A weather phenomenon took place in the 1930’s that was known as the Dust Bowl, which had terrifying consequences. Find out more about this event, as well as some lessons learned from this horrifying event.
The Dust Bowl of the 1930’s
In the 1930’s, particularly in the years from 1930 to 1936, around the area of Oklahoma’s western panhandle and the panhandle of Texas, and adjacent parts of Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico, different criteria came together to create the conflagration of the great Dust Bowl of the 1930’s.
Originally, people didn’t want to settle in that part of the country because it was rather dry. There wasn’t very much rain there, nor were there any trees whose timber could be used for building houses and barns. But, as the American nation gained more immigrants who wanted land, they started settling farther and farther west, eventually settling into the land in that particular area. What was really ironic is that during the settlement of those lands, the climate changed a little, and more rain started to appear – the area appeared to become wetter, less dry. People thought that this would be a permanent climate change – much like we think that the average global temperature going up will be a permanent change. Land prices started going up, food prices started going up, and, thus, the amount of land put under the plow started going up also.
At the same time all of this was occurring, there was something else happening too. People were, almost deliberately, doing everything they could to help cause erosion and the type of situation that could cause dust to blow. Cotton farmer, after they harvested their cotton, were leaving their fields bare in the high-wind winter months causing massive erosion to take place. These days, when farmers harvest corn or wheat, they usually leave the stubble in place until the next season of crop growing, but back then they would burn all that stubble out, thinking it was like weeds that needed to be eradicated. People would not let fields go fallow for a year, rotate their crops, and use some as grasslands for the feeding of livestock, and the type of plowing they did dug quite deep into the ground. Nor did they take any other precautions to hinder the wind from blowing away their topsoil, such as planting tree-lines or even shrub-lines. They, in fact, acted as if they wanted the wind to blow away their crops.
If that were not enough, at the peak of these happenings, the climate went back to its old ways, and became drier. Less rain came down, and as a result, the earth dried up. Add this in conjunction with the farming practices of the day, which left land open to the elements and wind erosion, and you have yourself a calamity of the almost-worst proportions. Wind started to pick up as the ground started to dry out and before you know it, gigantic dust clouds started to appear. People couldn’t get a hold onto their land, or stop all the dust from blowing, making it impossible to continue to grow their crops, and thus, as a result, many lost their land to the bank and were forced from their homes, forced many times to head west to California to become migrant farm workers with subsistence pay. This was the story line for the famous work by John Steinbeck entitled The Grapes of Wrath – a very good book if you’ve ever read it.
Lessons Learned:
What were the lessons learned? For started, we learned that we needed to practice farming methods that would reduce the possibility of erosion. Our government stepped in and helped with that process. They were responsible for the planting of trees, 200 million or so, from the Canadian border all the way to Texas in order to help stop the dust from blowing away. The government also started the education of farmers, allowing them to understand the different techniques that can be used to reduce wind erosion – contour farming for those people to farm on sloping terrain, strip farming where you might have long strips of grassland divided by long strips of tilled land, terracing also for sloping land, and crop rotation, among other things.
Hopefully we can learn that we all need to work together to do the proper things needed to stop environmental catastrophes from blighting us, or even destroying us. Unfortunately, we tend to be reactive rather than proactive.
