The Greater Plains: Rethinking a Region's Environmental Histories

The study of the Great Plains has done much to help define the field of environmental history, especially in the United States. And because histories of “dust, drought, and declension” dominated studies of, and ways of thinking about, the Great Plains, the tension between competing linear narratives of progress and decline also became highly influential among environmental historians over the past three decades. In this new edited collection, Brian Frehner and Kathleen Brosnan bring together a diverse group of scholars from multiple disciplines to demonstrate that this long-standing approach to the study of Great Plains environmental history is changing in favor of “adaptation, persistence, preservation, and sustainability” (xv). Taken together, the sixteen essays that comprise the collection effectively capture the state of the field of Great Plains environmental history. There is much scholarship of significant value emerging from a variety of disciplines and approaches that challenge standard historiographical assumptions. Indeed, the field, like the collection itself, is so large and broad that it is difficult to explain coherently. The collection goes a long way in sketching out the scope of the field, and the editors have done important work in framing the contributions in a way that reflect the authors’ various challenges to the region's dominant historiographical axiom of disaster and decline. The breadth of what is included in the collection, however, sometimes stretches the category of environmental history to the point that it begins to lose explanatory power. The editors do a good job of lending structure to the diversity of scholarship, but like the state of the field itself, they struggle to provide coherence to such a diverse array of new approaches to Great Plains environmental history.The breadth of topics here is large enough that it is clear the editors and contributors struggled to organize the essays thematically. In the introduction, Frehner and Brosnan write that technology and its role in human adaptation unites the individual essays in the collection, but they then present four additional themes—water, grasses, animals, and energy—that are supposed to be the book's main themes (xviii–xx). The editors then offer regionalism as an important concept with which the contributors engage in their essays, and then mobility, and then environmental decline caused by agriculture as well (xxii–xxiv). These themes and the structure they supposedly provide to unite the book are not clearly explained. Technology certainly accommodates and connects most of the essays, which focus on a diversity of topics from rawhide bags to account books, and from breakfast cereal to natural gas pipelines. But most other themes are not central to the essays as a whole. Animals and energy, for instance, receive their own sections of the book, but water and grass do not, nor does regionalism or mobility. Instead, the essays are arranged into four sections with four essays in each: “Indigenous Grassland Adaptations over the Longue Durée,” “Animals on the Great Plains,” “Modern Agriculture and the Transformation of the Plains,” and “Energy Landscapes.” The essays are of high quality, and each category holds its four essays together.Linking all sixteen essays together effectively under the umbrella of environmental history is tricky, because in fact not all of the essays are actually environmental histories. Some of the strongest contributions are written by scholars who identify as environmental historians. George Colpitts demonstrates that the qualitative descriptions from fur trader daybooks contributed to better bookkeeping records, which in turn facilitated the transformation of bison into commodities. Jacob Blackwell uses nuisance lawsuits and environmental regulations to examine the opportunities and constraints of large-scale feedlot operations. And Ryan Driskell Tate traces the failed efforts of ranchers to resist the slow violence of strip mining and its overburden. Interestingly, the essays that are most clearly environmental histories are also ones that detail stories of degradation, decline, or disaster. The essays that best frame their contributions around the complexity and nonlinearity that the editors insist characterize efforts to rethink Great Plains environmental history are not written by environmental historians. Anthropologist Leila Monaghan provides an excellent study of mobility and place-based knowledge of Cheyenne and Arapaho women's lived experience moving across vast distances. The chapter is awkwardly framed around the importance of travois, which undoubtedly mediated mobility and landscape knowledge over time but might have been stronger had it been focused on Monaghan's insights about the environmental knowledge embodied in painted rawhide bags and landscape names. Native American studies scholar Clint Carroll frames Indigenous epistemology and storytelling as central to understanding the persistence of animal kinship relationships among the Cherokee during and after colonization and dispossession. And geographers Jonathan Peyton and Matthew Dyce reveal that accommodation and ambiguity characterized the inconsistent consequences of oil development for one municipality in Manitoba. What this suggests is that stories of things getting worse still have a lot of influence among environmental historians, and that scholars working at the edges of the field in other disciplines often have important conceptual, theoretical, and methodological contributions to offer.What does help this collection rethink environmental histories of the Great Plains is the inclusion of nonhistorians. More than half of the contributors (eleven, or thirteen if we include the editors) are historians. The other ten include four anthropologists, three geographers, one archaeologist, one Native American studies scholar, and one media studies scholar. Frehner and Brosnan claim that this makes the collection “an interdisciplinary forum” (xx). Indeed, much environmental history is made stronger by taking an interdisciplinary approach. Drawing from other disciplines—or, better yet, working with scholars from other disciplines—to better understand past relationships between people and the nonhuman world is a central tenet of environmental history. But this collection is multidisciplinary rather than interdisciplinary. Of the sixteen essays, thirteen are sole-authored and only one was coauthored with a historian. The best environmental histories will always be written by historians. But some of the best interdisciplinary environmental histories are coauthored by historians working with scholars from other disciplines.The Greater Plains delivers on its promise in that it “complicates earlier narratives of the plains as a region prone to ecological disaster” (xvii). But environmental declensionism is still an important part of the field, especially if we are talking about the Great Plains. Rethinking the region's environmental histories appears to have just begun, and the contributors to this broad collection provide important indications about where the field is headed.

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