Darkness In The Dust Bowl

Imagine living on a farm out west during the 1930s. In the middle of a series of terrible dust storms. The dust storms were so horrific, children were dying from “dust pneumonia” which was a result of breathing the dust in. These dust storms would trap plains settlers in their homes for hours, days at a time. This series of dust storms is better known as the Dust Bowl. It forced 3 million settlers out of their homes. Drought, increased mechanization, and destruction of grass all lead to the Dust Bowl.

The Dust Bowl, battering the Midwest for nearly a decade with high winds, bad farming techniques, and drought, became a pivotal point in American history. The wind storm that seemed relentless beginning in the early 1930’s until its spell ended in 1939, affected the lives of tens of thousands of Americans and the broader agriculture industry. The catastrophic effects of the Dust Bowl took place most prominently around the Great Plains, otherwise known as the farming belt, including states such as Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas, which were hit extraordinarily hard. Millions of farming acres destroyed by poor farming techniques was a major contributor to what is considered to be one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in American history. This period resulted in almost a decade of unstable farming and economic despair. Thousands of families sought government assistance in order to survive. Luckily, government aid to farmers and new agriculture programs that were introduced to help save the nation’s agriculture industry benefited families and helped the Great Plains recover from the Dust Bowl. Furthermore, the poor conditions in the farm belt were also compounded by the Great Depression as it was in full swing as the Dust Bowl began to worsen. In addition, World War I was also underway which caused a high demand for agricultural products, such as wheat, corn, and potatoes to be at its peak, which lured many people to the farm belt with the false expectation that farming

The Dust Bowl was "the darkest moment in the twentieth-century life of the southern plains," (pg. 4) as described by Donald Worster in his book "The Dust Bowl." It was a time of drought, famine, and poverty that existed in the 1930's. It's cause, as Worster presents in a very thorough manner, was a chain of events that was perpetuated by the basic capitalistic society's "need" for expansion and consumption. Considered by some as one of the worst ecological catastrophes in the history of man, Worster argues that the Dust Bowl was created not by nature's work, but by an American culture that was working exactly the way it was planned. In essence, the Dust Bowl was the effect of a society, which deliberately set out to

One major cause of that Dust Bowl was severe droughts during the 1930’s. The other cause was capitalism. Over-farming and grazing in order to achieve high profits killed of much of the plain’s grassland and when winds approached, nothing was there to hold the devastated soil on the ground.

In the years leading to 1930, the Great Plains experienced a healthy amount of rain. The drought began in 1930 when the rain ceased. That year proved tough for farmers in the Great Plains, but they had no idea what was yet to come. In 1931, dust storms began to sweep through the Great Plains. Behind the dust, families stayed hidden inside their homes using wet clothes and such to guard the window sills and door frames. The families affected by the Dust Bowl were trapped inside of their homes for the six years of raging dust storms. The Great Depression was a number of years that consisted of workers being laid off, no job openings available, and an overall economic low in the United States. The Great Depression, which started in the years leading up to the drought, resulted in poor living conditions, including little to no income, scarce food, and unclean water. The Dust Bowl amplified those conditions for the affected families. (Steinbeck, Lewis, “Dust Bowl”

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The Dust Bowl was one of the worst economic and tragic events of the 20th century. The Dust Bowl negatively affected people who lived there in a personal way. Some of them included how badly it had affected the children living in that time, how it had affected families health, and how badly it affected the economy causing a mass corruption.

Though most everyone has heard of the Dust Bowl, many people don’t actually know what it is. “When rain stopped falling in the Midwest, farm fields began to dry up” (The Dust Bowl). Much of the nation’s crops couldn’t grow, causing major economic struggle. "The Homestead Act of 1862, which provided settlers with 160 acres of public land, was followed by the Kinkaid Act of 1904 and the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909” (Dust Bowl). This caused many inexperienced farmers to jump on this easy start of a career. Because of this, farmers in the Midwest had practiced atrocious land management for years. This included over plowing the land and using the same crops year after year. In this way, lots of fertile soil had gotten lost. This helped windstorms gather topsoil from the land, and whip it into huge clouds; dust storms. Hot, dry, and windy, almost the entire middle section of the United States was directly affected. The states affected were South

The Dust Bowl negatively affected people who lived there in a personal way. The dust bowl was one of the worst natural disasters in the U.S.

Rays of golden sunlight were piercing the blue sky. Today was a hot day. There had been no rain in the last month. A young child was playing in the field while his father was harvesting the crops. The boy was playing among the newly harvested golden vegetables. There were a lot more vegetables than he remembered from years past. The boy knew they were going to sell most of this harvest. Where are the other plants that he remembered? Why was corn the only thing growing? Why is it in straight lines instead of winding around the property like it normally did? He pondered these questions on the way to school. Today, unlike normal, his teacher let him out of school early. Though he thought nothing of it at the time the sky was turning dark. It

The Dust Bowl was a treacherous storm, which occurred in the 1930's, that affected the midwestern people, for example the farmers, and which taught us new technologies and methods of farming. As John Steinbeck wrote in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath: "And then the dispossessed were drawn west- from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out. Carloads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless - restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do - to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut - anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place

The printed work of the Dust Bowl written by Donald Worster tells of the devastating man-made events that occurred between 1929 and 1939. Worster described this time in history as the darkest moment life in the southern plains encountered in the twentieth-century (4) which was a time where drought, poverty, and famine were of concern. Worster also ties the Great Depression with the Dust Bowl and said that the same society produced them both because of the weakness of America (5). He strongly believes that the Dust Bowl was not a disaster created by nature, but a crisis created by man due to capitalism. Dust Bowl gives a powerful stance on how man ignored the limits of the land which led them into the dirty thirties; however, his beliefs cause him to disregard the disaster as the fault of nature, and specifically blamed man.

The documentary, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s by Donald Worster paints a surreal mosaic of life on the Great Plains during the dirty thirties. He does this by illustrating various causations and correlations as well as specific rural towns in the Dust Bowl that exhibit them, and public institutions whose objective was the restoration of the Great Plains to a fertile state as before the coming of the Capitalistic agriculturist that wreaked havoc on the ecosystem. Worster then uses the above as a fulcrum to his main argument, “…there was in fact a close link between the Dust Bowl and the Depression – that the same society produced them both, and for similar reasons. (p.5) He further goes on to explain that the crisis in the Great Plains was primarily caused by man and not nature (Worster, p.13). This was primarily due to the fact that man had never truly lived in equilibrium with the land on the high plains; they exploited the prairies to produce beyond their capacity, thus causing severe environmental breakdown. The fault was not all the agriculturists of course, part of the blame, as Worster points out, is rooted culturally in our capitalistic, industrialized values and ideals. One spokesman stated, “We are producing a product to sell, and that profitability of that product depended on pushing the land as far as it could go.” (Worster, p.57) To fully illuminate the problems at hand, he uses Cimarron County in the Oklahoma panhandle, and Haskell County,

Natural disasters can cause massive damage, but few realize that many barely last a few days. If so much can be done in such a minute amount of time, imagine what a decade would do. The dust bowl was a weather event that lasted for the entirety of an eight-year drought and lingered for multiple years after. The result: Economic devastation for the agriculture of the area. The dust bowl was a large contributor to agriculture’s role in the great depression and defines how we approach environmental protection today.

In what was one of the most fertile areas of the United States, one of the Nation’s worst agricultural disasters occurred. No rain came so crops did not grow, leaving the soil exposed to the high winds that hit the area in the 1930s. Stretching over a 150,000 square mile area and encompassing parts of five states—these being Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico—the Dust Bowl was a time where over 100 million acres of topsoil were stripped from fertile fields leaving nothing but barren lands and piles of dust everywhere (Ganzel). While things were done to alleviate the problem, one must question whether or not anyone has learned from this disaster. If not, one must look into the possibility that the United States may be struck