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The Conservation Landscape: Trees and Nature on the Great Plains Joel Jason Orth Iowa State University

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The Conservation Landscape: Trees and Nature on the Great Plains Joel Jason Orth Iowa State University Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Retrospective Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 2004 The conservation landscape: trees and nature on the Great Plains Joel Jason Orth Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd Part of the Forest Sciences Commons, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Commons, Natural Resources and Conservation Commons, Natural Resources Management and Policy Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Orth, Joel Jason, "The onc servation landscape: trees and nature on the Great Plains " (2004). Retrospective Theses and Dissertations. 809. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/809 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Retrospective Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The conservation landscape: Trees and nature on the Great Plains by Joel Jason Orth A dissertation submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Major: Agricultural History and Rural Studies Program of Study Committee: Joseph E. Taylor III, Co-major Professor Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Co-major Professor James T. Andrews Amy Sue Bix James A. Pritchard Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2004 Copyright © Joel Jason Orth, 2004. All rights reserved. UMI Number: 3136342 INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI UMI Microform 3136342 Copyright 2004 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 ii Graduate College Iowa State University This is to certify that the doctoral dissertation of Joel Jason Orth has met the dissertation requirements of Iowa State University Signature was redacted for privacy. Co-major/ ofessor Signature was redacted for privacy. Signature was redacted for privacy. iii Table of Contents List of Figures iv List of Tables v Introduction—Constructing the Conservation Landscape 1 Chapter One—Idealized Landscape: building a case for Plains forestry 10 Chapter Two—Formalizing Science: forest reserves on the Great Plains 50 Chapter Three—Science Professionalized: the early science and politics 98 of Plains forestry Chapter Four—The Rhetoric of Nature: science, politics and the 140 Shelterbelt Project Chapter Five—The Politics of Planning: technical decision-making, 188 politics, and nature in constructing a plan Chapter Six—Forests in miniature: PSFP technical standards 236 Chapter Seven—Constructing a Bureaucratic Landscape: the SCS and 276 PSFP Chapter Eight—The Conservation Landscape 322 Bibliography 363 iv List of Figures Figure 1.1—The "Great American Desert" 1849 14 Figure 2.1—Holt County, Nebraska from an 1889 map showing Swan Lake 63 Figure 2.2—Path of the 1901 survey 71 Figure 2.3—The Niobrara and Dismal River Forest Reserves 75 Figure 4.1—1934 Forest Service artist's rendering of Shelterbelts 148 Figure 6.1—Earliest Plan for a 25-mile wide belt 194 Figure 6.2—Early plan for a belt running from Canada to Brownsville, Texas 195 Figure 6.3—Zone from the New York Times in summer of 1934 1 96 Figure 6A—Zone from fall of 1934 197 Figure 6.5—Zone in February 1935 201 Figure 6.6—Zone from Possibilities of Shelterbelt Planting 202 Figure 6.7—Actual areas of heavy planting compared to Zone 204 Figure 6.8—Areas of concentrated planting compared to Dust Bowl region 215 Figure 6.9—Soil types of Northern Plains and tree growth 216 Figure 6.10—Soil types of Central Plains and tree growth 217 Figure 6.11—Soil types of Southern Plains and tree growth 218 Figure 6.12—Summer wind patterns on the Great Plains 219 Figure 6.13—Wind pattern on the Great Plains for non-summer months 220 Figure 6.1—A 165-foot wide belt from 1936 creating forest-like conditions 238 Figure 8.1 —Idealized diagram of Shelterbelt effects on crop yield 334 Figure 8.2—Five-state summary of reasons for windbreak removal 350 Figure 8.3—North Dakota summary of reasons for windbreak removal 351 Figure 8.4—South Dakota summary of reasons for windbreak removal 352 Figure 8.5—Nebraska summary of reasons for windbreak removal 353 Figure 8.6—Kansas summary of reasons for windbreak removal 354 Figure 8.7—Oklahoma summary of reasons for windbreak removal 355 V List of Tables Table 8.1—Windbreak Removal rates from the 1975 GAO report 343 Table 8.2—Summary of field windbreak statistics from 1980 SCS report 349 1 Introduction—Constructing the Conservation Landscape For over two centuries Americans have been apprehensive about the suitability of the Great Plains for intensive agriculture, and while they devised and implemented many schemes to "fix" the landscape, their worry remained. Americans worried about the Great Plains because the land was arid and prone to recurring droughts that brought dust storms, crop failures, economic ruin, and abandonment. This made agriculture tenuous at best and disastrous at worst. To fix these troubles Americans experimented with tree planting, plowing, and a variety of cultivation practices. Congress passed repeated acts in support, from the Timber Culture Act of 1873 to the Conservation Reserve Program of 1985. University and federal experts taught farmers how to farm—to plant trees in blocks, to plant trees in wide rows, to plant trees in narrow rows, to plant on the contour, to leave crop stubble, to plow deep, and not to plow. Farmers offered their fields to these measures and helped install them. They learned to file paperwork for government assistance, and they developed their own methods and theories. When private initiative seemed insufficient, Americans created conservation agencies to undertake tree planting, grassland restoration, emergency plowing, and other direct measures. Despite these actions, Americans failed repeatedly and dramatically to impose the stability and order they desired. They tamed, at least temporarily and with great effort, some aspects of nature, but agriculture on the Great Plains today still lives in fear of the next drought. Of all the schemes to transform the environment, the longest lasting and most persistent was tree planting. Social forestry was the belief that trees had agronomic, climatic, and social benefits. Early boosters used social forestry to inform the world that tree planting 2 increased rainfall and that the Great Plains was becoming America's Garden. In this newly planted Garden, settlers would find an improved version of the Eastern United States. The droughts of the early 1890s crushed facile assertions of climatic change, but, instead of abandoning trees, a new group of individuals emerged to promote planting. Professional foresters called for systematic and sustained planting. They planned to combine scientific expertise with federal power to build a series of forest reserves. Once covered with trees, these reserves would stabilize the environment and secure their professional authority. The great difficulty foresters encountered in growing trees, however, crushed their hopes of expanding the reserve system, and Plains forestry withered into a small, unglamorous field of science. These trends seemed to reverse when drought returned in the early 1930s, and Americans once again searched for solutions to dust and economic ruin. In cooperation with President Franklin Roosevelt, foresters proposed literally to divide the nation in half with a Great American Wall of trees. The Shelterbelt Project, as it was called, at first planted more controversy than trees, and Americans and professional foresters began debating the future of tree planting on the Great Plains. The emergence of such a systematic, massive plan offered foresters an opportunity to reengineer the mistakes of nature, culture, and history, but in moving from plan to practice foresters found that planning and science had not escaped culture or history. Both were instead intimately bound together. Grandiose plans began to fade, but even as foresters downshifted to creating technical guidelines for smaller landscapes, they could not extract social, political, and natural conclusions from their science. When foresters looked out from their miniature forests, they saw another group of experts, agronomists, providing farmers with conservation assistance on the Great Plains. 3 Agronomy, with its greater mixture of populism and patina of comity, emerged victorious as the dominant approach to managing Plains landscapes. Agronomy was sorely tested by repeated drought cycles, but with the help of irrigation, it would remain the favored method of stabilizing the Great Plains landscape into the new millennium.1 Part of the difficulty Americans faced on the Great Plains was the environment. In its most expansive definition, the region stretches from Canada, through Montana, North Dakota, and the edge of Minnesota, Wyoming, South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, eastern Colorado and New Mexico, Kansas, western Oklahoma and Texas (Figure 1.1). The region is characterized by flat, eastward rolling plains and tablelands that stretch in a broad belt across the central United States. While notable for its flatness, valleys, canyons, isolated mountains, badlands, and sandhills divide the region. The shortgrass prairie east of the Rocky Mountains consists of short, sparse bunch grasses, but varies from semi-desert to woodland.
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