A typical strip farm field in Austria spans between 16.5 and 33 feet wide and between 82.5 and 115.5 feet long.

By comparison, Lyon County alone claims 450,000 acres of agricultural land, and the trend is toward ever larger individual farms.

Yet southwest Minnesota, Austria and the rest of the world share some of the same interests and concerns about land-use policies and sustainable development, according to Verena Winiwarter, a scholar from the Institute of Anthropology at the University of Vienna who recently spoke at Southwest State University in Marshall as the guest of the university's Center for Rural and Regional Studies.

However, while policy makers want to save the world, they forget about the places, Winiwarter said.

Winiwarter is one of a handful of researchers worldwide who bring together natural and social sciences to understand past human interactions with nature. She has written extensively about 600-plus years of human environment interaction and agricultural history in Austria.

"If you go from what you know, you can trace this back in time," Winiwarter said. "I'm trying to get back as close to the Middle Ages as I can by starting in the 19th Century."

Winiwarter recently worked on a research program for the Austrian Ministry of Science to determine how sustainable development issues translate to Austria.

"The overall question was, can you say something about sustainable development in Austria? The idea was to give them information about long-term land use, land cover and demography in order for this information to be used for sustainable regional development and sustainable local development," Winiwarter said, "We're not going into prescriptions, we're just studying things and describing their long-term history in order to (facilitate) more informed sustainability decisions by others. I'm very much for the distinction between scholarship and policy."

With this type of data, willing policy makers are better able to actualize information into concrete plans, Winiwarter said.

"I think that it works well when you're working on the local level," Winiwarter said.

She recalled meeting resistance from one politician in a small village who demanded to know what use her land-use maps and research were to him. When she asked him to point out his properties, he began relaying some of the history behind each plot.

"He started to work himself into the 1820 land-use map," Winiwarter said.

In talking about the history, he acknowledged his deep connection to the land, she said.

Absentee landlords sometimes are viewed as obstacles to adopting land uses that promote sustainable regional development, but they are not necessarily detrimental, Winiwarter said.

"This can be changed by giving people a knowledge of and an identity with their place," Winiwarter said.

Landlords need close connections to renters, and renters must be concerned with keeping the land in good shape, not just about turning a profit, Winiwarter said.

"This is a decision that can be made between those two parties interacting about the land," Winiwarter said.

Winiwarter said she sees similarities between her work and that of the center because both deliberately study periphery areas to show that value exists in such work and in such places.

The center publishes numerous books about the environmental history and a wide range of other topics about the region. Most recently, the center released "Draining the Great Oasis," a book about Murray County's environmental history, which will be the centerpiece of an SSU seminar Oct. 25.

"I'm very interested in turning this (region) into a microcosm," said Joseph A. Amato, professor of rural and regional studies and history at SSU. "I would like to see this area the best studied, the best thought of area in the world.

"I think what's really interesting is the recent transformation of the area. But I don't think we're collecting this stuff, like hardware catalogs, changing businesses going in and out. I think there's an immense transformation going on right now, and it's not being recorded. I would really like to see us go deeper into the material history of the transformation. And then, I don't think we understand what's happening in people's minds. That's what I'd like to see us document."

People also need to know more about pre-settlement times, prior to the advent of the railroad, Amato said.

"We don't know the story very well, and I think it could be known," Amato said.

Winiwarter said she is struck with the region's vastness.

"Coming from Austria, which is a small country, very mountainous, I'm very impressed by the horizons that you have here. I've been to many places in the United States, but I've never been to the United States proper, so to say, where you can really see the prairies and the countryside and see how it's all done here," Winiwarter said. "If you go to places like New York, or San Francisco, I don't think that you get a grasp of what this country is all about."

Winiwarter previously lived in Utah with her husband while he was in the country on a Fulbright Scholarship. Even though it was a smaller city, everyone drove everywhere, even to the supermarket, she said.

"When I looked out of my window this morning and I saw people walking, this gave me the idea that rural United States might be quite different," she said.