RJ,
I spent 23 years working, living and recreating less than 30 miles from Sutton Bay. I even spent many hours on the public land above and adjacent to where the golf course is now located, hunting geese, grouse and pheasants.
My in laws are almost all in the ranching business in western South Dakota.
And all i can say is that you've been fed a myth.
Ed Abbey had it right in his essay "Even the Bad Guys Wear White Hats," 25 years ago:
The rancher (with a few honorable exceptions) is a man who strings barbed wire all over the range; drills wells and bulldozes stock ponds; drives off elk and antelope and bighorn sheep; poisons coyotes and prairie dogs; shoots eagles, bears and cougars on sight; supplants the native grasses with tumbleweed, snakeweed, povertyweed, cowshit, anthills, mud, dust, and flies. And then leans back and grins at the TV cameras and talks about how much he loves the American West. - Edward Abbey, Even the Bad Guys Wear White Hats - Cowboys, Ranchers and the Ruin of the West, Harpers 272 (January 1986)That was originally delivered as a commencement speech at the University of Montana. See
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/psy-op/message/10932I love my inlaws, they are damned good people. I respect them for their ability to survive in a part of the country where most of those city slickers you're talking about would die of alcohol poisoning before the end of the first winter. I know that they care a lot about wildlife, and wild lands, but the simple fact is they and their neighbors have never had the wherewithal to actually do much of anything except take every last bit of juice from the land.
When it doesn't rain--which is all-too common--they graze their land, and any public liand they have access to, into submission. They are not unlike the superintendent at a ultra-high-end facility who is forced by circumstnaces to overwater, over apply plant protectants, and generally foul things up.
Our western plains have wildlife and water and in spite of the cowboys, not because of them.
One more quote from Abbey:
Most of the public lands in the West, and especially in the Southwest, are what you might call "cowburnt." Almost anywhere and everywhere you go in the American West you find hordes of these ugly, clumsy, stupid, bawling, stinking, fly-covered, shit-smeared,
disease-spreading brutes. They are a pest and a plague. They pollute our springs and streams and rivers. They infest our canyons, valleys, meadows, and forests. They graze off the native bluestem and grama and bunch grasses, leaving behind jungles of prickly pear. They trample down the native forbs and shrubs and cacti. They spread the exotic cheatgrass, the Russian thistle, and the crested wheat grass. Weeds.I realize that doesn't have squat to do with golf on the prairie, but it's one of my favorite quotes of all time.
More germane to your point, golf--and such other activities--might be one of the things that will prevent all that territory from becoming Buffalo Commons (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Commons). I was in SD working for a resource management agency when the Poppers first espoused the idea, and you'd have thought they had suggested making the Great Plains a toxic waste dump.
Today, when the only way most of the ranchers can survive is by plowing up vast acreages of grasslands, or sending their wife to a job in town, or by having thousands of acres of Federal lands that they pay almost nothing for, maybe a golf course isn't such abad idea.
K