The Dust Bowl

[Part 1: November 18]

WOW. I knew the Dust Bowl of the 1930's was no picnic - particularly in the southern United States. But I really had no conception of just how very awful it was until tonight. Tonight I watched the first part of Ken Burns' "The Dust Bowl" on PBS. Entitled "The Great Plow Up", this episode explored the history of the region and the origins of what is one of the worst environmental disasters in the history of the entire world! It was already an area prone to dryness (there were significant droughts in the 1890's) but the first part of the 20th century was uncharacteristically moist. That, combined with generous land grant programs, led unprecedented numbers of people to settle there. And because wheat prices were unusually high during the years of the First World War, that's what they concentrated on. To do that, they plowed under countless acres of native grasses ... the native grasses that had been holding the soil down and keeping the moisture in. Essentially, man's greed caused the catastrophe - and not over a period of centuries or millennia but less than fifty years. Talk about a lesson for today.

And of course people paid for it - an extraordinarily high price. There were the relentless storms themselves to endure. Dust miles high that blew everywhere. They could obliterate the sun at midday and hit any time of the year. (I was surprised when I learned the first storm arrived in January; I was also surprised to know that the storms were accompanied by high static electricity.) It was a perpetual battle to keep homes clean, to keep a small kitchen garden alive (forget about fields of crops), to be able to breathe! Animals died. People died. There was a "dust pneumonia" that was particularly cruel to small children and damaged other people's lungs for life. Beyond that, there were plagues of jackrabbits (tomorrow night we'll see the grasshoppers that came in later years) that had to be culled. (Farmers had wiped out the rabbits' natural predator, the coyote - another poor ecological decision in retrospect.) People had to kill off their own livestock too. Many couldn't pay their debts and lost their homes and land. Some committed suicide.

[Part 2: November 19]

And we haven't learned a thing, it seems! In fact, the region seems poised for a whole other Dust Bowl era in twenty years or so.

But first a little more about tonight's episode. It looked at the late 1930's and early 40's. Some people simply couldn't hold on any more. They had no way to feed their families, no places to live even (one family ended up in a rented chicken coop - the only place they could afford; another family searched their whole house and couldn't find a single dime to buy a loaf of bread). And so they left for the Promised Land of California. To an extent they found happiness: more to eat and fresher weather. But they were hardly welcomed; in fact they were looked down on, taunted and bullied. At one point the state even set up border check points, arresting "vagrants" who tried to enter without at least fifty dollars. Many ended up in pretty squalid conditions in tent cities of migrants, following the harvests from town to town.

Back in the Dust Bowl, many of those who stayed had to turn to relief - a bitter pill for a highly independent people, but the sole means of survival for their families in many cases. Eventually government work programs were put into place that allowed people to maintain their self-respect, feed their families, and do valuable work like building new highways, bridges and dams. Although there were some who felt the region wasn't worth saving - or capable of being saved - President Roosevelt, to his immense credit, never gave up on the area or its people. He brought in advisors who looked at farming practices and were able to start implementing changes that gradually allowed the land to return to a healthier state. They did terraced farming, following the natural contours of the land. They used plows that went deeper instead of shredding the topsoil. They reintroduced native grasses and planted some 217 million trees as windbreaks. The government also bought up large swaths of land and returned it to grassland. In some cases they even paid farmers not to plant crops. And though there were still many dust storms, things did begin to get better.

Which brings us to the next folly, the one that proves we've learned virtually nothing from even recent history. In the fifties, they started irrigating the land by piping up water from the Ogallala Aquifer, an underground reservoir left over from North America's last ice age. Of course it meant they could grow practically anything and also raise pork and cattle. But it's being used up. Fast. The reservoir averages 100 feet deep and it's already well over half gone. One of the interviewees on the show estimated there are about twenty years left. And that's it. That's the end of their water ... even their drinking water! When you see shots of those massive sprinklers spraying water in every direction it looks deceptively elegant - but it's really hideously obscene. They're sacrificing their future, their children's and grandchildren's future. Of course there could be another Dust Bowl, in fact there could easily be a Sahara-like desert in the middle of the continent if nothing changes. And given the way people seem to forget the past and focus blindly on short-term gain, it seems more, rather than less likely. I could very well live to see a "Dirty Thirties" of my own - and that's about the saddest thing of all about the whole documentary: it could happen all over again, and humans would have caused it ... all over again.