CIPEC - Fall Semester 2004 Colloquium Series

Of the known histories of the impact of human intervention on the landscape, that of the U.S. Great Plains may be the most frequently described. In the 1930s clouds of dust rose off recently-plowed land to focus attention on the ways that human actions have consequences for people and the environment. More recently, the region has had divergent demographic and environmental experiences, with part experiencing population loss and a reduction in active farmland, part holding its own demographically and agriculturally, and part experiencing an increase in population through urbanization and suburbanization. These dramatic stories give the region significance in the study of the impact of the human population on the environment, and the parallel ways that the environment can shape the human population.

This paper summarizes a decade of work on the ways that human population change has influenced the environment of the U.S. Great Plains, and then goes on to report recent work by an interdisciplinary research team. This new work presents biogeochemical model results for a group of counties in the Great Plains to document the ways that different agricultural histories and different urbanization and suburbanization histories have led to different soil carbon levels as well as other varying soil chemistry outcomes.

Myron P. Gutmann is Professor of History and Director of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan, where he also holds the title of Research Professor in the Population Studies Center. Prior to joining the Michigan faculty in August of 2001, he was Professor of History and Geography and Director of the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Gutmann received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1976, and has broad interests in interdisciplinary historical research, especially health, population, economy, and the environment. As Director of ICPSR, he is a leader in the archiving and dissemination of electronic research materials related to society, population, and health. He is the author of War and Rural Life in the Early Modern Low Countries (1980), Towards the Modern Economy, Early Industry in Europe 1500-1800 (1988), and more than 50 articles and chapters. His recent publications include “Scaling and Demographic Issues in Global Change Research,” in Climatic Change (2000); “Hispanics in the United States, 1850-1990: Estimates of Population Size and National Origin,” in Historical Methods (2000); “Intra-Ethnic Diversity in Hispanic Child Mortality, 1890-1910,” in Demography (2000); and “Three Eras of Young Adult Home Leaving in Twentieth-Century America,” in the Journal of Social History (2002). Gutmann has served as chair of the Social Sciences, Nursing, Epidemiology and Methods-3 Study Section of the National Institutes of Health, and as a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change, as well as other national advisory committees and editorial boards.

top of page

408 North Indiana Avenue, Bloomington, IN 47408-3799
Phone: (812) 855-2230
TDD: (812) 855-7654
Fax: (812) 855-2634

Last Updated: May 11, 2005
Comments: cipec@indiana.edu
Copyright 2005, The Trustees of Indiana University.

Fall Semester 2004

Abstract