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Book Review
| On the Great Plains: Agriculture and Environment. By Geoff Cunfer. Foreword by Dan L. Flores. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005. xii + 292 pp. Illustrations, maps, charts, tables, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $55.00, cloth, $28.00, paper.)
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In On the Great Plains: Agriculture and Environment, Geoff Cunfer argues that the interaction between people and the natural world in this region has been surprisingly sustainable for over a century. His story is neither a "progressive narrative" of the American West such as those told by Frederick Jackson Turner, nor a tale of decline like that put forth in Donald Worster's Dust Bowl. Instead, "successive episodes of temporary equilibrium, ... best describe the past" (p. 10). Across Cunfer's Great Plains this "equilibrium" remains steady as farmers continually adjust their land use practices to fit the region's ecological limitations. |
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On the Great Plains is divided into three historic phases: the "pioneer era" from 1870 until the mid-1920s, a "transitional era" when the Dust Bowl taught agriculturalists they had over-farmed, and a final sustainable era during the second half of the twentieth century (p. 27). Cunfer threads this chronology through seven thematic chapters organized around what he calls "specific agroecological processes" such as sod busting, grazing, and planting. Each chapter argues that Great Plains' aridity and high temperatures forced farmers in the region to embrace what the author calls "sustainable" land use practices. |
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Cunfer combines county-level agricultural census data from 1850 to the present, with a variety of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) maps to argue, among other things, that the infamous Dust Bowl was caused not by the rise of agribusiness but rather by a combination of dry soils and high air temperatures. By including as well three case studies of individual farms, On the Great Plains successfully incorporates a variety of geographic scales. |
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Cunfer's reliance on scientific data, however, does not alleviate two nagging concerns. First, the author naturalizes human-induced ecological changes, arguing that since people are part of nature their actions are natural too. For Cunfer, in other words, irrigating crops with Ogallala water or with rainwater are equally natural processes. Such an approach, however, ignores the fact that certain ecological changes are better than others and that this difference is central to understanding our relationship to the natural world. A second problem is Cunfer's failure to define what he means by "sustainability." While there is no single, canonical meaning of the term, even among environmental scientists, Cunfer's definition seems based more on the ability to produce crops than on the so-called ecological health of the plains environment. Yet where do the millions of tons of synthetic fertilizer dumped on the Great Plains annually, not to mention the artificial pesticides applied with them, fit into Cunfer's "sustainable" form of agriculture? |
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Regardless of these criticisms, Cunfer's skillful use of new agricultural data and extremely readable prose will force environmental historians, agricultural historians, and historians of the American West to rethink once again the role played by non-human nature in the history of the Great Plains. |
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| Neil M. Maher
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Federated History Department of the
New Jersey Institute of Technology
and Rutgers University, Newark |
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ISSN 1939-8603
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