Weather Warfare

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

There are some reports, for example, that some countries have been trying to construct something like an Ebola virus, and that would be a very dangerous phenomenon, to say the least. Alvin Toffler has written about this in terms of some scientists in their laboratories trying to devise certain types of pathogens that would be ethnic specific so that they could just eliminate certain ethnic groups and races; and others are designing some sort of engineering, some sort of insects that can destroy specific crops. Others are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves.

So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations. It’s real, and that’s the reason why we have to intensify our efforts.

~ William S. Cohen, U.S. Secretary of Defense, 1997

This startling statement was made by William S. Cohen while he served as the United States Secretary of Defense. It is from his keynote address to the Conference on Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and U.S. Strategy, given on 28 April 1997 at the University of Georgia, in Athens, Georgia. It can therefore be taken as an official position of the United States government, at least at that time.

Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski, a Polish-American political scientist, geostrategist, and statesman who served as United States National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981, wrote in his 1970 book Between Two Ages:

It is ironic to recall that in 1878 Friedrich Engels, commenting on the Franco-Prussian War, proclaimed that weapons used have reached such a stage of perfection that further progress which would have any revolutionizing influence is no longer possible. Not only have new weapons been developed but some of the basic concepts of geography and strategy have been fundamentally altered; space and weather control have replaced Suez or Gibraltar as key elements of strategy.

After events like the Christmas 2004 Asian tsunami and 2005’s record-shattering Atlantic hurricane season many people have wondered just how natural those natural disasters were. Could terrorists or rogue states have been involved? Is it really possible to alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves? Has weather control really become a key element of national strategy?

While the use of electromagnetic waves (radio frequency weapons) is exceedingly difficult to prove, there indeed are many out there, both on the drawing board and in the arsenal. Secretary Cohen wasn’t just making them up as a ploy to get increased funding for counter-terrorism efforts. He knew about them, and so should we.

SCIENCE BEYOND THE BOX

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910)] was credited with saying that in an editorial by Charles D. Warner Dudley in the Hartford Courant of Hartford, Connecticut, in 1897. As we will see in the next chapter, it wasn’t entirely true then and is far less true today. This is a fine example of the limits of conventional wisdom.

There certainly are many readily discernable civilian projects intended to do something about the weather today. These are taking place around the world as you read this. In the United States they include cloud seeding to increase the snow pack in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California and hail suppression over farmland on the Great Plains, to name but two. We will briefly examine the positive and negative sides of civilian weather modification in this book, which may be just the off the shelf versions of military technologies.

Better than 80% of what I will present to you in this book is well established and fully cited mainstream science. But mainstream science has self-imposed blinders. Science and the base of knowledge it is founded upon resists change. There are many reasons for this. One is that in order to change, science (and individual scientists) must admit fallibility— something that most people of education are reluctant to do. Who wants to admit they were wrong? How much harder would it be to admit being wrong if advancing your career depended on your being right? Also, position within the scientific community (and grant money) does not go to mavericks. This institutionalized resistance to new theories has resulted in it routinely taking from 50 to 100 years for new discoveries to move from ridiculed nonsense to revered facts.

I bet you can think of several examples of this lag between the time a theory is presented and its universal acceptance. You may remember this one: Alfred Wegener, a German geophysicist and meteorologist proposed the theory of continental drift in his book The Origins of the Continents and the Oceans, published in German in 1915. For nearly 50 years his theory was ridiculed, yet today it is taught in nearly every school as the science of plate tectonics.

Today many branches of mainstream science have circled the wagons, waging war with cranks with goofy theories, some of which, like Alfred Wegener’s, will eventually be proven correct. One such example is the battle between American archeologists and anthropologists and scores of revisionist researchers whose work collectively demonstrates that the Americas were reached many different times and in many different places by many more peoples than just a few Chinese crossing the Bering Strait land bridge 12,000 years ago.

Another example is the assault on traditional Egyptology by another army of independent investigators. While West and Schoch, whose research pushed back the age of the Sphinx by thousands of years, and Hancock and Bauval, who found a connection between the positions of the Giza pyramids and the constellation of Orion, have received the greater notoriety, the most spectacular work has been done by Christopher Dunn, a master craftsman and engineer. Dunn has virtually proven that the conventional wisdom of the ancients having used copper chisels and stone pounders to build the great monuments of Egypt is ludicrously wrong. His work clearly shows that the ancients used advanced machining techniques, especially high-speed lathes. Further, he has presented virtually irrefutable evidence that the Great Pyramid was not a burial chamber, but the largest machine ever built. So far the mainstream’s only answer to him has been to ignore his work.

Similarly, understanding weather warfare will take us outside the box of conventional wisdom. Why is the weatherman so often wrong? Meteorology isn’t a complete science. Many things about the atmosphere and its interactions with other geophysical systems, like the oceans and the earth’s magnetic field, are still not fully understood. Meteorology, like all mainstream sciences, refuses to look at crank theories raised outside its circle. This includes anything that smacks of astrology. Unfortunately this smugly arrogant stance has blinded meteorologists to important facts.

The single greatest influence on the Earth’s weather is the Sun. It is an accepted fact that solar eruptions from sunspots affect the weather. The Sun’s sunspot cycle seems to be affected by a number of factors, including the positions of the inner planets (because of their proximity) and Saturn and Jupiter (because of their size). The Sun’s magnetic field is as large as the solar system and affects, and is affected by, everything within it. The solar system is just that, a system in which all pieces are interconnected. Understanding these relationships better should lead to improved forecasting— except it won’t happen anytime soon, as meteorologists clap their hands over their ears and chant I can’t hear you when you bring this up.

Temperatures across North America in January 2006 were record-setting. Where these temps natural or artificial? If manmade, were they inadvertently caused or was the US under eco-terrorist attack? Considering the topic of this book you might expect me to say that we were under attack—but I am going to offer an even more outlandish theory—these temps were perfectly natural and would have been predicted if only meteorology didn’t have rectal-cranial inversion.

A crank theory that has been repeatedly championed in the popular press for the last few decades is the so-called Jupiter Effect. This is the observation that some astronomical events have an effect on the Earth. Retired forester and fire fighter Roger L. Jewell spent a lifetime trying to discover if there was anything to the old adage about there being fire weather and if severe wild fires were the result of weather cycles. In his groundbreaking book Riding The Wild Orb: Long-term Weather Extremes On The Planet he outlines his discovery that there are indeed weather cycles caused by planetary mechanics, and not just the four seasons, which is about all the mainstream will admit to.

One of the things he discovered was that North America has a January thaw, like the one we saw in 2006, every eight years like clockwork (this last one was the hottest because of other additional factors in play, like global warming). His discovery was that a January thaw happens every time the planet Venus comes between the Earth and the Sun around the time of the Winter Solstice. In astrology this is called a conjunction, and in meteorology it is called a crank theory because it sounds too much like astrology for these learned men to deal with. It is anyone’s guess how much else the mainstream is responding to by squeezing its eyes shut.

I mention this in that this book is about human manipulation of natural forces to produce unnatural events — but how do you determine what’s natural and what isn’t? This is a difficult and delicate subject. As we will discuss later Mother Nature gives great plausible deniability. One of the enticements of geophysical warfare is being able to hide it behind Mother Nature’s skirts.

One needs a baseline of what is unquestionably natural to be able to say definitively that so-and-so is unnatural. And thanks in part to the half-built nature of modern geo-sciences we really don’t have that. This means that throughout this book I am going to have to tell you what is established and accepted by mainstream science, and then take you outside of the box. Rest assured I will always try to tell you when we cross the line from accepted to crank.

HAARP

Getting back to Secretary Cohen’s concerns about using electromagnetic waves to alter the climate, and/or set off earthquakes or volcanoes remotely…

One much discussed project that embodies both civilian and military geophysical applications is the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP). Although HAARP proponents claim it is nothing more than a simple civilian research station designed to investigate the properties of the upper atmosphere, few investigators buy that explanation.

HAARP does have the appearance of a civilian project with open access and the work being done by civilian scientists. However, the project is managed by a joint US Air Force and Navy committee and is funded out of the Department of Defense (DoD) budget. Most recently the heart of the program, the Ionospheric Research Instrument (IRI), was completed by one of the world’s largest defense contractors working under the direction of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the central research and development (R&D) organization for the DoD. DARPA manages and directs selected basic and applied R&D projects for the DoD pursuing research and technology where risk and payoff are both very high and where success may provide dramatic advances for traditional military roles and missions.

Under construction since 1990, the HAARP IRI is a field of antennas on the ground in Southeastern Alaska. The facility was probably completed late in 2005 with the announcement of same added to the DARPA website in March of 2006. It is now the world’s largest radio frequency (RF) broadcaster, with an effective radiated power of 3.6 million watts—over 72,000 times more powerful than the largest single AM radio station in the United States (50,000 watts). The IRI uses a unique patented ability to focus the RF energy generated by the field, injecting it into a spot at the very top of the atmosphere in a region called the ionosphere. This heats the thin atmosphere of the ionospheric region by several thousand degrees. HAARP, then, is a type of device called an ionospheric heater. This heating allows scientists to do a number of things with the ionosphere. Controlling and directing the processes and forces of the ionosphere is called ionospheric enhancement. An early HAARP document stated:

The heart of the program will be the development of a unique ionospheric heating capability to conduct the pioneering experiments required to adequately assess the potential for exploiting ionospheric enhancement technology for DoD purposes.

What might those DoD purposes be? Something about winning wars, eh? How might those purposes be achieved? What technologies will be needed to win the wars of the future? Researchers trying to answer those questions have come up with a vast number of possibilities, most bordering on science fiction. But then again, good science fiction is about recognizing the problems of the future, and suggesting solutions to them before they happen.

On 23 March 1983 President Ronald Reagan called upon … the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete. This quest for the creation of a technology, of a weapon or weapons system that would make atomic war impossible was officially named the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The press lost no time in dubbing it Star Wars after the George Lucas movie.

That Initiative sent the United States military-industrial-academic complex on the greatest and costliest weapons hunt in human history. Thousands of ideas were floated, hundreds of those were funded. While SDI research has since been officially abandoned, some ideas are still being actively pursued to this day.

Not all of these ongoing developmental programs are taking place in laboratories of the military and its contractors. Some of these ideas involve technologies or applications that, as weapons, violate international treaties; others, the use of which would be repugnant to the ethical and moral values of the majority of Americans. In an effort to avoid public outcry (and international condemnation) some of these programs have been disguised as civilian science. One of those may be HAARP.

As Dr. Bernard Eastlund, the putative inventor of HAARP put it: The boundary between science fiction and science comes with can you actually make the thing that you’re proposing. Bernard J. Eastlund is a physicist who received his B.S. in physics from MIT and his Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University. He led a team of scientists and engineers working for Advanced Power Technologies, Inc. (APTI), a wholly owned subsidiary of ARCO. Eastlund’s team developed the concept of a massive antenna array that could produce the kind of shield called for by President Reagan.

The APTI patents that HAARP is probably based on openly discuss manipulating the weather by moving the jet stream and using other techniques to create floods and droughts at will. These patents also describe a way to raise the ionosphere, sending it out into space as an electrically charged plasma capable of destroying anything electronic (like an incoming ICBM or a spy satellite) passing through it. HAARP certainly looks like a ground-based Star Wars weapons system, a relic of the Cold War. But unlike most such relics this one is up and running and now fully funded.

In August of 2002 the Russian State Duma (their version of Congress or Parliament) expressed concern about HAARP, calling it a program to develop a qualitatively new type of weapon. A joint commission of the State Duma’s International Affairs and Defense Committees issued a report that said:

Under the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) the USA is creating new integral geophysical weapons that may influence the near-Earth medium with high-frequency radio waves. The significance of this qualitative leap could be compared to the transition from cold steel to firearms, or from conventional weapons to nuclear weapons. This new type of weapon differs from previous types in that the near-Earth medium becomes at once an object of direct influence and its component.

The report further claimed that the USA’s plan to carry out large-scale scientific experiments under the HAARP program, and not controlled by the global community, would create weapons capable of jamming radio communications, disrupting equipment installed on spaceships and rockets, provoke serious accidents in electricity networks and in oil and gas pipelines and have a negative impact on the mental health of people populating entire regions.

An appeal, signed by 90 deputies, demanding that an international ban be put on such large-scale geophysical experiments was sent to President Vladimir Putin, to the United Nations (UN) and other international organizations, to the parliaments and leaders of the UN member countries, to the scientific public and to mass media outlets.

HAARP technology, real or imagined, has shook up a lot of people, setting off alarm signals with environmental, health, political and sociological concerns in the minds of scientists, reporters and concerned citizens all over the globe. We will take up HAARP in detail later in this book bringing you up to date on what is happening there now.

GEOPHYSICAL WARFARE

Those who fight wars have known since the beginning of the human race that weather affects the outcome of battle. Since the Vietnam War the United States military has been actively trying to influence the outcome of conflicts by developing technologies that manipulate the weather. It is hardly surprising then that other nations, such as the former Soviet Union, China and even North Korea have been accused of doing the same. How far might the world’s military have come in the decades since Vietnam?

This is the 21st century—we are living in the future! If you are over forty, many things that were science fiction when you were in school are now everyday realities. Control of the weather, at least to some degree, is an established and expanding field of scientific and commercial endeavor. But, is it really possible to create floods or droughts, steer hurricanes or set off tsunamis, much less trigger earthquakes or volcanic eruptions? Are these still in the realm of science fiction, or have they become science fact? Throughout this book we will examine evidence that intentional hostile control of the weather and other environmental processes (collectively called geophysical warfare) is a reality, just as Defense Secretary Cohen and the Russian State Duma said.

In 1966 Dr. Gordon J. F. MacDonald wrote: The key to geophysical warfare is the identification of environmental instabilities to which the addition of a small amount of energy would release vastly greater amounts of energy. This was in Geophysical Warfare: How to Wreck the Environment, a chapter he contributed to Nigel Calder’s 1968 book, Unless Peace Comes: A Scientific Forecast of New Weapons.

Dr. MacDonald was no off-the-deep-end loony; he was one of the United States’ top internationally recognized scientists. At the time he penned those words he was Associate Director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). [A side note: the UCLA Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPL) has, over the last twenty years, operated another ionospheric heater near Fairbanks, Alaska, known as HIPAS (for HIgh Power Auroral Stimulation), the success of which led to the creation of HAARP.] Dr. MacDonald was also a member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, and was later made a member of the President’s Council on Environmental Quality.

In Space an article for Toward the Year 2018, released in 1968, Dr. MacDonald elaborated on the possibilities of geophysical warfare writing:

By the year 2018, technology will make available to the leaders of the major nations a variety of techniques for conducting secret warfare, of which only a bare minimum of the security forces need be appraised. One nation may attack a competitor covertly by bacteriological means, thoroughly weakening the population (though with a minimum of fatalities) before taking over with its own overt armed forces. Alternatively, techniques of weather modification could be employed to produce prolonged periods of drought or storm, thereby weakening a nation’s capacity and forcing it to accept the demands of the competitor.

In Between Two Ages Brzezinski openly discussed conducting war covertly by causing droughts, storms, volcanic eruptions and floods. If, as Dr. MacDonald wrote, only a few in the military or scientific community need know what is actually taking place, how would the general public know if such a war were being fought? Were the dead and displaced of New Orleans victims of an invisible battle? Many people around the world are convinced that a covert weather war has in fact been raging for years, possibly decades — the evidence for which we will examine in this book.

Dr. MacDonald was also a member of the Board of Directors of the MITRE Corporation, a not-for-profit federally funded R&D company. It was MITRE who did the outrageously flawed environmental impact study for HAARP that, after carefully ignoring where the radio waves went after leaving the antenna array concluded that there would be no impact on the environment!

He was also a member of two organizations that have been accused of engaging in globalist conspiracies by anti-New World Order researchers: the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the secretive JASON Group. The CFR, with such related organizations as the Trilateral Commission and the World Federalist Association, is a prominent supporter of globalization and of global governance schemes, as can be read in their own magazine Foreign Affairs.

The JASONs are described as a select group of world class scientists who conduct studies for different parts of the U.S. government. The group is referred to as the JASON Defense Advisory Group, or simply the JASON Group. Today their headquarters is located in the JASON Program Office at the MITRE Corporation. JASON was created as an elite division within the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA). The official history of IDA says:

IDA traces its roots to 1947, when Secretary of Defense James Forrestal established the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group (WSEG) to provide technical analyses of weapons systems and programs. In the mid-1950s, the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff asked the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to form a civilian, nonprofit research institute. The Institute would operate under the auspices of a university consortium to attract highly qualified scientists to assist WSEG in addressing the nation’s most challenging security problems.

Over the years, IDA has modified its structure to remain responsive to sponsor needs. In 1958, at the request of the Secretary of Defense, IDA established a division to support the newly created Advanced Research Projects Agency. Shortly thereafter, the mandate of this division was broadened to include scientific and technical studies for all offices of the Director of Defense, Research and Engineering. Subsequent divisions were established to provide cost analyses, computer software and engineering, strategy and force assessments, and operational test and evaluation.

[Another side note: the Office of the Director of Defense, Research and Engineering (DDR&E) was also involved in the early planning of HAARP. Another major player in HAARP is DARPA, formerly the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), who created the ARPANET which eventually grew into the Internet. ARPA was renamed DARPA on 23 March 1972, then back to ARPA on 22 February 1993, and then back to DARPA again on 11 March 1996.]

Dr. MacDonald published numerous papers and articles on future weapons technology. These suggested such coming advances as manipulation or control over the weather and climate, including destructive use of ocean waves and melting or destabilizing of the polar ice caps; intentional ozone depletion; triggering earthquakes; and control of the human brain by utilizing the earth’s energy fields. Today the polar ice caps are indeed melting and holes in the ozone layer are growing. Could these be the handiwork of advanced weapons? What about earthquakes and mind control? Are we, the private citizens of the world, in the crosshairs of bizarre, unthinkable weapons?

What about the Russian Duma’s claim that HAARP could have a negative impact on the mental health of people populating entire regions of the globe? In Vandalism hi The Sky? their seminal article on HAARP in Nexus Magazine Dr. Nick Begich and Jeane Manning describe how HAARP could be used to induce mental dysfunction, quoting from Brzezinski on a proposal from Dr. Macdonald saying:

Political strategists are tempted to exploit research on the brain and human behavior. Geophysicist Gordon J. F. MacDonald—specialist in problems of warfare—says [an] accurately-timed, artificially-excited electronic stroke …could lead to a pattern of oscillations that produce relatively high power levels over certain regions of the Earth… In this way, one could develop a system that would seriously impair the brain performance of very large populations in selected regions over an extended period…

In 1969 Dr. MacDonald wrote: Our understanding of basic environmental science and technology is primitive, but still more primitive are our notions of the proper political forms and procedures to deal with the consequences of modification.

It would appear that the gap between our understanding of environmental science and technology and our ability to grapple with this knowledge as a body politic has changed little in the intervening decades. This book, like so many others since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is an attempt to correct this problem of science creating ever more and bigger monsters to come out of science’s Pandora’s Box, by alerting you to the need to find a solution. It is not sufficient merely that I, or anyone, write; it requires you, the reader, the citizen, to take action, to create the necessary forms and procedures to deal with the consequences of modification.

CHEMTRAILS?

This question of whether advanced technology is being intentionally used to alter the climate is also seen in the contrail vs. chemtrail debate, which we will address in depth. If you have spent much time looking up lately you may have noticed that something about the sky seems to have changed. You may be old enough to remember when the condensation trails (contrails) from jet aircraft used to be thin streaks behind the planes, blazing like comets, disappearing in seconds. Now they persist for hours. The brilliant blue sky of the morning becomes a milky white opalescence in late afternoon as the contrails merge together, creating a layer of artificial cirrus clouds. What’s going on? Are we being sprayed? Is there some chemical in these persistent contrails making them chemtrails? Who could be doing this, and why?

If you try to answer any of the questions connected to chemtrails via the Internet you will find many sites devoted to this subject, both pro and con. Some will tell you there is no spraying, that these strangely persistent contrails are in fact perfectly natural. Others will detail bizarre things found in the air. Chemicals and metals like aluminum and barium salts, and stranger things like E-coli bacteria and genetically modified human blood, are but a few of the bizarre things claimed to have been spewed out after commercial aircraft or mysterious unmarked tankers have unloaded their covert payloads over the heads of frightened or angry witnesses.

Particulate matter in the air is called an aerosol. If you search the scientific media for information on aerosols you will discover that there are literally scores of organizations (military, academic, commercial, environmental and governmental) involved in studying, monitoring, tracking and placing aerosols in the atmosphere. A number of technologies using aerosols for a variety of purposes have been patented, and many more are under development. Chemtrails, it seems, are not a one-size-fits-all phenomena. There is not just one program running or just one purpose to this alleged spraying. I have found that there are many players, many technologies for many purposes, injecting an amazing variety of aerosols into our environment.

In the chemtrails section of this book I will try to lay out for you what is real and what is probably lies and hysteria. Like in the UFO field, military intelligence may well have injected wild and crazy stories into the chemtrail debate to hide covert operations. Unfortunately too, the scientifically challenged have added a tone of very literal Chicken Little hysteria to all this. It is probable that not all contrails are chemtrails, and possible that not all chemtrails are intentionally evil—but all are an environmental hazard that will have to be addressed. Aerosols are a very real problem, somewhat acknowledged in the scientific press and totally ignored by the popular media.

After the week of no commercial flights over the United States in the wake of the horrific events of 11 September 2001 atmospheric scientists were able to take new measurements of an unmodified sky. They found that these clouds produced by persistent contrails—chemtrails if you will—did in fact reflect back into space solar energy during daylight hours and trap in heat at night, adding about .5 degrees Fahrenheit to the average temperature of North America.

In the contrail/chemtrail debate we see a bridge between the topics of hostile (military) use of environmental modification (EnMod) and the unintentional. It is now a fact recognized by the scientific community that the banks of artificial cirrus clouds left behind by the thousands of aircraft that ply our skies daily are taking a toll on the environment. Officially this comes under the heading of inadvertent environmental modification and is a part of the Global Warming debate. To date the most commonly talked about aspect of inadvertent environmental modification has been the destruction of the rainforest. But in just the last few years contrails and the global dimming they seem to be causing is being pushed to center stage in scientific circles. But what if contrails are actually chemtrails? What if these strangely persistent contrails are actually the product of some nefarious covert spraying operation(s)? We will look at several possible answers including the possibilities of misguided civilian programs as well as military operations.

ENVIRONMENTAL MODIFICATION

Examples of both hostile (military) and inadvertent modification of the environment can be seen back to the dawn of civilization. Sumeria is the oldest civilization recognized by Western science. The city-state of Sumer (Sumeria) existed between the Tigress and Euphrates Rivers in an area called The Fertile Crescent in what is now Iraq between seven and ten thousand years ago. Today that land is a vast region of deserts caused by over-farming and over grazing. Desertification is a chilling example of inadvertent environmental modification, a process that is ongoing in several parts of the world today. The United States got a taste of it in the dust bowl years of the Great Depression. Scientists are warning us that it could happen there again.

One of the oldest examples of hostile environmental modification (EnMod) can be seen in the salting of the fields of Carthage by Rome. After a long and costly war between those two great powers Rome won, and intent on never having to deal with Carthage again, sowed salt into the croplands of Carthage, sterilizing the earth and forcing the people to move away, abandoning their city so as not to starve.

Several examples of EnMod from American history can be cited. During the 1840s the United States government fought a series of wars against the indigenous peoples of North America. These were called the Indian Wars. The First Peoples (Indians) of the Great Plains had an economy and a