“A Public Domain, once a velvet carpet of rich Buffalo-grass and grama, now an illimitable waste of rattlesnake-bush and tumbleweed, too impoverished to be accepted as a gift by the states within which it lies. Why? Because the ecology of the Southwest happened to be set on a hair trigger.” Aldo Leopold, author of A Sand County Almanac and champion of land ethics, made this observation of rangeland in New Mexico in 1935. He recognized that some landscapes are fragile and, given enough disturbance, can suddenly lose productivity. Ranchers in the Nebraska Sandhills, too, recognize the potential fragility of their landscape.
The Sandhills have changed from sea to desert to forest to grassland, and they can—and will at some point—change again. No ecosystem is stable for all time. Ecosystems contract and expand like lungs; they collapse and emerge as completely new ecologies. These are not new phenomena. They have been occurring for millennia. What is new is the rate at which they are occurring and our understanding of humanity’s role in causing them.
Early Sandhills’ pioneers experienced devastating prairie fires and sand blowouts, often caused by railroads and by overgrazing, respectively. Both blowouts and fires are forces that can push a landscape beyond an ecological threshold, causing it to change fundamentally. Blowouts could spread and turn the Sandhills into a moving dune field, as they were less than a thousand years ago. Fires, too, remove vegetation, potentially leading to moving sands and the change of the Sandhills from productive rangeland to sand dunes.
What does this uncertainty mean for the Sandhills? It means there are alternative futures the Sandhills could have. Without the hundred-thousand-acre fires and millions of bison refreshing, fertilizing, stirring, and replanting the grasses and pushing back the tide of trees, what could happen to the Sandhills? And with the new influences of climate change, more people, more fences and cattle, and more fragmentation from roads and human land use, what new paths could the Sandhills take? Will the Sandhills be recognizable in a hundred years or even ten or twenty years?
One way to grapple with these questions is to consider all the paths the Sandhills may take given these changes and how to keep or make the Sandhills resilient to them. History, current trends, and imagination can be used explore these alternative futures, then stakeholders can use this knowledge to guide the Sandhills to the place they want it to be.
Future 1: The Sand-Woods
A prairie is only a prairie if it burns. If a prairie does not burn, it becomes something else. Globally, human fire suppression coupled with human actions, like tree planting, and human-caused problems, like climate change, are leading to a phenomenon called “afforestation.” During afforestation, trees and shrubs begin peppering grasslands, congeal into patches of woodlands, and then sometimes completely coat the landscape and become forests. The Great Plains, where the Sandhills are nestled, are collapsing under the weight of trees, and evidence is mounting that the Sandhills are not immune to this threat. Satellite imagery and artificial intelligence are tracking tendrils of trees spreading westward along roads and rivers, sprouting from shelterbelts and nurseries. American robins—woodland birds—are pushing westward into the Sandhills where they historically did not occur. It is not clear how long the afforestation process would take, but given the rate of afforestation over the last several decades, the Sandhills prairie could shift to sand woods in less than a hundred years.
Future 2: Dune Sea
Historically, the biggest fear in the Sandhills was a catastrophic loss of grass cover and a return to mobilized sand dunes. Although experiments suggest that the Sandhills can experience blowouts without blowouts spreading, that could change, for example with prolonged drought or drought coinciding with catastrophic wildfire. This is not an improbable future—Sandhills sand dunes were largely free of grass and mobile in very recent geologic history. This future would benefit few. Sand dunes are not productive rangeland, and few wildlife species would inhabit the Sandhills transformed to a dune sea. Currently careful land stewardship has been successful in keeping this undesirable alternative future at bay.
Future 3: A Shadow of the Past
If fires burned a hundred thousand acres in a day, if fences no longer broke the blanket of prairie into a homogenized tilework, if cedar waxwings no longer spread juniper seeds with their droppings, and if humans no longer planted trees that bore thousands of seeds each year, the Sandhills could, potentially, return to a state similar to pre-European colonization. The amount of change this would take is staggering—it would require change in not only the ecology but the society of the Sandhills. It would require a culture that thrives with fire instead of fearing it. It would require a culture that sees fences and boundaries but also sees past them to the larger landscape they all share. Groups such as the Sandhills Task Force, The Nature Conservancy at the Niobrara Valley Preserve, the Nebraska Prescribed Burn Council, and many others are working to make this alternative future of rolling prairie, unbroken by trees, and united by stewardship a reality.
Future 4: Dead Man Walking
Perhaps the most obvious future for the Sandhills is exactly like today’s Sandhills: mostly intact prairie, fences carving up the grass like cookie cutters, cattle sleeping under the cottonwoods by the river, sparse ranches, little towns, some ranches cracking into ranchettes when the kids don’t come back, center pivots in the swales, sharp-tailed grouse dancing on the hills, old cedars standing in clean shelterbelts, and younger cedars creeping out of the river valleys and peeking above the prairie grass. These are beautiful and familiar images to many. But keeping this status quo does not mean doing nothing. All the pressures the Sandhills are facing will only increase over time, meaning maintaining today’s Sandhills will become harder and harder. The tides of trees will pile higher, the droughts will get longer and deeper, more people will want a little piece of the wide-open spaces, and stakeholders will be left fighting for shrinking scraps of a memory of the Sandhills. Soon, the Sandhills could become a “dead man walking,” still alive, but shuffling toward its end.
Future 5: Suburban Sandhills
Pandemics and remote work have limited the desirability of city living and increased the benefits of rural living. The Sandhills, with low population density, beautiful vistas, lakes, and proximity to the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, is attractive for acreage developments, both for full time and vacation living. This future has ranching forced out by increasing land values and taxation rates and ultimately destroys the amenities that made it attractive in the first place.
Stranger (Less Likely?) Futures
Alternative: Potato Fields
Exploding human populations globally and diminished fresh water supplies increase the attractiveness of the Sandhills for row crop agriculture. The Great Plains Aquifer provides plenty of irrigation water, and crops, such as potatoes, thrive in sandy soils. Because row crops are more profitable than rangeland, the entire Sandhills becomes cropped. This leads to fragmentation, loss of grass and wildlife, depletion of the aquifer, and flattening of the landscape to better enable center pivot irrigation. Although ranching is no longer viable, former ranchers are economically benefited by this transition.
Alternative: Back to the Future
By 2050 humans are producing laboratory-raised meat, and real meat consumption has plummeted, in tandem with the increasing global population. To maintain their livelihoods, ranchers have embraced the idea of a buffalo commons and profit from the Sandhills National Park. The Sandhills becomes a global tourism hotspot, featuring wild landscapes and snippets of “life in the twentieth century,” where ranching activities are reenacted by paid actors.
Alternative: Fueling the World
Currently, cattle production feeds the world. Decreasing demand for beef and increasing demand for clean energy leads to the development of the Sandhills for energy production. Ranching is relegated to largely hobby farms, as the sale of solar and wind energy drives economic productivity in the Sandhills. Rolling dune vistas are lost to seas of solar panels and the architecture of tens of thousands of wind turbines. From all, a network of aboveground electric transmission cables spiders the landscape, and extensive road systems scar the landscape.
Conclusion
How do stakeholders respond to these alternative futures? Continue with business as usual and hope for the best, or take proactive steps to predict changes and reverse the problems?
Determining alternative futures can be helpful in guiding management to ensure that desirable futures are likely and undesirable futures avoided. Some of our scenarios may seem far-fetched, but ecological surprises are common. While Sandhills ranchers have been extremely successful in avoiding blowouts and fires, the focus on these has led to a new, unforeseen enemy in the form of invading redcedar, which threatens ranching livelihoods in a different way. Recognizing and acknowledging this and other problems is needed for action to prevent undesired change over large landscapes. This has happened, and many ranchers in the Sandhills have joined forces to help manage and continue to steer the Sandhills to a desirable, sustainable, future.