The Shelterbelt “Scheme”: Radical Ecological Forestry and the Production Of
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The Shelterbelt “Scheme”: Radical Ecological Forestry and the Production of Climate in the Fight for the Prairie States Forestry Project A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY MEAGAN ANNE SNOW IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Dr. Roderick Squires January 2019 © Meagan A. Snow 2019 Acknowledgements From start to finish, my graduate career is more than a decade in the making and getting from one end to the other has been not merely an academic exercise, but also one of finding my footing in the world. I am thankful for the challenge of an ever-evolving committee membership at the University of Minnesota’s Geography Department that has afforded me the privilege of working with a diverse set of minds and personalities: thank you Karen Till, Eric Sheppard, Richa Nagar, Francis Harvey, and Valentine Cadieux for your mentorship along the way, and to Kate Derickson, Steve Manson, and Peter Calow for stepping in and graciously helping me finish this journey. Thanks also belong to Kathy Klink for always listening, and to John Fraser Hart, an unexpected ally when I needed one the most. Matthew Sparke and the University of Washington Geography Department inspired in me a love of geography as an undergraduate student and I thank them for making this path possible. Thank you is also owed to the Minnesota Population Center and the American University Library for employing me in such good cheer. Most of all, thank you to Rod Squires - for trusting me, for appreciating my spirit and matching it with your own, and for believing I am capable. To my friends and fellow graduate students, Jennifer Kotting and Victoria Downey, thank you for always listening, always understanding, and always laughing. I am so lucky to have found such brilliant friends for life in you. Thank you also to Jacob Barney, without whom I would never have made it to the end. I am thankful for Ursula Lang, Timothy Currie, Harlan Morehouse, Erin Walsh, Brooke Bernini, Renata Blumberg, Kyle Green, Basil Mahayni, Bill Lindeke, Katharine Kindervater, Sami Eria, Ben Alden, and Dudley Bonsal, for friendship and camaraderie that meant everything along the way. i Most of all, gratitude is owed to my family, whose enthusiasm for my education has never faltered. Laurel, thank you for forging a life path of meaningful choices that I have been so lucky to follow behind as your little sister – I wouldn’t be me without you. Thank you, Mom and Dad, for your endless love and support; for always listening to me, and in so doing, teaching me that my thoughts could matter. Final thanks go to my grandparents, Robert & Stevie Crisson and Janet Scurlock, who I think of and miss daily, and who I hope to always make proud. ii Abstract In 1934 the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration announced the creation of the “largest project ever undertaken in the country to modify climate and agricultural conditions.” The Shelterbelt Project, later known as the Prairie States Forestry Project, was designed to alter local climatic conditions around the 100th meridian through the planting of large bands designed to slow the winds and conserve moisture in the soil. The Shelterbelt Project was made possible by the work of radical foresters who were fighting within their field to establish forestry as its own ecological science with a vital role to play in public service. Raphael Zon and his colleagues translated Roosevelt’s broad vision into a technical scientific plan and set themselves apart by embracing forestry as relational and inherently political, acknowledging both that economic drivers contribute to climatic shifts, and that environmental and climatic problems have the potential to be mitigated through political solutions. This project uses archival material and the academic writings of project stakeholders to demonstrate how the spatial ontologies of the Shelterbelt Project’s advocates and critics produced different conceptions of climate. It also traces how their thinking affected the types of science they saw as legitimate and the policy solutions they fought for. Though some academic geographers involved with the debate around the Shelterbelt Project wrote explicitly about space, for others, understanding their view of space comes from examining how they viewed the relationship between society, politics, and the environment. Geographers Carl Sauer, Isaiah Bowman, and Ellsworth Huntington fundamentally disagreed with Zon and other ecological foresters about the best way to combat climatic iii instability because their own spatial ontologies always predicated human geography (including political and social solutions) on top of what they saw as an unchanging set of naturally occurring environmental conditions. Focusing on land-use policy and population resettlement as the solution to climatic instability, these geographers ignored the ways in which economic systems were exacerbating environmental differences, casting changes as naturally-occurring in order to remove environmental solutions from the realm of political debate and to insert their own political expertise after the fact as a solution. These actions amounted to a geographical production of climate through the logic of regional and deterministic geography. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements .................................................................................................... i Abstract .................................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents ...................................................................................................... v List of Tables and Figures ...................................................................................... viii Table of Shelterbelt Debate Stakeholders ................................................................. x Introduction ............................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: The Great American Desert ..................................................................... 6 Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 6 The Great American Desert .............................................................................................. 7 Advertising an ‘Evolving’ Landscape ............................................................................. 12 Pinchot Encounters the A Westward Continent .............................................................. 16 Confronting the Soil and the Plow .................................................................................. 24 The Shelterbelt Idea ........................................................................................................ 27 Chapter 2: Zon’s Radical Ecological Forestry ........................................................ 34 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 34 Zon’s Relational Section of Silvics ................................................................................. 35 The Fremont and Alpine Laboratory ............................................................................... 40 Gifford Pinchot and the Taft Administration .................................................................. 45 Graves, Forest Streams, and the 1911 Weeks Act .......................................................... 48 Post-War New Conservationism and the Clark McNary Act .......................................... 52 A Radical “Letter to Foresters” ....................................................................................... 54 v Groundwork for New Deal Forestry ............................................................................... 59 Chapter 3: A Scientific Plan .................................................................................... 63 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 63 Munns and Zon Restart the Proposal .............................................................................. 64 A Scientific Plan ............................................................................................................. 65 Project Is Announced ...................................................................................................... 68 The 1934 Zon Petition ..................................................................................................... 70 Huntington Supports Resettlement ................................................................................. 73 Chapter 4: Geographical Production of Climate ..................................................... 76 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 76 The Separation of Man and Nature ................................................................................. 78 Deterministic Geography ................................................................................................ 79 Regional Geography and Bowman’s Science of Settlement ........................................... 87 Geographical Production of Climate ............................................................................... 92 Chapter 5: The Shelterbelt Project .........................................................................