WHAT: Brown Bag Lecture Series
HOSTED BY: UNK Department of History
TITLE: “Prairie Fortified: Shelterbelts and Conservation in the Great Plains”
TOPIC: Beginning in the 1930s, farmers, ranchers and agricultural scientists met informally to discuss designing protective bulwarks against growing environmental disasters. New conservation strategies, including planting trees as windbreaks and shelterbelts, would come to characterize a farm-based conservation civil defense through a series of climate, weather, soil, disease, drought and pesticide studies conducted in the 1950s and ’60s. These trees of defense represented a significant embrace of alternative agricultural strategies, moving their efforts from a rescue science to semipermanent environmental fortifications.
PRESENTER: UNK history professor David Vail specializes in environmental and agricultural history, public history, the history of science and medicine and the Great Plains. His research has appeared in numerous academic journals and he’s authored multiple books. His current book project, “Vulnerable Harvests: Emergency Conservation in the Cold War Great Plains,” considers the region’s agricultural-environmental relationships in the Cold War era and looks at the concepts of risk perception and rescue science in what he characterizes as agricultural vulnerability environments. The principal goal is to demonstrate how regional actors – both human and nonhuman – shaped the land.
TIME: Noon
DATE: Wednesday, Feb. 11
PLACE: Kearney Public Library, 2020 First Ave.
VIDEO: Available on the Kearney Public Library YouTube channel
CONTACT: Nathan Tye, associate history professor, 308.865.8860, tyen@unk.edu
