Negative articles a Plains disservice

Recent articles suggest that the Great Plains region is in trouble. This is the area of the U.S. between Canada and Mexico that lies roughly between Interstate 25 along the Front Range of the Rockies and Interstate 35, which runs from Minneapolis through Dallas to Laredo, Texas, on the border with Mexico.

This vast area, bisected by the 100th meridian, includes Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska; parts of Minnesota and Iowa, and the Dakotas; and the eastern portions of New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana as well as vast stretches of Texas.

This area of the United States is larger than every country in Western Europe. It has world-class industries and generates some of the nation's most important exports, including food, medical instruments and a variety of other manufactured products.

Yet many look at this region and see only dying towns, depleting aquifers, and farm foreclosures. The Great Plains corridor, they argue, has a bleak economic future.

One study, in fact, suggests that the settlement of this region in the first instance was a colossal public-policy mistake, prompted by the cheap land made available by the Homestead Act of 1863.

This study, by professors Frank and Deborah Popper of Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey, proposes returning large portions of this area to its original condition and creating a national grasslands park, a "Buffalo Commons" to be preserved for future generations.

The idea of a declining Great Plains region increasingly unable to compete in a global economy, surfaced again recently in the popular media in a widely read front-page article in the Aug. 16 edition of the Wall Street Journal titled, "Abiding Frontier: On the Great Plains, Life Becomes a Fight for Water and Survival."

Other doom and gloom articles followed in Newsweek, Business Week and other highly visible publications.

The Rand McNally atlas omitted portions of many of these states in the new edition of its travel guide.

These scholarly, mass media, and commercial assaults on the future of the Great Plains region, if they go unanswered, can have an enormous negative impact. They can:

• Reduce the ability of states and communities to attract new
  industry and retain existing business.
  
• Undermine the interest of talented young people to remain in
  or move into the region.
  
• Greatly diminish the net worth of region by their effect on
  real-estate prices.
  
• Corrode the self-confidence of the region's grass-roots
  leadership, precisely the group that needs to come up with
  the new investments and new policies required to adapt to
  the huge economic and social changes affecting the region.

From a business development perspective, these negative commentaries undermine investor confidence in companies that obtain a large part of their revenues from this region.

But the Great Plains region is alive and well, as I will discuss next week.