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In The News
April 25, 2008
CEP Conversations: Donald Worster, history of Kansas energy, climate, and environment
Posting this CEP Conversation during the week of Earth Day seemed like a good fit. All too often, we think of the environment in terms of an immediate, looming crisis.

While environmental concerns are indeed major - and many require action sooner rather than later - sometimes it also helps to take a longer view. This perspective can make it easier to appreciate the larger meaning of the earth, and creation.

Renowned environmental historian Donald Worster recently sat down for an interview with CEP. He spoke of the environmental history of the Great Plains – its volatile weather and climate, history of water use, agricultural development, and the risks of climate change in this unpredictable realm of the natural world.

He also discusses how fossil fuel usage began during the industrialized era, and visions for a future that makes better use of renewable energies.

Dr. Worster is also a Kansan. His parents were from Reno County. They moved to California during the World War II era (which is where he was born) but they soon moved back. Dr. Worster was raised in Reno County and still has family who farms in the area.

For a .pdf download of this interview, please click here.

*****************


Maril Hazlett, CEP: Why don’t you start out by telling us a little about yourself, and how you got involved with environmental history.

Donald Worster: Well, I was raised along the banks of Cow Creek in Reno County. There are a lot of good people out there. I also grew up deeply impressed by the landscape. Some people find it monotonous or uninteresting, but I grew up with a prairie sense of sky, land, climate… the big broad rivers rippling through…

This all mattered a lot to me. All the seasons of Kansas, the wildlife and bird life, the weather patterns and so on. These always were very much part of my awareness.

When I became a historian I got very tired of simply reading about politics, theology, etc… It all seemed like such an urban view of history.

MH: I noticed that, too, when I went to school. Back East is a very urban perspective.

DW: During the late sixties, I was a graduate student at Yale. The rise of the modern environmental movement very much influenced me – writers like Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Barry Commoner, Paul Ehrlich. Earth Day 1970.

I ended up combining my own background with all these new environmental ideas. What emerged for myself, and several others, was a new discipline called environmental history.

Environmental history looks at how human societies, at all scales, are related to the natural world. And we don’t define the “natural world” as the countryside alone. It includes all kinds of things that come under the category of the creation - the world that humans didn’t make - including plants, animals, micro-organisms, weather patterns, climate patterns, etc.

So we have really invented a new field of history. Sometimes it sounds a bit like agriculture, sometimes a bit like geography. It also has a lot of science in it. It studies how people have thought and felt about their relationships to the natural world - what they wanted in the way of living, what they wanted emotionally from the world around them, economically, all of that.

As an historian, I bring humans and nature together by crossing the lines of other academic disciplines. Environmental history can be carried out anywhere on the face of the earth, but to me the best places to study all this is right here at home, on the Great Plains.

MH: What in particular makes you say that?

DW: On the Plains, the elemental contact of people and natural world is right on the surface. The Plains environment has been a defining issue for its inhabitants, going back to the Native Americans.

Ecologically, this is an area that is extraordinarily vulnerable. And volatile, with extreme weather and climate. Every organism, every living thing, has got to deal with that volatility. We range from extremely cold winters to extremely hot summers. We alternate between wet years and droughts. There’s colossal wind patterns.

All this combines to make life here a challenge compared to some other parts of the world. The Great Plains environment is one of the most unpredictable places on the earth - certainly in the United States. And it has been a challenge for people who live here. Everybody has tried to come to grips with the nature of this place. But what is the nature?

MH: It’s hard to describe an environment – or its weather and climate – when the system experiences such flux already.

DW: Right. Which year are you talking about, and which month of the year? This is also true for a lot of the western part of the United States because it is so drought prone.

But the Great Plains is where our continent’s kingdoms of nature come together and swirl around. It runs from New Mexico and Texas, all the way up into the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

MH: You define the Plains by its environment, then, as a geographical area. Not necessarily defined by state or country.

DW: And the Plains is a huge part of the United States – it’s got to be getting on to eight hundred million acres, I would say. Close to a third of the United States, if you take it in its broadest dimensions… Iowa… tallgrass prairie country…

Somebody once called the Plains the boneyard of America, because we have had so many disasters. We’ve failed so many times. So many different groups have failed here.

MH: What are some of the major examples of those failures?

DW: Anthropologists have studied how during Indian times, every time there was a drought, the Indian peoples migrated eastward. They moved in and out of the Plains according to the climate patterns. They came in during the good years, moving along the river bottoms where they could raise food and hunt. During drought years they headed back towards Missouri, closer to where there was more plentiful wood and surface water. Surface water is essential for any settlement, and in the Plains that resource comes and goes.

I’m not sure if I would call that example a failure, though. Recognizing and adjusting to the constraints of your environment is not a failure.

MH: Hmm. Recently, we maybe haven’t quite got the hang of that lesson.

DW: Americans of European background have had the same dance with this place, the Plains. Same as the Indians did.

The 1870’s would be a good example. Then, it looked lush out on the Plains. Clear up into the 1880s. People talked about how “the rain followed the plow.” They thought that agriculture had the power to increase rainfall.

Then comes the 1890’s. There was a severe drought. The line of white settlement actually fell back across the Plains. Many counties were severely depopulated, some up to 90%. European Americans were repeating the Indian pattern, coming and going in response to larger environmental cycles.

The 1930’s are a very dramatic example of how humans on the Plains suffered, during the Dust Bowl – the drought, the dust storms. That hasn’t happened since, though. What has changed is that the federal government has basically paid people to stay here. It has transferred wealth from other parts of the country into the Plains, to stabilize agriculture. This is a safety net that the Indians or 19th century settlers did not have.

MH: Extensive federal supports. Subsidies. They’ve offered Kansas and other ag states a safety net for surviving the Plains.

DW: Since World War II. Subsidies. Agricultural subsidies, drought assistance, crop insurance. There are some counties on the northern plains where more than half of the money that comes in derives from the federal government, if you include social security, Medicare, along with farm programs.

Now, there’s a lot of humanity behind that. Subsidies help cushion people against short-term environmental dangers and risk. However, they can also unintentionally expose them to new long-term disasters.

Subsidies can keep people in the same place, doing the same thing without having to work with the environment’s limits as much as they could. People might figure out how to adjust in the short-term, like to changes in weather, but they are a lot less likely to figure out strategies for the long-term, like how to adjust to larger cycles of climate and drought.

And subsidies can be dangerous. Think about it - the Plains has to depend on the good will of outsiders. It makes us dependent on taxpayers in New Jersey and Florida. If they or their legislators decide they don’t want to continue to transfer their tax dollars into the Plains to keep this place alive – say they think we’re getting too much for a bushel of corn these days - we are in very serious trouble.

I don’t think most people up and down the Great Plains realize - we have shifted our dependence on nature, to a dependence on the federal budget. At the same time, we are of course extraordinarily dependent on very flexible and volatile crop markets around the world.

We have created a lot more economic volatilities, to pile on top of the environmental ones nature has already given us.

MH: Living on – and living off of – the Plains is a high-risk proposition, in terms of the environment and the economy. At the best of times.

But on top of that we are now facing some major environmental challenges – the risks posed by climate change, new choices in renewable energy, and extremely rapid development of wind resources and biofuels.

DW: Well, the most serious new card in the deck is man-made climate change. To this point it has all been nature’s climate patterns we’ve had to deal with, and they are volatile enough.

This wild card is unprecedented in all of human history. Our excessive burning of fossil fuels has resulted in global climate change, and we don’t even begin to know the outcome. We’ve got lots of projections, but no one really knows how it will work. All we know is that fossil fuel carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is having an effect.

MH: And that the risks are high.

DW: And those risks make the Plains even more vulnerable. But we have to keep in mind, many people also see lots of possibilities. Like the way we are, or were until recently, throwing money into ethanol.

There’s an interesting historical comparison there, with how people poured money into Kansas farmland during the 1920s, developing agricultural production. The world market looked great and it all went bust in the 1930’s. In fact, it contributed to the problems of the 1930’s.

MH: The Great Depression.

DW: Right. And the Dust Bowl, the time of large-scale wind erosion on the Plains.

In a way, our basic economic institutions and principles have always been a mining economy. You come in, you get the resource, and you leave as quickly as possible when it runs out. The western part of the U.S. has seen this cycle in terms of minerals. But in the Plains we do it with agriculture. Long ago, our families raced in and started to mine the soil fertility, mine the water.

In western Kansas, right now we are mining water from the Ogallala Aquifer, although we don’t think of it in those terms. Just like copper, all the water from the Ogallala mine will be gone some day. When copper mines ran out the mining enterprises all moved offshore to other countries. They left behind derelict mining towns all over the west. And the mining tailings.

Agriculture in the Great Plains has often looked like the mining industry. Going for broke in the good years, suffering through the bad years. And crying for help in the bad years, when we bust.

MH: Maybe we shouldn’t take it all. Maybe we should agree on some limits.

DW: Actually, in some ways we already have agreed. At the federal level we have done this in economics since the 1930’s.

Both political parties have basically accepted that the federal government has to play an interventionist role in the economy. They argue about how that intervention will work, but everyone in the federal economic system is constantly dealing with monetary policy and taxation and government regulation, trying to keep this ship on an even keel.

In other words, they are planning the economy. Corporations, Congress, they all want as much predictability and stability as they can get. Growth, but stability, there’s got to be a balance. It is not working all that well yet because we don’t understand all the factors.

But it is in the area of the environment that we have not yet accepted the idea of limits giving us some long-term stability. In ecological terms, we need to think about institutions and regulatory practices that can deal with the volatilities of the natural world. And help us to live with them, and not make them worse.

And that requires… well, it requires planning. It requires some kind of public agency intervening and trying to take the long view and trying to figure out where we are going, how to keep things stable as possible, to maintain some sort of balance - so that people’s savings don’t get wiped out and their livelihoods and they don’t end up as refugees heading for California. Like what happened with the Dust Bowl.

MH: We don’t want a new set of Okies heading out of here.

DW: I don’t think anyone in Kansas really wants to go through that again. They are unaware of how easily it could happen.

MH: Your parents went through the Dust Bowl. My grandparents did. Their memories kept it alive in my mind. Part of who I am as a Kansan is - not wanting anyone to ever have to go through what they did.

DW: There is still a large group of people in this state who believe the Dirty Thirties were simply a problem created by nature. That humans had nothing to do with it.

MH: It was a lot more complicated than that.

DW: Exactly. It was a lot more complicated than that. Agricultural practices helped create the conditions that led to the erosion, and when drought struck and a combination of weather conditions happened, they were sunk.

And because they don’t accept that humans had a huge role in making the Dust Bowl years in the first place, they can’t see anything that we are doing today that could create another similar situation with climate change. They just say, well, nature walloped us once, so it may wallop us again. It’s a kind of fatalism.

But that fatalism then allows them to say- don’t tell me I have to change my way of life, because it could have serious ramifications down the road. Oh no, it is just not possible for humans to affect nature like that.

MH: Why do so many of us reject that idea so strongly? That our actions can have an impact on nature?

DW: It requires taking some responsibility, and people are bearing pretty heavy burdens of responsibility already. They have got to raise their kids, they have got to make sure their business or whatever they are involved in survives. They have got a job to do.

Taking on responsibility for something as big as planet Earth, and what we are doing to it, is very hard. People have done many things to try and tread lighter but they resist having their burden of responsibility enlarged.

And of course the biggest problem is - regardless of all the easy solutions you often hear - taking responsibility for what we are doing to the Earth requires us to look at how we consume and how we produce. And how we make money, and how much money we are making. And our economic goals. That is extremely difficult in this country. Since we were founded, one of our goals has been to increase personal wealth. You are nobody unless you do that.

And we consume far beyond the rest of the world, and yet it is not enough.

MH: What is enough? Where is the shut-off button?

DW: To take responsibility for our role in global climate change is to face that question head-on. What is enough?

I wish I could say the solution is new technology that will make us all infinitely rich (laughs). Although faith in technology, there is something to that. We do have to behave like a creative entrepreneurial society, not a scared society hanging on to the way we did things in the past.

We are really afraid to face this fossil fuel issue. I suppose it is because we have mostly had it so easy and so abundant but there is a lot of fear out there. But if we don’t have any real confidence in our entrepreneurial capability, then we certainly have no confidence in our ability to handle resource issues more responsibly.

MH: Is there any historical precedent that you can think of, say between a fossil fuel economy and a more renewable energy economy? When in history have humans gone through such a massive switch?

DW: Well, when we invented the fossil fuel economy, we went through a huge switch, We went from a renewable economy based on water power, based on wood, based on whatever was growing, based on the annual accumulation of sunlight in plants.

Originally, that is all we had. We didn’t really become a predominantly fossil fuel economy until about the 1870’s. We were burning coal before that. The British were burning coal much earlier. But the Industrial Revolution came about in the U.S. by harnessing water power. In this country we were still burning a lot of wood at the time of the Civil War. We burned more wood than coal. And the oil part of our fossil fuel usage didn’t really become a big factor until the 1920’s.

It took us decades to make the transition to fossil fuels. It didn’t happen all at once. It didn’t happen all in one place.

For example, Britain. When did that transition occur in Great Britain? When there was a scarcity of wood and forest. Only then did people begin to turn to coal. It’s nasty stuff to mine, handle, burn. They called it a poor man’s fuel. Rich people got to burn beautiful oak logs.

It took Britain decades, a century, to go through the transition to fossil fuels. But it changed everything. The consequences never could have been predicted. What it did for people, what they didn’t really calculate at the time – burning fossil fuels opened up enormities of energy, of affluence. Suddenly with all this energy, there was wealth. There was transportation, etc.

To undo all of that - we can’t. There is no way. Instead, we have to invent some kind of renewable energy system. And some countries have got to lead the way and others will follow decades later. That is the way the transition happened the first time as far as I can tell.

The idea that the U.S. has to wait until China and India join us in cutting emissions is just not the way to make this energy transition work. People have got to lead the way, find ways to make it possible, develop the technology, and hope that other countries will adopt it.

We didn’t get the coal industry by ourselves. It came to us from England. The oil industry on the other hand, we invented, but then we gave it to the rest of the world. So why can’t we invent something to replace the oil era and give it to the rest of the world?

MH: We invented nuclear power.

DW: And it may come back.

MH: To tie it up – this is one of two questions that we ask everybody. In twenty years or so, what would your vision of Kansas be? What would it look like? Not what you fear it might look like, but what you hope it might look like?

DW: What I would hope it would look like - is that we have found ways to generate energy in this state without any fossil fuels at all. I don’t think we will make it in twenty years.

MH: Probably not.

DW: But we will have made a start. We will be able to meet most of our own energy needs right here, without importing energy from any other part of the world. We would have found a way to live without mining underground water. We have got to find a way to raise food in this state without depending on the pumping of water because (1) it is going be extremely expensive to pump whatever is left and (2) there is not going to be much that is left.

I hope at that point we have will have begun to create an agriculture that is not so dependent on fossil fuels and the other chemicals we use in farming. We need an agriculture that is more in tune with the whole natural world around us. Kansas ought to be a leader in creating an agriculture that is ecologically harmonious.

I don’t know about the word “sustainable.” I don’t use it. I don’t know what the term really means.

MH: What other word would you use?

DW: I talk about ecological harmony instead of sustainability. That means that our actions do not adversely impact soils, vegetation, human health, etc. I use the word harmony in the sense of healthy. If we can advance toward a greater degree of health in all of these dimensions – and not a doctor’s office idea of health. Health in terms of healthy landscape, a healthy environment.

These are platitudes, but sustainability… well, I just don’t know what the term means. Everything is sustainable to a certain degree but in an ultimate sense, nothing is.

MH: There is always going to be an environmental impact of some kind. Nothing is untouched.

DW: And health isn’t just about human health. Health should mean restoring our riparian habitats that we have decimated by irrigation. It should mean allowing other species to have the necessary space for their habitat.

And we should realize that we don’t have to go to Colorado and some national park to see beauty. Kansas is a place of great beauty and ecological diversity. Here we do still have a chance to live harmoniously with nature. We need more open space - we need to set aside more land from urban development, commercial development and from agriculture. We have also put too much land into agriculture. I would like to see a future which agriculture is practiced differently, but also occupies a little bit less of the landscape.

And I want people to love being in this state. To love not just because it is familiar, in the sense of “good old Kansas,” but they love its beauty.

MH: They should appreciate it. This is an amazing place. They don’t have to apologize for living here.

DW: We don’t make it more beautiful by building more highways or that sort of stuff. But we make it more beautiful by preserving our riverine forests and native prairies, and bringing wildlife back into the landscape and protecting the beauty, the bird populations, and all the rest.

We could generate our own electricity, we know we have got great soils, we could potentially have great, clean river systems. There is so much we could do to restore lost habitat. In an increasingly overcrowded world, Kansas is especially beautiful.

The scale of our towns is also manageable politically. We are just not overwhelmed with the number of people that are crowding into southern California. Or the East Coast, etc.

MH: Well, if the ocean rises they will all be showing up here.

DW: If climate change really does progress, if we don’t manage to arrest it, we will have another Dust Bowl. Kansas will look like the Chihuahuan desert. It could create not just a drought but a desert that could basically wipe out agriculture in this state and shift wheat production clear out of the US into Canada. Is that really what we want in 15 to 75 to 100 years?

MH: Last, kind of a random question. I ask this of everyone, so don’t laugh too hard. What is your favorite country music song or singer? Do you have one?

DW: My favorite country music song or singer… Well, the singer would have to be Patsy Cline. And any of her songs, I like all of them so much. Sweet Dreams is awesome, but I don’t know which one I would choose if I had to choose one. She is the queen.

And Waylon Jennings. Oklahoma Sunshine.

--- Maril Hazlett, www.climateandenergy.org



Other CEP Conversations include:
- Thad Holcombe, Ecumenical Christian Ministries (ECM) - Care for Creation (.pdf)
- Dan Nagengast, Kansas Rural Center - The Potential of Community Wind (.pdf)
- Kimberly Gencur-Svaty - Transmission Development in Kansas (.pdf)
Contact Name: Maril Hazlett
Contact Email: hazlett@climateandenergy.org
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