Into Restoration:
Some Notes on the Dustbowl

"But it was the May 1934 blow that swept in a new dark age. On 9 May, brown earth from Montana and Wyoming swirled up from the ground, was captured by extremely high-level winds, and was blown eastward toward the Dakotas. More dirt was sucked into the airstream, until 350 million tons were riding toward urban America. By late afternoon the storm had reached Dubuque and Madison, and by evening 12 million pounds of dust were falling like snow over Chicago – 4 pounds for each person in the city." – Worster, from "The Black Blizzards Roll In," Dust Bowl







When thinking about those three location points of context in restoration – what happened, what is happening, and what will happen here – it's usually at the farthest point, into the future, where we visualize difficult things to come as climate change seems to serve up conditions that are more radical and unpredictable. But really we don't need a crystal ball to look ahead; photographs of the great hulking masses of black dust which rolled over small plains towns with the bizarre admixture sometimes of lightening and thunder, was as bad as any man-made disaster has ever been documents. In fact, the Dust Bowl of the "dirty thirties" is considered by many scientists as one of the three worst in known history, the other two the deforestation of China's upland region in 3,000 BC. and the destruction of the Mediterranean by livestock. "Unlike either of those events, however, the Dust Bowl took only 50 years to accomplish." Although of course bizarre and ominous, the black blizzards that rolled in and across America, sometimes (as noted above) all the way from Montana to the east coast at Buffalo, NY, it has to be remembered that the culture at the time would have been working through some very heavy moral and practical set backs already. One – and this might have been far too abstract to consider for many observers at the time who were merely trying to survive – was that the very people of the plains who suffered most from the dust bowl conditions were the very agents of those conditions in the first place.  The backyard gardener, considered in such a smaller scale, is able to quickly see that he or she has not properly attended to weeds, applying nutrients, creating proper spacing, laying down ground cover, etc., and can make the proper adjustments. It would have been unbelievable in the case of the Oklahoman or Kansan of the time visualize the destructive fruits of their labor not merely flash by them here and there, but as was the documented case of Guymon, Oklahoma, for example in the year 1937 550 hours of passing dust. "In Amarillo the worst year was

1935, with a total of 908 hours." Storms could rage for an hour or three and a half days. "Most of the winds came from the southwest, but they also came from the west, north, and northeast, and they could slam against windows and walls with 60 miles per hour force." The dirt they left behind might vary in color and could very well stink or sting nose, eyes, and throat.  These routinely unpredictable flare-up would have been terrifying enough, but it has to be remembered that previous to the dust bowl, there had already been draught across most of the continental U.S., including such extreme heat that states like Iowa registered at 111 degrees and one day in Illinois shot up to 118. The advent of the economic depression had already taken hold as well, leaving people both penniless and in addition houseless against the waves of black storms.

In education, we often pick and choose from a handful of events to teach the more mammoth blunders or tragedies of the past, so that we can recognize their seeds in our times, and hopefully be capable of working through them in a more manageable way.  Just as we continuously look back to the lessons of WWII, it might be of just as important consequences to hold on tight to the conditions of the Dust Bowl. To this day, we know that agriculture in this country is the cause not only of virtually half of all climate change emissions (or lack of carbon sequestration), and that we are losing the black gold of the earth (topsoil) at a rate that is unprecedented. Much of this can go unnoticed because of the surplus of corn stocks and because few farms are merely vacant and ungrown, therefore they look productive. But if productivity means continual tillage, mono crop, pesticides, and lack of agro forestry, we have to understand that underneath the seeming productive layer of green is a disappearing layer of topsoil. A time will come when this too turns closer to dust.