A Critical Human Ecology of Water Use at the County-Level in Texas, 2002

摘要

The structural factors shaping human society's relation-ship with water have only begun to be quantitatively exploredby environmental sociologists. The current study aims tocontribute to this discovery by asking the question: Why didsome counties in the American state of Texas consumegreater amounts of water than others in the year 2002? Tohelp answer this question, using county-level data from twomain sources (the United States Census Bureau and the TexasWater Development Board), agricultural and non-agricultur-al water use are regressed on a selection of variables in-formed by the critical human ecology approach. The resultsof the regression analysis indicate that these two dependentvariables are positively related to critical human ecology fac-tors. This analysis supports the argument that the societal-ecological dialectic plays an important role in the mainte-nance of the hydrologic cycle and freshwater provisioningservices for humans, especially in the context of anthro-pogenic global warming.