Beyond Social Science History: Population and Environment in the US Great Plains

Abstract

This essay advocates for broadening social science history to include an even larger horizon, in order to reach a new level of understanding of human society in the past. It builds on and shares insights from twenty years of research that integrates environmental knowledge and environmental science into a history of social change, while simultaneously trying to understand in detail how people changed the environment. The focus of the research is the demographic, social, agricultural, and environmental history of the U.S. Great Plains, from the 1870s to the end of the twentieth century. Beyond supporting the argument for a broader interdisciplinary vision of history, the essay shows how the Great Plains environment was changed by human action, and the ways that the environment shaped human behavior in turn. The history of the Plains shows that the impact of human action on the land was dramatic and unmistakable. People radically changed land cover, but their actions were only one factor in causing events like the Dust Bowl, and only one part of the measurable increase in greenhouse gases. At the same time, the environment also constrained and shaped human behavior, even though it had less to do with family organization than broad trends in social change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The environment’s most dramatic contribution was to spur out-migration in the 1930s when drought caused wide-spread agricultural failure, further confirmation of the importance of going beyond purely social factors to understand how people lived in the past.

Nutrients and warming interact to force mountain lakes into unprecedented ecological states

“…The increases correspond with warming throughout the northern hemisphere from the end of the Little Ice Age, and stimulation by warming of algal growth in cold climates [24,75,76]. While in principle increased production after ca 1850 may also correspond to the rise of continental industrialization, including mining in the Rocky Mountains and agriculture on the adjacent plains [77], there is no evidence of increased nutrient deposition at that time [27]. Instead, we conclude that modest increases in primary production during the mid-nineteenth century were the result of warming at the end of the Little Ice Age.…”

Population responses to environmental change: looking back, looking forward

“…Six projects were funded under this mechanism, in the US generally (Hunter, 1998), and in the US Great Plains (Deane & Gutmann, 2003), the Brazilian Amazon (Moran & Brondizio, 1998), India (Foster & Rosenzweig, 2003), Nepal (Shivakoti et al, 1999), and Thailand (Entwisle et al, 1998). Four of the six projects are still generating publications (e.g., Entwisle et al, 2020;Gutmann, 2018;Li et al, 2019;Williams & Gray, 2020).…”

Soil Fertility on an Agricultural Frontier: The US Great Plains, 1880–2000

“…The following account of the nitrogen cycle in the natural world and in farm systems follows Cunfer (2005).…”

“…The most important agricultural development of the long nineteenth century was a massive and rapid expansion by farmers into the world's grasslands, a process that doubled global land in farms. Displacing Indigenous populations, European settlers plowed and fenced extensive new territories in North America's Great Plains (Cunfer 2005), South America's campos and pampas, the Ukrainian and Russian steppes (Moon 2013), and parts of Australia and New Zealand (Brooking and Pawson 2011). Between 1800 and 1920, arable land increased from 400 million hectares to 950 million hectares, and pasture land from 950 to 2,300 million hectares; much of that expansion occurred in grasslands (Goldewijk 2001).…”

“…They also gathered statistics-population and agricultural censuses-that both monitored the settlement process and promoted further immigration. That unprecedented documentary record reveals a massive ecological transformation, in fine detail and from its very beginning (Gutmann et al 2005). This article proposes a systematic evaluation of the world's nineteenth-century agricultural frontiers based on census data and employing socioecological metabolism methods drawn from sustainability science and agroecology.…”