Following the Plow: Climate Misperception, Myth, and Catastrophe

The promises and perils of climate played a central role in the global settlement and colonization efforts of Europeans.  Prospective settlers speculated about climate to evaluate the agricultural potential or healthful qualities of different regions. Some Europeans even speculated that climates could change, whether through natural cycles, or through human action.  The natural sciences evolved in no small part out of efforts to better understand climate and predict prospects for natural abundance.  Perceptions of climate – ranging from the factual to the fantastical – were informed by science, religion, folk belief, and prior European agricultural experience. 

When explorers or settlers tried to discern climate, they were primarily “reading” landscapes.  In an era before precise weather measurements, a new landscape, and its vegetation, animal life, and surface water, held many potential clues to its climate. Settlers lacked modern climate science, and, no less importantly, long-term experience with these landscapes, which placed them at far greater risk for environmental hazards. A classic North American case is that of the Great Plains, which witnessed a large in-migration in the later nineteenth century, one hastened by a disastrously incorrect climate theory – the claim that rain would follow the plow, and that agriculture would transform arid climates into humid ones.  This theory, ballyhooed by hucksters but also embraced by some scientists, would prove disastrous.  Nor were its consequences limited to North America.  Australian settlers, for example, believed it as well, and ultimately it would cause environmental and economic havoc on multiple continents.