The Dust Bowl In The 1930's

During the Dust Bowl many people and kids have suffered, many lost their home and their towns got ruined. One of the people who has suffered in the Dust Bowl is Ashton. When Ashton went to his school he was immediately pulled in by his teacher Mrs. Kam. He was then told that the entire middle east was affected by the Dust Bowl and that a black blizzard will hit very soon. Then the winds outside started to get faster, the windows getting hit by all the dust gathered from the storm, but luckily for the students the school was structured well and was firmly attached to the ground. Many of the students panicked, the teacher trying to comfort them. Ashton was the only one who thought about his family how the black blizzard will affect his

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 misuse of various environmental resources contributed to one of the greatest droughts in history. The years of successful harvesting and good times lead to the overuse of farmland, troublesome lives for all and ultimately the Dust Bowl.

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

An artist who compares the Dust Bowl to nowadays’ air pollution is Heather Watts. Her best known picture is the “New Dustbowl Blues”.

“We watched as the storm swallowed the light. The sky turned from blue to black, night descended in an instant and the dust was on us…Dust lay two feet deep in ripply waves across the parlor floor, dust blanketed the cookstove, the icebox, the kitchen chairs, everything deep in dust.” -Karen Hesse’s Diary, April, 1935 (Dust Bowl Diary Entries). In the 1930s, a phenomenon called the Dust Bowl swept the people of the Great Plains off their feet. This paper defines the Dust Bowl and its impact on the US economy and American citizens.

The ‘Dirty Thirties’ is perhaps one of the most known time periods in American History. During the 1930s, the worst and longest drought occurred in the United States, this was also know as the Dust Bowl. According to Christopher Klein, the Dust Bowl is considered both a man-made and natural disaster. In fact, many events contributed to the Dust Bowl such as poor farming techniques, a severe drought, and economic depression.

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

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.

If I was part of one of the families living on the Southern plains during this time, I think I would have stayed. I would have tried to stay just to say that I had made it through the Dust Bowl, and could share my experience with many others. I would have also liked to see how it was like being in the Last Man Standing club. Next, if I was part of one of the families, I would have probably thought that the dust storms were going to end soon enough, and it would have been a waste to move then. It would probably be very nerve-wracking, stressful, and depressing to see the people leaving each day, but I think it would still be worth staying. Finally, I think you would become mentally stronger and braver since you would try to survive in one of

The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms occurring in the American and Canadian prairies in 1930-1936. At the same time, the Dust Bowl was not just a natural disaster that struck the large territory and affected the natural environment and economy of the US and partially Canada. In fact, it was the disaster which revealed the full extent of the negative impact of human activities on the environment. The Dustbowl was provoked by humans and put many people on the edge of survival. At the same time, the Dust Bowl proved to be the warning made by the nature to people to change their attitude to their environment and their economic activities.

During the late 1920s farmers had rick and great soil up until the dust bowl which was when a whole city known for farming was covered in a blanket of black and nasty dust. When this first occurs people thought it would blow past within a few weeks but that never happened. As more and more dust storms came to the area people began to wonder if it was worth it to stay in a farming town that was no longer ok for farming. The population of the city dropped by 59% over the 7 year span which is insane to think considering that the population was small to be gain with. After a long 7 year battle with the weather and Mother Nature the sky's opens up and begs in to spray water and in that moment they knew it would all be

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