Beyond the Two-Year Election Cycle
The South Dakota Institute of Prairie Futurology recognizes that the greatest enemy of a resilient future is short-term thinking, embodied in political cycles that rarely look beyond the next election. Its Policy for the Seventh Generation lab operates on a different timescale, drafting and advocating for legislative and regulatory frameworks designed to endure and guide decisions for decades and even centuries. The work is non-partisan and deeply pragmatic, focused on creating the legal 'scaffolding' that enables and rewards the regenerative practices promoted by the Institute's science and culture wings. It starts from the premise that good policy doesn't force people to do the right thing; it makes the right thing the easiest and most profitable choice.
Innovative Conservation Tools: From Easements to Commons Trusts
A key area is land tenure innovation. The Institute has helped pioneer the 'Resilience Easement,' a new form of conservation easement that goes beyond simply prohibiting development. It requires active land management for specific ecological outcomes, such as increasing soil organic matter or native pollinator habitat, and is tied to payments for verified ecosystem services. For larger landscapes, the lab advocates for 'Community Land Trusts' and 'Commons Trusts,' legal structures that remove land from the speculative market and hold it in perpetuity for regenerative use, whether for agriculture, forestry, or habitat. These trusts can have multi-generational governance boards that include youth and elder representatives, legally mandating long-term stewardship.
Reforming Water Law for a Scarce Future
Western water law, based on the 'prior appropriation' doctrine of 'first in time, first in right,' is ill-suited for climate change and aquifer depletion. The Institute's policy team is developing alternative models. One is the 'Water Budgeting' framework, where a watershed's sustainable yield is scientifically determined and then allocated as shares to users, which can be traded in a regulated market. Another is the 'Public Trust' doctrine applied to groundwater, asserting that the state holds these resources in trust for current and future citizens, requiring management for long-term sustainability. They also draft laws to protect 'fossil water' (ancient aquifers) from any extraction, recognizing them as strategic reserves for true emergencies.
Taxation and Subsidy Reform
The current system of subsidies and property taxation often incentivizes ecologically harmful practices (e.g., tax breaks for draining wetlands) and punishes good ones (e.g., high taxes on land left for conservation). The Institute proposes sweeping reforms. This includes shifting agricultural subsidies from crop insurance based on monoculture yields to direct payments for verified ecological outcomes like carbon sequestration and biodiversity. Property tax codes could be rewritten to assess land based on its 'ecological yield' rather than its potential development value, making it affordable for stewards. 'Green Tariffs' could protect local regenerative producers from being undercut by imported goods produced under exploitative conditions.
Building a Cross-Jurisdictional Governance Model
The prairie ecosystem ignores political boundaries. Effective policy must therefore operate across county, state, and even international lines (with Canada). The Institute is a catalyst for the 'Great Plains Bioregional Compact,' a voluntary association of counties, municipalities, tribal nations, and provinces that agree to align policies around shared principles: net-zero water extraction, soil health standards, wildlife corridor protection, and a just transition for fossil-fuel-dependent communities. The Compact would have a rotating governance council and a shared scientific advisory board (which the Institute could help staff). This model creates a scaled, collaborative approach to governance that matches the scale of the ecological and climate challenges, proving that the future of the prairie requires not just new laws, but new forms of political imagination and cooperation rooted in the geography they serve.