Adapting to an Uncertain Climate on the Great Plains:

Testing Hypotheses on Historical Populations

By Roberta Balstad, Roly Russell, and Vladimir Gill

Columbia University

8 February 2008

Focus of Paper

Two Questions:

– How do people adapt to climate uncertainty?

– Can the historical past serve as a “laboratory” for testing and understanding human responses to climate uncertainty?

Theoretical Context

Laboratory research on decision making under climate uncertainty at CRED, Columbia University, related to– a) patterns of information processing; – b) the finite pool of worry;– c) bias toward a single action in response to

uncertainty.

Advantages of Historical Research

• Much of the existing social science theory on adaptation and decision making is the product of laboratory studies and/or behavioral observation

• Need to examine adaptive behavior and links among perceptions, experiences, and behavior over long time periods

• Climate impacts should be evaluated in the context of an integrated socioeconomic and climate system

• Adaptation decisions are made in a temporal, socioeconomic, and cultural context, as well as in a climate or meteorological context

Substantive Focus of this Study

• The initial century of settlement of the Great Plains of North America

• Geographical focus on Kingsbury County, South Dakota

• Intensive reconstruction of historic decision contexts under variable climate

• Weather variability used as a surrogate for climate change

• Settler decisions (e.g., plow more land, diversify crops, mechanize agriculture, abandon farms, migrate) are examined at multiple time points

Historical Background

• Land originally purchased from the French in 1803; initially inhabited by Indians, soldiers; land used for cattle ranging

• Dakota Territory formed in 1861 as prelude to settlement

• Kingsbury County opened to (European-origin) agricultural settlement in late 1879

• Subdivided into two states in 1889• Majority of early settlers were first or second

generation immigrants from outside the US

Incentives to Settlement

• 160 acres given to farmers under the Homestead Act (1862)

• Railroads also received land grants and provided transportation and access to markets and sold land to settlers

• Widely circulated communications about climate issued by the Territorial government and the railroads companies

• Rainfall increased during the years of the “Great Dakota Land Boom”

Expectations: Climate in Dakota Territory

• “It is difficult to understand in what manner the climate of the Territory came to be so misrepresented to our Eastern neighbors.”

• “Dakota is in the same latitude as many of the most prosperous and well-to-do states of the Union.”

• “Occasionally, in the southern portion of the Territory, seeding is begun as early as February, and the fall plowing continued as late as December.” [But the mean temperature, October through March, 1872-1887, was 21.8 F.]

More Expectations: Climate

• “There is little question that the cultivation of the soil, the planting of trees, and the improvements of civilization, have already had a marked effect on the climate of Dakota.”

• “Intelligently investigated and understood, the healthfulness of the climate offers the strongest and weightiest of all inducements for settlement in our midst.”

• Widespread discussion of the benefits of “dryland agriculture”

Information on Climate Available from Other Sources

• “Great American Desert” of the 19th century

• Major John Wesley Powell, US Geological Survey

• US Census of 1880

• All stressed the lack of rainfall and limitations of agriculture

Climate Conditions Settlers Encountered

• Low annual rainfall• Variable rainfall, droughts• Extreme winter cold and dangerous blizzards• Damaging hailstorms• Fire• Cyclones and wind storms• Floods• Ecological disturbances (locusts, blight, soil

exhaustion, erosion, etc.)

Willa Cather, “On the Divide,”

• “He had seen it smitten by all the plagues of Egypt. He had seen it parched by drought, and sogged by rain, beaten by hail, and swept by fire, and in the grasshopper years he had seen it eaten as bare and clean as bones that the vultures have left. After the great fires he had seen it stretch for miles and miles, black and smoking as the floor of hell.”

– Published in 1905

Government Influences on Settler Adaptation to Great Plains

• Agricultural incentives (homesteading) based on experience in more humid and less variable climates

• Conditions of land tenure discouraged using drylands for cattle

• Marketing incentives for traditional agriculture (especially wheat) and transportation to distant commercial markets

• Incentives for planting trees• New lands opening up farther west

Impacts of Incomplete Information and Government Incentives

• Rangeland left ground cover intact; plowing for wheat cultivation and drought encouraged erosion

• Rainfall variability and other climate events led to frequent crop failure

• Trees did not have sufficient water to grow and tree claims often abandoned

• Adding more land to a farm to increase production during drought led to borrowing to purchase farm machinery

• Opening new lands for homesteading farther west encouraged population churning and out-migration

Settlers’ Responses to the Climate

• Plow more land, more deeply

• Live in town in the winter and on the claim in the summer

• Diversify crops

• Mechanize

• Go elsewhere

One Settler’s Response

• “For seven years there had been too little rain. The prairies were dust…Crop after crop failed. …The agony of hope ended when there was no harvest and no more credit, no money to pay interest and taxes; the banker took the land. Then the bank failed.” – Laura Ingalls Wilder, On the Way Home

Return to Theory: Information Processing

• Analytic information came from government publications, laws, and advertising about the feasibility of moving to the Territory—all directed toward encouraging movement to Dakota

• Negative information was difficult to obtain• Experiential information rare; migration decision

more influenced by the prospect of land ownership than by climate

• Third form of information processing on the frontier: Placing problems in the context of past experience through sayings or axioms

Processing Information through Axioms

• “This earthly life is a battle…If it isn’t one thing to contend with, it’s another. It always has been so, and it always will be. The sooner you make up your mind to that, the better off you are.”

• “The rich man gets his ice in summer and the poor man gets his in the winter.”

Return to Theory:Finite Pool of Worry

• Climate worries were less important to farmers in the Dakota Territory than other worries—mostly socioeconomic—although these may have been linked to climate.

• We found that expectations (and worries) were fluid over time and involved adaptation, adjustment, or rejection of living under extreme conditions. With experience, people adjusted to climate extremes more easily than economic problems.

• The response to climate events was strongly influenced by the interaction of climate problems with government policy and economic problems.

Return to Theory: Single Action Bias

• Settlers observed climate through a lens that was colored by their financial security, their homes, their safety, and their economic livelihood, and their sense of economic options

• Their response to climate events was consequently filtered through the same complex lens and resulted in multiple strategies

Climate vs. Socioeconomic Influences

• Historical study of the Great Plains shows that climate has rarely had an dominent social or economic impact

• Adaptation to climate impacts was influenced as much by social, economic, and technological policies and possibilities as by the climate events themselves.

• Cultural backgrounds did influence the patterns of adaptation, but because of the leveling effects of social and economic opportunities and technology in a market economy, culture does not appear to have been the most important influence on adaptation in this system

The Role of Historical Analysis • We conclude that historical analysis is valuable in

understanding adaptive behavior in its broadest context• It can also be used to compare behavior observed in

laboratory studies with that in real situations, and the findings can be used to feed ideas back into lab experiments.

• The lack of interactive data, or the possibility of interacting with historic populations, makes it impossible to test specific experiments as the term is conventionally used.

• However, it does give us a broader perspective on system-wide influences on adaptation and decision making under climate uncertainty.

• It also gives us a means of assessing individual and group behavioral patterns in a socially, culturally, and economically influenced system