On computer printouts, this brainchild of a faculty couple, he a land-use expert and she a geographer, sounds intellectually inspired but of course impractical, a pipe dream; yet when the calmly audacious plan of Frank and Deborah Popper to return millions of devastated acres in ten Plains states to their natural condition and to the buffalo was described in an article by Anne Matthews in the New York Times Magazine in the summer of 1990, the reaction was international and explosive.

Where the Buffalo Roam is the first and fascinating account of a plan that, whether it rewrites American environmental history or is trampled underfoot by herds of developers, politicians, and local inhabitants, has stirred pro and anti forces everywhere to believe that it could happen.

From the Dakotas to Texas, and from Wyoming to Nebraska, the Poppers have earmarked what they see as the core of their Buffalo Commons: 139,000 square miles drawn from 109 counties, now inhabited by a decreasing population of about 400,000 of the Plains states' 6.5 million people.

Restored to the natural grasses and the buffalo population of the past, the prairies would thrive, benefiting world ecology and costing less than the farm subsidies now despairingly lavished on the region by the American taxpayer.

Anne Matthews, who has traveled the Plains extensively with the Poppers, takes care to give equal time to the opposition, which can be highly vociferous, colorful, even threatening--security guards have been required in some towns. With wit, compassion, and a sleeplessly observant eye, she gives us an exhilarating tour through a whopping controversy, which could be an American epic in the making.