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Published on Visualizing Ecology (http://www2.evergreen.edu/visecowinter)

Aileen Milliman - Week 3 Clements

The Dust Bowl of the 1930's was the result of years of careless farming on the Great Plains. Farmers were more concerned with quick money from high wheat prices than environmental security in the future. The added pressure from WWI and the popularization of heavy tractors allowed farming on the Plains to skyrocket. Unfortunately, they did not realize the severity of their actions. When the Dust Bowl hit in the 30's, it was a wakeup call for the country that man does have a profound effect on nature.

“It was man's destruction of the grassland that set the dirt free to blow. Through such ill-advised practices as plowing long straight furrows (often parallel to the wind), leaving large fields bare of all vegetation, replacing a more diverse plant life with a single cash crop, and —most importantly— destroying a native sod that was an indispensable buffer against wind and drought, the farmers themselves unwittingly brought about most of the poverty and discouragement they suffered.” (Worster 226)


However, farming practices were not considered at that time to be villainous. After all, they believed they were conquering nature, civilizing it, and growing fuel for man's civilization. The main villains were thought to be wind and drought (Worster 222). And while the wind and drought did play a major role in the Dust Bowl, the destruction of sod and the native grasses and other vegetation impaired the Plains' ability to moderate these extreme climatic conditions. The government at the time rushed to implement an emergency environmental cleanup to help dampen the dust storms. What worries me is the irony of this huge environmental movement. We seem to have reverted back to our old ways of viewing the environment and forgotten our lessons. Soil erosion due to wind and water is still a major issue in agriculture today-70 years after the Dust Bowl. Will it take another severe human-influenced climatic disaster to wake us up again?




 

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