Plains speaking.

America's Great Plains will never be the same. This may not be bad news.

DEPENDING ON HOW YOU LOOK AT IT, THE states of the Great Plains are either confronting the greatest demographic collapse in America's youthful history or they are beginning a process of reclamation and healing that most of us cannot even begin to understand. An analysis of recent census data confirms a perhaps now unalterable population shift on the Great Plains of the United States. At the same time, an ecological transformation is slowly rebuilding the landscape of the Great Plains, filling abandoned farm fields with the indigenous grasses and wildlife that knew the prairie long before any European surveyed it.

A campaign, a century and a half in the making, to bend the landscape to the logic of the plow and remove or degrade the human impediments to European expansion is faltering on the Great Plains. The descendants of the European settlers of the prairie are simply leaving, depopulating the plains states. An area the size of the Louisiana Purchase, nearly 900,000 square miles, now has so few people that it meets the 19th century definition of frontier country, with six people or fewer per square mile. More than 60 percent of the counties in the Great Plains lost population in the last 10 years.

Remarkably, the decline of the European-descent populations of the Plains has been accompanied by, an inverse growth in the populations of Native American communities, which have seen 20 percent overall increases in Plains states and 200 percent increases in specific counties. The descendants of America's first peoples are returning to the communities, often to the lifestyles, that their parents or grandparents knew. These survivors of two centuries of Western progress are being joined by other previously diminished inhabitants of the plains: prairie dogs, burrowing owls, the black-footed ferret, and, perhaps most spectacularly, the American bison-- the buffalo.

Gambling revenue is allowing those returning Native Americans to assert previously unknown political might and to begin reassembling land tracts sold or lost generations ago. Native American ranchers are rediscovering the buffalo as a resource for food and wealth-building. There are now more bison and Native Americans living on the Great Plains than at any time since the late 1870s as the prairie is slowly reconverted to the ranching and grazing that best suits its particular ecology.

These changes have not occurred without pain--thousands of small tragedies tell the story of the decline of family farmers and the communities that supported them--nor are they guaranteed to proceed in a manner that will ultimately prove beneficial to the Plains' ecosystem. Meanwhile, Native American reservations remain for the most part outposts of the most depraved poverty in the industrialized world.

Still, what the "recovery" of the Great Plains offers is a geological murmur of hope. European expansion into the Plains and the great agricultural enterprise that accompanied it may turn out to be a short-lived experiment in human historical time, barely a blip in the geological clock that marks God's time. The march of "Western civ" litters history with exploited peoples and tortured landscapes. A triumphal global capitalism devours cultures and ecologies, blithely ignoring the collateral damage of progress, celebrating the creative destruction of peoples and the earth wrought by industrialization and the onslaught of modernity.

People of good conscience fix on these historical wrongs or their contemporary descendants and demand redress. They call out for reparations; they seek justice. But the seeking does not always lead to the finding. The injustices seem to taunt, the resistance of others frustrates, and often wrongs can never be made right--not in lifetimes that have passed, not in lifetimes that are to come. It is easy to succumb to cynicism or despair.

But the wisdom offered by the prairie suggests there may be other processes at work than our own small efforts to build the kingdom according to our pitifully short schedules. The subtle, merciful process of time and nature envelopes us. Divine time is tectonic time, and it is not measured by legislative initiatives, reparations movements, or well-executed "actions."

Divine justice is certain if slow, following a schedule no human can comprehend, reliant on the patience of stones and the inevitable cycles of the passing seasons.

By KEVIN CLARKE, managing editor of online products at Claretian Publications in Chicago.