Land Use

The EPA defines land use as: 

“the term used to describe the human use of land. It represents the economic and cultural activities (e.g., agricultural, residential, industrial, mining, and recreational uses) that are practiced at a given place. Public and private lands frequently represent very different uses. For example, urban development seldom occurs on publicly owned lands (e.g., parks, wilderness areas), while privately owned lands are infrequently protected for wilderness uses.“¹

The Badlands are an area where many different land uses border each other, conflict, overlap, intersect, inform, negate. There is National Park, Wilderness, Forest Service, Private ranchers, Private businesses, Military lands, and Tribal lands of the Oglala Lakota.  Within these land uses there are models of preservation, conversation, restoration, and extraction.

Many of these overlap, there are Oglala Lakota ranchers, private ranchers who work for the National Park, rangers who hunt on Forest Service Land, missile silos on private land, decomissioned nuclear missles on National Park land.

The more time you spend in the area, with the humans and non-humans, the more it becomes clear that different frameowrks inform different ways of seeing the land. This manifests in many ways creating a wide variety of perspectives on what it means to know the land, to care for the land, to prioritize the land. And all of these different ways of seeing have different underlying assumptions, and different futures that they could create.

Some perspectives are more dominant than others - historically, economically, scientifically. And sometimes it makes one wonder much room there actually is for alternate co-existing perspectives. What would it look like to have a healthy ecosystem approach to perspectives on the land? Is it possible? Are we too late?