In his examination of ecology and environment, John Opie tells the story of a 6,000‐year‐old grassland. The environmental characteristics that define the Plains cover one‐fifth of the lower forty‐eight states and include the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas, as well as eastern Colorado, Oklahoma, and Texas. Opie explores a number of major periods in the life of the Plains environment from Native American experiences to Euro‐American settlement and the lack of water, the rise of irrigation technology, and the issues of sustainability and conservation. Opie concludes by asking how the region’s environmental future is being imagined: should agriculture be rejected and the landscape returned to the buffalo, or should a new agricultural system be developed that rejects large‐scale farming for small‐scale agriculture that can weather large‐scale economic booms and busts and exist more easily in a landscape of environmental extremes?
Though the stereotypical vision of Plains ethnicity seems to suggest similarity rather than diversity, A. Dudley Gardner reveals a complex patchwork of ethnic groups. Gardner divides his analysis of ethnicity between peoples before the Louisiana Purchase (1803), and after 1803, when Napoleon sold the region, among other lands, to the U.S. government. The early period covers early Native presence, the influence of Spanish and Old World technology, such as the gun, introduction of the horse, disease epidemics, the removal of eastern Indians into the Plains, Scottish and French influence from the trapping trade, and escaped slaves. The period after 1803 includes the movement of African American farmers to Kansas, Scandinavian settlers who settled primarily the northern Plains, Icelanders, Russian Germans, religious groups such as Hutterites and Mennonites, and Pennsylvania Dutch, Jewish, Japanese, and Chinese immigrants. Gardner then turns to the latter part of the twentieth century and the rise of immigration from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, as well as Filipinos, Asian Indians, Middle Eastern immigrants, and the dramatic rise of Hispanic populations, who are often centered on the meat‐packing industry in the region. Gardner concludes with a discussion of the extraordinary rise of Native populations in the contemporary region.
