The colonization of the North American continent has been one of the greatest ecological tragedies in human history which continues to contribute to mass death to this day. In the violent struggle to secure land for every white yeoman to have his own farm, the United States government waged a war against the Great Plains biome itself as part of an all-out assault on the indigenous peoples of the continent’s interior. The American bison which had been the primary food source of numerous American Indian nations were systematically slaughtered by the military as part of an effort to force the native people off their lands and on to the reservation system. Since then, “Middle America” has been a wasteland as the agricultural practices of small settler landholders caused widespread desertification leading to tragedies such as the Dust Bowl. Contemporary American agriculture, a thoroughly industrialized abomination made possible by this primitive accumulation carried out through genocide, now serves as one of the most significant contributors to the apocalyptic destruction of climate which will devastate human society and the natural world without distinction.
Combating the existential threat of climate change and decolonizing the North American continent are causes which are joined at the hip, and a key component of both of these efforts is restoring the grassland biome of the interior, for which the Bison was a keystone species. The exact ecosystem of old might not be possible to recreate, but there are clear reasons to want an American steppe that can sustain huge numbers of grazing megafauna. The American bison served as a necessary component of the ecological web that sustained the grasslands, and the resurrection of such an ecosystem would provide a carbon sink that could push global climate back towards a less hostile equilibrium. A 2018 study by University of California, Davis found that grasslands were a more effective and reliable carbon sink than forests, being less vulnerable to the release of carbon from wildfires due to carbon in grasslands being predominantly stored underground in the soil rather than in surface biomass. The ecological diversity of these grasslands was encouraged by the role of the bison, whose grazing patterns formed an important component of the lifecycle of many types of native grass and encouraged competition among a variety of plant life in contrast with the Taurine Cattle brought by European settlers, which engage in grazing habits not adapted to the North American continent and lead to a sharp decline in biodiversity.
Recreating the precolonial grasslands biome has been proposed by multiple experts in the past few decades to address the issue of environmental degradation. Frank J. and Deborah Popper proposed the concept of a “Buffalo Commons” as a solution to the cycle of periodic disasters like the Dust Bowl and the ongoing depopulation of the Great Plains. The Poppers note that American Indian tribes in the region are already working to reintroduce both American bison and native grass species to their lands. However, these efforts have been rendered effectively minimal due to the limited resources of indigenous nations. The successful creation of a Buffalo Commons in our lifetime will need a massive, coordinated effort. As ambitious as such a project is, there are clear precedents for human creation of biomes in the past. The Amazon Rainforest, one of the world’s most important climate sinks, was the result of thousands of years of work by the indigenous peoples of South America to encourage the forest’s growth through charcoal fertilizer and deliberate cultivation. What the indigenous peoples of the Amazon accomplished in millenia, we must bring together all the developments of industrial technology and the natural sciences to carry this out in decades - and it has been made clear that we can do this provided a significant enough upheaval in the social order.
On the April Fool's Day of 2020, Wolf Tivy of Palladium Magazine published the “Bison Sphere Manifesto,” a semi-joking proposal for a form of futurism centered entirely around the bison-pasture ecosystem, where not only will the nations of the world competing with each other to see who can recreate the most impressive megafauna steppeland in a way similar to the space race, but eventually set out on the grand project of terraforming other worlds with these incredibly effective grassland ecosystems, envisioning how on these new steppe-planets “vast ziggurat cities carved out of solid billion-year-old space rock will be landed on the artificial plain, and space cowboys will range out from them, tending and hunting the herds.” While Tivy concludes the article by noting that it is satire, it is difficult not to be inspired by the real and immediate possibilities that it suggests. This is why, with complete seriousness, I advocate that we carry out the process of transforming Earth into the proposed “Bison Sphere One,” complete with our own megacities and vast herds of prairie megafauna, beginning with the North American Great Plains.
The nucleus for exactly such a new world is already here in the “Pleistocene Park,” an attempt to reintroduce the primordial grassland ecosystem initiated under the oversight of geophysicist Sergey Zimov in Siberia. The Bison Sphere Manifesto cited the ideas of Zimov as its central influence, and we would be amiss if we did not touch on the importance of Zimov’s work in our own proposals for an American Steppeland. Zimov observes that despite the tremendous amount of energy put into sustaining 800 million livestock that results in massive amounts of carbon emissions, the massive steppe ecosystems of the Pleistocene were able to sustain twice as many equivalent species “utilizing only the sun’s energy.” This presents a third way between the continued maintenance of the disastrous meat industry and the total abandonment of animal products from the human diet: using the bountiful megafauna that are naturally sustained by the grasslands to replace the products of factory farming.
By reintroducing the steppe biome, the reduction in permafrost emissions can serve to help offset the carbon emissions from industrial production, in addition to the reduction in carbon emissions from replacing the cattle factory farming system. The Mammoth Steppe of Eurasia, named for its own iconic grazing megafauna, served as Zimov’s inspiration for his ambitious project, and despite limited funding he and his so have been successfully recreating the ancient grassland biome of Pleistocene Eurasia in their little corner of Siberia, where they hope to reintroduce mammoths as soon as advances in cloning technology makes it possible. Zimov’s ambitious project serves as the inspiration for a new world that builds off of the old, an Archeofuturism which can help to right ancient wrongs.
The restoration of the prairies and bison to America’s interior goes hand in hand with the rectification of historical crimes committed against indigenous nations. The peoples who historically tended to the bison of the Great Plains, such as the Lakota, should be the first to receive the privilege of herding the restored buffalo on the lands they were once driven off from, allowing them to return to their ancestral traditions after countless decades being forcibly assimilated into unsustainable settler farming and property relations. Over time, the descendants of those settlers who homesteaded the prairies on behalf of the American government and railroad corporations only to find themselves dispossessed once more by the economy which they helped spread will begin to be assimilated into these practices of indigenous pastoralism, reconciling old conflicts and moving towards resolving the contradiction of settler-colonialism through decolonization. The possibility for a society that allows for coexistence and intermingling among the Indigenous and Euro-Americans on equal footing without destroying cultural heritage is far from unprecedented, as is shown by the Metis people. While the restoration of the North American prairie and its bison herds is far from a complete decolonization of the continent, it represents an important step, especially overturning the regime of private property imposed by colonization. The program for the American Steppe is a rejection of the reservation system and an embrace of a commons under indigenous stewardship which will pave the way for the rootless proletarianized settlers to leave behind the cultureless world of capitalism and regain their most ancient traditions.
The integration of the Euro-American into this Neo-Siouan pastoral culture is a return to the ancient way of life of Chalcolithic Eurasia adapted to the conditions of the North American continent. A sizable number of the contemporary American masses are the cultural-linguistic descendants of the pastoral cattle-herding nomads of the Pontic Steppe, the Yamnaya people who structured their society around the importance of reciprocal gift-giving and the sacred nature of the relations between guest and host. After centuries of the degradation of these ancient values as mindless accumulation took hold, reconciliation with the indigenous peoples of the Great Plains is the pathway out of the cultural abyss of capitalism and will allow for the ancient ways of the Yamnaya to flourish in a new context. The Bison Steppe will be a return to the traditions of the past without abandoning the accumulated history that composes the present or the possibilities of the future, an economic transformation like the emergence of the Merchant Republics paved the way for the Renaissance which transformed Europe by reemphasizing the ideas and values of classical antiquity.
Much like the European Renaissance, the creation of the American Steppe does not mean a total rupture without continuity from the present state of things. Urban existence will not only continue with the introduction of this new pastoralism, but be brought to new heights: the creation of grand metropoli where urban horticulture and agriculture will serve to replace the monoculture crop farming abandoned with the restoration of the prairie. The organoponicos system practiced in Cuba illustrates a circumstance where urban agriculture was adopted out of necessity and with limited resources to a resounding success. If a post-Soviet Cuba can successfully urbanize most of its farming, surely with all the resources at our command we can begin the process of transforming our megalopoli into garden cities which can sustain each other with a combination of their produce and the products of the bison pastures. A symbiotic relationship between the metropolis and steppe will replace the contradiction between city and countryside, binding the two worlds together even with their clear distinction.
All of this is merely a distant, blurry vision of a possible future. If it in any way appeals to your sensibilities, if you believe at all that the world could even hypothetically be this way, then you have taken the first step towards transforming it to be such. As for making it happen, I’m as lost as you are honestly, blindly feeling at some megafauna which I couldn’t possibly give a proper description of. But let us make this a mobilizing vision which drives us to discover how we can bring about this world from our present unpleasant circumstances. The forces of capital are arrayed against us in defense of the regime of property: now we must begin the process of organizing our own forces, studying the conditions we face, and preparing the way for the return of the buffalo.