| Between 1959 and 1982 Colorado experienced rapid and significant regional environmental and social changes. The overall theme of this dissertation is to discuss the nature of the relationship between a society's patterns of natural resources utilization and selected socio-demographic impacts. The major objective is to generate an environmental sociology framework that will conceptualize the relationship between Colorado's irrigation transformation and the state's socio-demographic changes as expressed through the changing number of farms, average farm size and total county population transformations between 1959 and 1982.; Through a review of the relevant literature, a human ecology paradigm was adopted which perceived an ecosystem's natural resource utilization as the independent variable, social organization as the intervening, and population as the dependent variable. This paradigm was translated into a series of researchable propositions testing a number of critical interrelationships between the variables selected. The testing utilized macro-level longitudinal data for all Colorado's 63 counties in the period under examination. Used on their irrigation transformation patterns, two groups of 24 counties each were generated reflecting the state's irrigation increase and decrease patterns. When these groups were compared against each other with regard to selected socio-demographic changes, the empirical evidence supported in a consistent manner the proposed hypothesis that an ecosystem's patterns of natural resources utilization have significant impacts on key socio-demographic dimensions. Besides their theoretical relevance to the discipline of sociology and to the conceptualization of social change, the findings of this study also bear relevance and practical implications with regard to the state's irrigation prospects. |
