Manhattan ? If Kansans want to salvage the state’s small towns, former Gov. Mike Hayden says they’ll need to invest in the state’s infrastructure, create more parks and public lands and learn to respect what they have.

“Think for a moment what Manhattan would be without Kansas State University or what Colby would be without its community college and without the interstate highway,” said Hayden, who grew up in Atwood, a small town in northwest Kansas, 29 miles north of Colby.

“The truth of the matter is that communities that have survived and that are prospering are those centered around public infrastructure,” he said.

Hayden’s comments came during an afternoon forum, “The Buffalo Commons Revisited: Conversations about the Future of the Great Plains” at Kansas State University.

Hayden shared the podium with New Jersey professors Frank and Deborah Popper, who in 1987 proposed converting the Great Plains to a “Buffalo Commons” in response to the region’s declines in populations.

The Poppers asked the audience — about 500 people attended the two-hour session — to understand that their call for returning the nation’s prairies to bison was meant to be more “metaphor” than literal.

“It’s meant to be a suggestion, a way of generating ideas,” said Deborah Popper, who teaches geography at New York’s College of Staten Island.

She reminded the audience that while open spaces were taken for granted in Kansas, they were treasured in New Jersey, “which has to be the most urban, the most developed state in the nation.”

Hayden admitted that as governor, he lambasted the Poppers “like the (television character) Matt Dillon gunslinger — both guns blazing.”

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Since then, Hayden said, he has been proven wrong, noting that his grandparents’ farm in Rawlins County supported “16 of us in 1963. Forty years later in 2003, that same land supports four people — and of those four, three are over 80 years old. The rest of us had to go do something else.”

In Kansas, 50 counties lost population between the 1990 and 2000 censuses. Twelve posted losses of more than 10 percent.

Some of the out-migration plaguing western Kansas could be reversed, Hayden said, by state investment in the region’s natural resources.

“Go out to Cedar Bluff Reservoir on the Fourth of July or on Memorial Day or Labor Day,” he said. “The truth is there’ll be more people there than will be in three-fourths of the towns in western Kansas.

“And why will they be there?” he asked. “Because it’s public land. Because government made an investment to set that resource aside for the people of this country.”

Hayden, who’s currently secretary of the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks, scolded Kansas for setting aside only 3 percent of its land for parks and recreation.

“Three percent,” he said. “That’s the least of any of the 50 states.”

And too many Kansans, Hayden said, don’t appreciate the state.

“If you go to Coronado Heights this afternoon, you’ll find it covered with graffiti,” he said. “If you go to Pawnee Rock — not only has most of it been bulldozed, but what’s left is littered with beer cans.”

Frank Popper called Hayden’s remarks “an extreme exhibition of courage and poise,” prompting a round of applause.