March 22, 2001

Plains Folk: Aesthetics and the Future

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

A person doesn't have to be perfect for you to learn a lot from her, and a book doesn't have to be faultless for you to learn a lot from it. "The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains" (new from the University of Oklahoma Press) is a flawed but brilliant work that deserves broad and serious readership on the plains.

The author is Dan Flores, of the University of Montana. Flores at heart is what we call a biological determinist; that is, he thinks humankind is best understood as one more animal species acting according to the biological imperatives bequeathed by evolution. Lewis and Clark, then, were stirred in their imaginations by the expanses of the plains because the country tapped their innate longing for a savannah landscape like that in which humankind originated. The Great Plains were the Serengeti of America.

This is not the sort of assumption that can be proven, and my doubts about it only begin with my catechism lessons. Further, Flores has trouble applying it consistently. For instance, he characterizes predator control campaigns as a "jihad." That's a cultural term; if people are best understood as biological entities, then predator control is just one predator defending turf against another.

Then there is Flores's reference to citizens of a particular place, who sometimes look at him funny, as "locals." When I go into the tavern in Hope, N.D., and people look at me funny, I presume it's because I look funny. To call them "locals" would be a disparagement, to label them as provincial boobs and class myself as a cosmopolitan sage. Readers of this column know that I can be a smart-aleck, but if I ever refer to any people anywhere as "the locals," I hope someone will take a stick to me.

Questionable in its assumptions, flawed in their application, and arrogant in its rhetoric, "The Natural West" is nevertheless right, and important to people of the plains, in its fundamental finding. This is that aesthetics will have much to do with the future of the Great Plains.

By "aesthetics" I mean our judgments and desires about what makes a good landscape, a good physical place in which to live. This is something we have paid little attention to over the past couple of centuries. In fact we have done about as much as we could to fashion a distasteful landscape on the plains.

In the new economy of years to come, many people will be enabled to live where they wish. Some of these people will be of the sort who, whether because of biology or as a matter of spirit, respond positively to a plains landscape. If we can manage to reassert husbandry and restore a landscape they will like, then they will live here and be wonderful prairie citizens.

We might begin by giving up things like display billboards and recreational snowmobiles. These are only superficial and minor degradations of the landscape, you may say, but they are visible and symbolic.

Then come the hard things–things like giving up chemicals that enter ground water and give us cancer, curbing the tendency of commercial agriculture to destroy all life forms that do not yield profit, and restoring the vitality of our rivers, creeks, and sloughs. I'm not sure, but I suspect I will live to see these things emerge as the agenda of consensus on the plains of North America. Flores, in "The Natural West," helps us to move that way.

Now, in closing, I realize that what I may be doing in this column is explaining to my wife why in heaven's name I am buying land in western Kansas.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Gary Moran, (701) 231-7865, gmoran@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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