainly in a regional and local way, the Plains are very much adored. But I think the general sort of take on the Great Plains is that it's flyover country. It's a place that you drive through and hope that you get through fast and maybe at night. I mean, that's the way most people. I've had people tell me that they didn't think that Montana existed because they had never met anyone from Montana. They'd spent their whole lives on the East Coast and had never come across somebody from Montana, so maybe Montana doesn't really actually exist, I've heard people say. Now, for us, of course, the fact that Teddy Roosevelt and so many other people, especially from the 19th century, had exactly the opposite reaction to the Great Plains, I think is cause for some celebration and some excitement. And what I wanna do just for a couple of minutes is to read you a few examples of people who reacted very differently to the Great Plains than W.H. Auden did. And then I wanna try to offer you some explanation for why that might be. One of the people who's quote about the Great Plains I've always loved because it so upends this common sort of scorn about the plains from the coast was a little known mountain man named Albert Pike who in 1831 made a journey out onto the plains after having he and his party of trappers had mostly stripped beaver out of the Southern Rocky Mountains and they went out on the Great Plains looking for beaver to trap. And after a few months of roaming around in what is now Colorado and Kansas and Oklahoma, Pike, who turned out to be a remarkably good writer for a mountain man wrote this, listen to this line. The sea, the woods, the mountains all suffer in comparison with the prairie. The prairie has a stronger hold up on the census. Its sublimity arises from its unbounded extent, its barren monotony and desolation, its still unmoved, calm, stern, almost self-confident grandeur, its strange power of deception, its want of an echo and in fine its power of throwing a man back up on himself. I mean, every time someone from another part of the country visited me when I was living in West Texas and talked about how flat it was and how bare it was, I trotted out this quote. I would usually ply them with a little tequila first and get them in the proper frame of mind and then trot out this particular quote. Here's a, and this image that I have on the screen, I think sort of captures that. This is an Alfred Jacob Miller painting from the 1830s of a mountain man who's reacting, obviously, to the open spaces of the plains with something like adoration. I mean, true love for the landscape. Closer to where we are now, in fact, near present day Williston and only a dozen years after Albert Pike wrote those lines, the precise date of this particular description is June the 10th, 1843. The, let me change my slide here. The painter John James Ottoman offered up a really potent word picture. I think for one of the Great Plains was in the 19th century, the West's most admired landscape and this is what he said. We passed some beautiful scenery today and almost opposite of where we camp had the pleasure of seeing five mountain rams or big horns on the summit of a hill. We saw what we supposed to be three grizzly bears but we could not be sure. We saw a wolf attempting to climb a very steep bank of clay. On the opposite shore, another wolf was lying down on a sandbar like a dog. If there ever was a country where wolves are surprisingly abundant, surpassingly abundant, it is the one we are now in. I forgot to say that last evening we saw a large herd of buffaloes with many calves among them that were grazing quietly on a fine bit of prairie. They stared and then started at a handsome canner producing a beautiful picturesque view. We have seen many elks swimming the river. These animals are abundant beyond belief hereabouts. To me what Audubon is giving us a sense of and what so many people in the 19th century had a sense of on the Great Plains is that it was literally the Serengeti of North America. It drew people, the plains drew people from all over the world, primarily because of this tremendous abundance of wildlife. And I might add too that even in the early 20th century after much of this plains' wildlife had been exterminated, but before modern agriculture had ripped the grass off a good part of the plains, the region continued to entrance people with a kind of a peculiar magic that, I mean, I'll sometimes even wonder if maybe the reason we react to the plains the way we do, the way I do, doesn't have something to do with our evolutionary hard wiring in Savannah terrain in Africa. I mean, we just seem to have this kind of visceral reaction to the plains. So young Georgia O'Keeffe, for instance, who seemingly was sentenced to people her friends back east thought this was the case, to a career as an art teacher in Outback, Texas, during the time of World War I, found herself out in the Texas Panhandle and writing her friends back east and saying, this is the most entrancing place I've ever been in my life. She said, you can literally just drive out or walk off into space, as she put it. And even as late as 1949, she wrote a friend of hers, Daniel Catten Rich, and said this to him. This is after she'd been living in New Mexico for many years. Crossing the Panhandle of Texas is always a very special event for me. Driving in the early morning towards the dawn and the rising sun, the plains are not like anything else. And I always wonder why I bother to go to other places. So those of us, and obviously they're in the 21st century, there still are a few of us who experience a rush of excitement on finding ourselves on the Great Plains, as opposed to the, what seems to be the coastal reaction is sort of escape the Great Plains. No, this landscape is kind of a tremendous enigma. And I'm gonna read for you a little passage here. This is from an essay of mine. And I think it probably says it better than I can summarize it just spontaneous to you, spontaneously. Seemingly the simplest and umblest of topographies. In fact, the plains was long the biological Eden of North America. Today, America's poster child region of dwindling towns and an aging population, more than once in the past, it's drawn the human imagination as if it were the Elysian Fields. Find a piece of native prairie on the Great Plains, even today, preferably out of hearing distance of interstate traffic. And a few minutes of imagining brings the plains enigma home with a jolt. 10 centuries ago, elephants and camels and lions could have been in view. For thousands of years after that, herds of buffalo, likely trailed by wolf packs and bands of native hunters, would have grunted and grazed past your spot like wildebeest on the Masai Mara. Not quite 150 years ago, cattle drives tacked across the grass ocean towards the pole star. Then the homesteaders came, fences arrived, tractors appeared, followed by center pivot irrigation, libraries, churches, universities. Yet now, except for a handful of cities, the Lincolns and the Amarillos and the Bismarcks, in many places on the plains, modern America seems to be receding. What on earth? What I want to try to convey to you here is that there are a couple of points, really, to make. One is that we happen to be on the plains inhabitants of probably the most anxiously lived in spot in North America. Now there might be a case to be made for Beringia, I suppose, but the first great migrations came into the plains country, perhaps along the coastlines, but certainly our first major cultures that we associate with 10 centuries and 12 centuries in the past are great plains cultures. But one of the patterns that you find in the history of the great plains is this kind of going back 10 centuries or more, this pattern of embrace and farewell. Time and time again in the historical record, human beings have come to the great plains, stayed here while the weather was good and often retreated either eastward or westward when the weather turned bad. This has been one of the parts of North America where the climatic history has really regulated the ebb and flow of the human population. I mean, and that makes, for historians, the great plains into a really kind of fascinating place because it makes it so unlike the steady, relentless growth of so many other American regions. I mean, on the great plains, you have this sort of embrace and farewell that's characterized by the Clovis culture, the Folsom culture, the unregulated market hunts that devastated keystone animals like bison, cattle die-ups and sell-offs, homesteader failures, dustbowl out migrations, declining water tables and this slow bleeding away of the 20th century population on the great plains. I mean, all of this has made the great plains a kind of a set piece in the environmental history that Teddy Roosevelt had instructed us in that we've been talking about for the last couple of days. I mean, I would say that with his ranches, the Maltese Cross and the Elkhorn, Teddy certainly felt the undeniable power of life on the great plains. And I think we can also say that coming here and settling and remaining here generation after generation, I mean, it's not, hasn't been anybody's mistake by any means, we've all loved being on the plains when we've been able to stay. And clearly we're not going to go away, we're going to be here, so we're going to inhabit the place a century from now. But I think the question is not so much abandonment anymore, at least I hope it's not, as how, as Wallace Stegner put it, we create a society to match the scenery here. And in order to think about that, I want to pose to you a couple of points about this long-term history and our much briefer experience. I mean, we've only been here, particularly this part of the Great Plains, for a hundred years, little more than a hundred years, about 130 years is the truth. And in that short amount of time, folks, I mean, I really liked the fact that we've been speaking truths here about Teddy Roosevelt and trying to grapple with what his legacy really is, not just whitewashing the story or turning it into a celebration. So I feel an obligation to do that about occupation on the Great Plains too. In the short amount of time we've been here, we have really produced an extraordinary transformation of this place, especially in ecological terms. We managed, in a very brief period of time, to debuffalo and de-wolf and sometimes de-grass an ecology that was 10,000 years and more in the making. And across a lot of the Great Plains, that process has left the landscape a kind of a, if you look at this 1850s lithograph, it's left what we're occupying a kind of an empty stage. I mean, it almost has turned the Great Plains into an eerie sort of ghost place, a kind of spectral of what it once was. We read all these marvelous descriptions of Lewis and Clark and John James Audubon, and then we look out across the landscape that seems strangely empty of all of this excitement and all of this life. And it's not just a highly visible and charismatic species, the bison that are now just a shadow of themselves, Plains, Grizzlies, Lobo Wolves, Eskimo Curlews, Miriams, Audubon, Bighorn Sheep, all of those have been virtually rubbed out of the landscape. Let me go back here, let's see. Oh, I'm missing one. Sorry, if it comes up, I'll show it to you. There was one other one here I wanted to show you. It was Charlie Russell painting of wolves being roped. What I want to say before I conclude that thought, though, is that, I mean, we've been talking a lot about how Teddy Roosevelt was in love with birds and so forth. Today, the Great Plains is the landscape in North America that has suffered the sharpest population decline in birds and bird life of any other region in the United States over the last three decades, depending on which part of the plains from 25% to 65% of birds and bird species have disappeared on the Great Plains over just the last three decades. There are currently 55 Great Plains species that are threatened or endangered and a whopping 728 Great Plains candidates for listing as threatened or endangered. I mean, that is an extraordinary dismantling of an ancient ecology. The piece you see, the image that you see on the screen right now, I want to tell you what this is. It sort of stands to me kind of as an emblem of some of this dismantling that took place with, stunningly enough, a very small population of people out on the Great Plains. I mean, just a few tens of thousands of people in the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s. Dismantled a huge amount of the ecology in a very short time. And here's just one example of it. This was done by an artist named William de La Montaigne Kerry who was on a steamer heading up the Missouri River crossing into Montana Territory in 1874 and he saw this from the deck of his ship through good sharp field glasses. What he saw was this drama that absolutely transfixed him and he described it this way. He said, about a mile off an immense grizzly bear was making for a cottonwood miles away and behind the bear came two men superbly mounted, armed to the teeth. We could see distinctly the horses straining every muscle to overtake the bear who was equally anxious and making every effort to escape his pursuers. Kerry went back east and painted what he titled cattle men tracing grizzly bear to a den to capture the finale of that scene that he witnessed. They stopped, he later interviewed some of the people who were involved in the chase and this is what he was told about how it ended. And so here you are mounted stockman rifles drawn, they're wheeling their horses to the mouth of a den where a massive sal grizzly is roaring in defense of a pair of cubs that she's protecting. I mean, it's kind of a reiteration of the conquest of the continent and it happened in a really rapid fashion on the Great Plains. I mean, even Teddy Roosevelt himself put it this way. There's the Shirley Russell one. Teddy Roosevelt put it this way about hunting grizzly bears. He said, no other triumph of American hunting can compare with the victory of killing your grizzly. That's the photographer L.A. Huffman with the first grizzly he killed on the Northern Plains. Settlement of this region that we're talking about, the little Missouri drainage in Badlands country though, was really a 20th century phenomenon. I mean, all you guys know, you folks know this a lot better than I do. But I mean, Stockman had been here since the 1870s basically running cattle and sheep and horses across an open range. But, and I'll show you the growth of stock on the Great Plains in the decades from 1880 through 1900. You can see that the little Missouri country has really no stock in the census of 1880 and only is beginning to get something like 10 to 50 cattle per square mile. And even some of the Western parts, not that much by 1900. So it's a fairly open, classic open range, low stocking situation. But starting in 1904 and up to about 1920 during a really good and wet period, entities like the Golden Valley Land and Cattle Company began marketing real estate to farmers and the breakout began in Western North Dakota. Land prices at the beginning were about $5 an acre. By 1915, they were up to $15 and even $30 an acre. There was a pioneer photographer, quite a number of them obviously who were engaged in capturing the breakout in Eastern Montana and Western North Dakota and Evelyn Cameron, a really wonderful story about this woman, I don't have time to tell you. But she sort of captured the process of sod busting on the Montana North Dakota border. During this real estate boom between about 1904 and 1920, actually only about a quarter of the region that we're concerned with, the little Missouri drainage ever got plowed though. I mean, one reason, of course, was because the badlands and the badlands to some people seemed already to be plowed. But only about a quarter of the grasslands get broken out during that period. That's a very different situation, by the way, from other parts of the Great Plains. I lived down on the Southern Plains, which I'm gonna use as a comparison here in a second. And I can tell you the county I lived in, Lubbock County, back in the 1980s, had 3% of its native grass left. 97% of the grass cover had been removed by that time. In this part of the world, the historical low of remaining grasslands came in 1978 and there was still 78% of the prairie intact at that time. So only something like 32% had gotten broken out even by 1978. Despite the, let's see if there's, yeah, there's one more shot, I wanted you to see this one, how homesteaders were making it in the area in the first part of the 20th century. One other thing I wanna quickly tell you about is the fact that we have not, even in the short period that we've been here, we've not been impervious to the vicitudes of climate change either. And the classic example of climate change and its impact on the Great Plains, of course, is the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. We generally tend to think of the Dust Bowl as having affected the Central Plains, and especially the Southern Plains the most. But I mean, despite the latitude of North Dakota, it didn't get a reprieve from this most vivid modern historical experience. In 1934, in fact, the little Missouri drainage, which normally gets about 15 inches of precipitation a year, was getting for several years in a row only about seven or eight inches of rainfall a year. And during the 1930s, a quarter million acres of broken out cropland in this region failed, and area ranchers ended up, of course, liquidating huge numbers of cattle to New Deal programs, which ended up killing most of those animals. That's a very famous Alexander Hogue painting called Mother Earth Laid Bare, famous Dust Bowl painting. I wanna say something else about the Big Picture story. One other thing, and this is sort of where I'm carrying this towards the end here, because it's really important to the present and the future of the area, and also because it helps to make this comparison that I wanna draw between this region and the country farther south. In our national landscape tradition, the American national landscape tradition, we've always confused the vertical with the monumental. In other words, another way to put it, altitude equals beatitude. The plains is not very vertical. It's not very high elevation. And it got perceived as an aesthetically deficient place, especially with all these animals gone for much of the early 20th century, during the time when Teddy Roosevelt was helping to create this great national forest system that we've been talking about for the last couple of days. Hardly anything was going on in terms of preservation of Great Plains landscapes. I mean, I think we all know that in 1934, the first, or 1834, I'm sorry, the first great call for a great, for a national park by George Catlin was for a park on the Great Plains. I mean, this was the first person in American culture who really argued that the government should create something like a national park and Catlin wanted it to be on the plains along the Missouri River. But the Great Plains right now at the beginning of the 21st century is the most underrepresented region of the American West in the entire national park system. I mean, through the end of homesteading in the 1930s, the National Park Service found proposed parks in the Great Plains in places like South Dakota in the little Missouri country and Palo Duro Canyon down in West Texas, not sufficiently monumental as they put it compared to the parks of the far West. There were three existing Great Plains parks. I think someone has mentioned those in the last day or two. Sully's Hill, Platt down in Oklahoma, Wind Cave in South Dakota, they totaled altogether fewer than 30,000 acres. I mean, there are a lot of state parks that are bigger than 30,000 acres. And the National Park Service did everything it could to lose those three that it had. In fact, I found a document one time where one National Park Service investigator reported that he said Sully's Hill lacks even comic value. I mean, this was the attitude that even the Park Service had about parks on the Great Plains. In the 1920s though, the ecologists started getting interested in parks for ecological purposes and I won't go into all the details, but Victor Shelford, who was a very prominent early landscape ecologist in the United States, studied 11 Great Plains sites and the best one that he could come up with was one that I've written about a lot really regretting this decision. But in 1931, Shelford and many other people said the place the Park Service really needs to look at on the Great Plains is Palo Duro Canyon, the Red River country down on the Texas Panhandle. It's really dramatic landscape. It's just perfect for creating what Shelford and other folks thought should be a million acre park of the Great Plains. That would be about half the size of Yellowstone where you could turn Buffalo loose again on a large Great Plains landscape. The problem was though that Palo Duro didn't measure up in terms of verticality to these other parks in the far west. And so here's a map showing the outlines of what the Park Service was considering as a million acre national park of the Plains didn't happen. Park Service was not really interested and this land on the Plains, one of the problems with the Great Plains of course is much of it was homesteaded, therefore privatized and the Park Service doesn't have an acquisition budget. It can't really acquire private lands. It has to call on state folks, entrepreneurs, wealthy CEOs to come up with money to acquire private lands for parks. And I have to tell you, one of the problems with Texas is that none of these Texas CEOs ever stepped up to the plate. They simply were uninterested in a place where the politics are really conservative, they just didn't want a federal Great Plains park. Up in this part of the Great Plains, Roger Toll who was kind of the one man band of evaluating all these places came to the Badlands of South Dakota in 1928, took a look around and said this, it's not a supreme scenic feature of national importance. The Badlands Toll said, are surpassed in grander beauty and interest by Grand Canyon and Bryce. But since 60% of the Badlands in South Dakota was still public domain and South Dakota promised to acquire the rest of it and turn it over to the National Park Service, Toll recommended that under the Antiquities Act, that great Teddy Roosevelt creation of 1906, that we get a national monument out of the South Dakota Badlands. And so Congress approved Badlands National Monument in 1929 and President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed it such in 1939. Something similar happened with the Little Missouri Badlands which, and this is by the way, Palo Duro. Let's see. Okay, let me stick with that one. The Little Missouri Badlands, I'll go ahead and tell you this story and I think I've got an image here that will show you what I'm talking about. The Little Missouri Badlands Toll said, it's just too barren for a national park. He took a look at the Little Missouri country at the same time that he was looking at the South Dakota Badlands and he said it's just too barren. It shouldn't be a national park. We might make it a national monument, he said, but it looks like the idea is really vehemently opposed by local landowners, especially ranchers in the area. But then a few years later, this is in 1928, 1929, a few years later came the droughts of the 1930s and at that point rancher opposition sort of swirled away in the droughts of the middle 1930s and the National Park Service finally acquired the area in 1947 and Theodore Roosevelt National Park then became a reality of our part of the world. Both, it became a park of course with the Omnibus Parks Bill of 1978 along with Badlands down in South Dakota. I wanna stay with this area on the Southern Plains for just one more second though because I wanna make a point again as I said by comparison. The Park Service tried again on the Southern Plains in 1938. They decided that this time they would go for a more modest 140,000 acre national monument on the Southern Plains in this region, the canyons of the Red River around Palo Duro Canyon. And so Park Service did a study, recommended national monument status but again, absolutely no interest in the state of Texas. Park Service didn't have the money to acquire these lands. They were private lands and no one in Texas was willing to step up. Although people from Oklahoma and Colorado and New Mexico and Kansas were all excited about it but in Texas they didn't seem to be very excited. So what I wanna tell you is that in this part of the world today, what we've got are a pair of state parks that's all we have in this region that was considered by the Park Service twice in the 1930s for a park or a monument. We've got two state parks there. They total 40,000 acres altogether about 30 miles apart, one from the other. And what's happening in this part of the world today is that you see the area that's designated, these are the counties by the census of 1990 that were losing more than 10% of their population per census, per 10 year decade on the Great Plains. And the area I'm talking about is where that cluster of counties is in the Texas Panhandle. I mean, dramatic loss of population in that region. Today, I mean, not only do they lose population but they lose young people, of course. There's no predator larger than a coyote remaining in that part of the world. And the region seems to be becoming a national sacrifice area to hog farms and miles and miles of wind turbines along the Camp Rock escarpment. I mean, it's probably not a candidate for collapse the way Jared Diamond describes it in his book but it's not an economically healthy place. And I wanna say also it's not a particularly enjoyable place to live anymore. I mean, I lived there for 15 years and some, what I wanna convey to you it's not the little Missouri country. You got what from the perspective of the Southern Plains I always wanted the Southern Plains to have acquired. The little Missouri country ended up getting it. One last theme I'll tell you about and then I'll yield the floor to the rest of the panel is as I think, there we go. Famous painting of the country that we're interested in here. A theme that Don Worcester mentioned this morning and I've written a good bit about which is that in the 21st century the theme of conservation has now gone to basically restoration. Restoration of the wild. I mean, the 19th century and the 20th centuries we were preserving and conserving places. Now we're restoring them. Restoration goes all the way back to a famous writer named George Perkins Marsh who wrote a book called Man in Nature in 1864. And he described how we needed to, humans needed to reconstruct the fabric of the world that we had been dismantling. And I just want to read a brief thing for you that I think you will like because I mean, you all know Henry David Thoreau and Thoreau captured the whole premise behind restoration beautifully. He described himself, he said, is I am that citizen whom I pity. He wrote this in 1856 in his journal. And the reason he said I'm that citizen whom I pity is because, and I'm quoting from Thoreau, I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem. And then to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read. And that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages and mutilated it in many places. I should not like to think that some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars. I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth. That's basically the premise, I think, that lies behind the idea of restoration. Restoration is going to be controversial. It's going to basically force us to confront that maybe the most sustainable landscape in places like the Great Plains is the one that geology and evolution and ecology fashioned. We're gonna have to grapple with things like whether or not we want to introduce, reintroduce to the Great Plains species that are a little more difficult and controversial, say, than black-footed ferrets or swift foxes. I mean, we're getting both of those back on the Great Plains. But the question is going to be, of course, one of them is going to be, are we going to do on the Great Plains, ultimately? What we are doing in the Rockies right now, which is to reintroduce the Keystone Predator in the form of wolves. And heaven forbid, what about this one? Here was one of our native species. I mean, it seems unthinkable to us, but I gotta tell you, I live in a part of the West where we got grizzly bears around all the time and we somehow seem to do it without any great problems. It seems like once the bears are gone, people really develop a kind of an aberrance for having them back again. But when you live around them, you don't think too much about it. And here's, you know, Charlie Russell even is an advocate for restoration. Look at this little verse that he wrote to his friend Frank Bird Linderman. I wish I could clothe your frame with meat and hide and wake you up today, he said. We even may have to decide whether or not, you know, wild horses are a part of the West. I mean, they evolved in the West, then became extinct here, and then we brought them back 500 years ago. I know you have them in the little Missouri country, but that's the kind of question that restoration begs for us to address in the Great Plains country, especially. I mean, we've got the whole, I don't wanna go into the Buffalo Commons or the Big Open or anything. I know you all know about it. Those are very controversial, depending on your politics, of course, that's either Shangri-La and Eden in the future or it's the worst disaster one could possibly imagine. But it is the kind of thing that sort of in a piecemeal fashion is happening. And we're also confronting the whole issue of global climate change. Global climate change, as indicated by the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, is likely to hit the Great Plains especially hard. Some people are arguing that the Chihuahuan Desert may advance hundreds of miles northward into the Great Plains. And these particular maps demonstrate that the Dust Bowls seem to converge around places where the temperature was especially warm during particular seasons. So a warming temperature is going to make the likelihood of Dust Bowls and Dust Storms in the future much more common for us to confront. I kind of think, really, there are some other things I can say and I'll save them for the panel, but I really think, basically, what we're likely to confront on the Great Plains is a future that looks a little more like what the Rocky Mountain present is today. In other words, with more public lands, maybe regionally or locally managed, not necessarily owned by the federal government or managed by the federal government, but maybe in the John Wesley Powell fashion owned by and managed by local commonwealths. But I think it's going to be, in the future, a more restored nature. We're still gonna have plenty of ranching and plenty of farming, but more of this kind of restoration like the little Missouri Badlands and Theodore Roosevelt National Park already have. In fact, I kind of think that heritage tourism and eco-tourism of the kind that you're getting with the park is really the future for the whole Great Plains. And I'll leave you with this. We're talking about Teddy Roosevelt, and I wanna close this with Teddy Roosevelt simply by quoting something from his The Strenuous Life. What Roosevelt seemed to believe was that the kind of future I'm describing would have made for a more authentic life of the kind he wanted to live, this sort of wilderness life. And Roosevelt seems to have had this kind of thing in mind when he wrote in The Strenuous Life that for he who seeks out the wide waste spaces of the earth, the grandest scenery of the world is his to look at if he chooses. The beauty and charm of the wilderness are his for the taking. The joy of living is his who has the heart to demand it. That's the kind of future I think Teddy Roosevelt would have wanted for this era. Thanks very much for listening.