What do we want the Badlands to look like 50 or 100 years from now?

The Little Missouri River Valley is a broken landscape corridor that enters North Dakota modestly south of Marmarth and steadily widens and deepens and becomes more dramatic as it moves north toward Watford City and then suddenly turns east toward its confluence with the Missouri River proper.

By the time the Little Missouri Valley reaches the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, it has learned to carve up the countryside so effectively that we can honestly speak of the "Grand Canyon of the Little Missouri."

Through the middle of this orgiastic, tumbled, god-blasted maze of bluffs and buttes and earth-buttresses runs the hapless but vitally important Little Missouri River, which carries silt and water in equal proportions. Except for a few weeks (sometimes days) per year, the river is so water-starved that you can wade through it with nonchalance.

You can sit in it if you choose a gravelly patch. In fact, it's typically so shallow that you can lie down in it, feet-first downstream toward the Gulf of Mexico, and luxuriate in the laving of the warm sluggish current. One of my favorite activities in the world is to sit in the Little Missouri River fully clothed on a July or August afternoon hour after hour reading a book about the West.

You cannot do that in the Red. You cannot do that in the Mouse. You cannot do that in the Missouri.

The North Dakota Badlands are a magic landscape. They are North Dakota's "Montana." The appeal of the Badlands is that they are so different from the rest of North Dakota, which visitors tend to call "flat," but we prefer to call "rolling plains."

Tucked into the southwestern corner of a state that Eric Sevareid called a blank spot at the center of the North American continent is an exotic and self-contained region of "otherness," a wild, stark, magnificent landscape with a unique aura and a distinctive history that involves Theodore Roosevelt, an impulsive French nobleman and colorful, fiercely independent cattlemen. The whole package is irresistibly dee-lightful.

It's ours. And there's a national park in the heart of it, commemorating three things: the intrinsic beauty of the Badlands; the fact that one of the greatest of all Americans lived here and acknowledged that this place, beyond all others, got under his skin; and the conservation philosophy that Roosevelt developed in part here, which led him to do more for wise-use conservation of our natural resources than any other president of the United States.

The Badlands have looked more or less the same for tens of thousands of years. They had perfected their eerie magic long before humans ever tiptoed from the safe forest and lake belts out onto the treeless and arid Great Plains, and they will look more or less the same when the human project finally withdraws. It's the short term that is problematic.

What makes the Badlands so attractive to the human spirit is that we have mostly left them alone. Mr. Jefferson's rectangular survey grid system of section line roads breaks down on the lip of the Little Missouri River Valley. That's always a sign that something wild is about to happen.

Almost none of the Badlands corridor is farmed. Where it is tilled, it really shouldn't be, at least from an aesthetic perspective. Bridges are rare: Marmarth, Medora, the Long X on U.S. 85, the once-Lost Bridge on ND 22. Good reason to be exceedingly skeptical of all new bridge (and low water crossing) proposals. The human population is sparse, dispersed and diminishing.

There are only two towns on the Little Missouri River in North Dakota, and three more in the Badlands country. Medora (population ca. 100) gets most of the attention because of the musical and the pitchfork fondue, and because it is the portal of the national park, but Marmarth (population 140) is more enchanting, anarchic and improbable in its oxbow-oasis-at-the-end-of-the-world way. Killdeer (713), Grassy Butte (252) and the megalopolis Watford City (1,435) are wild and windswept Badlands towns. Think how much less interesting North Dakota would be without them.

As the 21st century begins, the left-aloneness of the North Dakota Badlands is seriously endangered. And when you cease to leave the Badlands mostly alone, the indefinable hypnotic appeal of the corridor begins to evaporate. We need to face the fact that the Badlands can be drilled, graded, bridged, ranchetted, paved, "improved" and even recreationed to death.

If you have seen the Bitterroot Valley in Montana, or the Flathead Lake region, or Telluride or Aspen in Colorado, you know what can happen when a spectacular landscape attracts too much improvement. In my view, we are already at tilt on oil development (rigs, thumping oil pumps, scoria roads, methane flares, pad and waste ponds) and there is clearly going to be much more of it in the years ahead. Hobby ranches and ridgeline homes make perfect sense to those who own them, but represent a kind of bane and scar to almost everyone else.

The best way to save the North Dakota Badlands is to "conserve" the existing for-profit family ranching system that has been in place since T.R. and the Marquis arrived in 1883. The working ranches in the Little Missouri River Valley are widely diffused and tucked into the contours of the land. Their environmental impact is low. Their infrastructural "footprint" is lighter than that of any other economic activity.

Their mission is to produce good grass year after year - which means that ranchers essentially perpetuate how the Badlands would look if humans were not there at all. Under difficult conditions, today's ranchers continue to exemplify the rugged independence and self-reliance that has been the heart of the American frontier experience. They are a living, hard-working and colorful link to the romantic cowboy heritage of the grazing country of the American West.

I'd rather see heritage ranchers like Merle and Linda Clark of Marmarth or Robert and Ann Hanson of Amidon on the land than newcomers of any stamp. They know what we have and they know precisely how to keep it pristine.

(Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute. He also is the Theodore Roosevelt Scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at Jeffysage@aol.com.)