Also the Dakotas...more important than Kansas, oil-wise. However, the majority of the oil in Texas in in the Gulf-East Texas region or in the Permian Basin--part of the latter is on the Great Plains, but part isn't.My idea would be for Buffalo Commons, which was an idea in the 1980 by professors from Rutgers to move people off of the Great Plains and return it to Bison land. Obviously it would be stupid as a lot of oil is down in Texas and Oklahoma and even Kansas
Honestly, doing so wouldn't be any different than almost any previous national park set up by the United States--even leaving aside the indigenous population, many of them were founded in areas that saw at least transient use by neighboring populations, leading to quite a bit of conflict as a result.while cattle ranching is still quite important in the region and as small as the population is, are you going to tell people that they can’t live or work out in the plains anymore?
Pretty sure that was the idea, yeah.Are smaller cities like Hays Kansas or Kearney Nebraska or Minot North Dakota just going to be evacuated?
Realistically, though, a smaller-scale version of this is likely to develop in the future as people move off the plains and leave large regions effectively abandoned (especially if Ogallala goes and you can't irrigate most of the plains any longer). Major cities like Omaha or Kansas City will remain, of course, but other areas will be functionally depopulated. This would create a de facto version of this. Conservation organizations and maybe the federal government would also in that case have more ability to buy up plains land and set it aside for conservation, which might lead to the creation of formal parks in some areas.Even if you paid folks to move it would probably not be enough to convince folks to move. Overall itd be impossible to do this but it sounds interesting.
That's more or less what the Poppers are talking about now, anyway. Continued decline in rural economics in part of the Great Plains (not the whole thing) leading to large parts essentially returning to nature. They compare it to the more remote parts of New England, where attempts at cultivation in the 18th and 19th century were abandoned and led to those areas returning to a natural forest environment.