Environmental Crisis and Governmentality: Technical and Cultural Rationality During the Prairie States Forestry Project

Abstract

The US government’s response to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s is testament to the various ways in which a democratic government can address ecological disaster. An often-overlooked project of Roosevelt’s New Deal was the Prairie States Forestry Project (PSFP), which successfully planted 220 million trees from northern Texas to North Dakota in order to reduce wind velocity and mitigate soil erosion. A cooperation between the government and the Great Plains’ farmers who planted the trees on their farms, the PSFP is an ideal case-study to examine how democratic government can encourage positive environmental action without authoritative means. To understand this cooperation, this thesis utilizes the source of USDA Farmers’ Bulletins, which present rhetoric and discourse of this relationship that is otherwise inaccessible. By approaching the Farmers’ Bulletins through the lens of Foucauldian governmentality, and understanding mentalities of government through their technical or cultural rationalities, this thesis sets out to answer the research question of how cultural and technical rationality impacted the success of the PSFP. The thesis concludes that rationality encouraged the successful approach that the PSFP took, while simultaneously limiting the extent to which the destructive elements of American agriculture could be fundamentally changed. Of particular importance was cultural rationality, derived from social and cultural values specific to the Great Plains and American agriculture and exhibited through modes such as narrativity, which supported the PSFP as a financial endeavor and positioned conservation as a solution to a loss in productivity.