Climate Smart? Bioclimatic Classifications and US Agriculture, 1860s-1930s

By aligning agricultural practices with climatic patterns and limits, Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) promises a potential global solution to the uncertainty of agriculture in the age of climate change. Together the USDA, FAO, and the World Bank have already invested billions of dollars in projects related to CSA. This presentation seeks to historicize CSA by looking to a key period in US history: the colonization and settlement of the American West after the Civil War period. It begins in the mid-eighteenth-century when a rapidly expanding nation attempted to boost and harness agricultural production in the climatically-diverse American West. I analyze how a succession of American naturalists, and later ecologists crafted bioclimatic classifications in an iterative effort to aid the processes of settler colonialism. However, despite their many efforts, settlers and local government authorities frequently ignored or countervailed ambitious regional plans to put agriculture on an efficient climatic template. Only in the wake of the Dust Bowl did any public recognition of regional climatic limits come to pass. Nevertheless, in these early bioclimatic classifications we see the emergence of an interdisciplinary science of climatic limits; a science whose own limitations and benefits have much to offer present day analyses of the effects of climate change on life. This presentation thus builds on the history of American meteorology by highlighting the integral role of ecologists and naturalists in shaping climate science and pioneering environmental management though climate.