Donald Worster And The Dust Bowl

Dust Bowl, The Southern Plains in the 30’s written by Donald Worster and published in 1979, is an informative text on the Great Plains during the Great Depression. Donald Worster is a credible author because he not only earned a Ph.D. from Yale in environmental history, but he also had previously written a book on the environment and the economy. This book was written well and Worster did a good job of revealing how people and how they live have effected the areas environment. He spoke of places including, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas and many more.

He also does a great job of describing how extreme the dust bowl its self was and how it effected people. He also describes the after effects of this large job loss on the people. He talks about a stretch of time from the 1890s to 1940s Thesis: America’s creed of maximization in the form of business farming paired with the drought Was the main cause of the poverty stricken people in the farming industry.

The dust bowl was caused by severe drought,bad farming and change of weather. During the 1930’s,severe drought,failure to know how to farm and to prevent wind erosions,the aeolian processes. The impact this disaster had on the society was scared,because people didn’t know if they were going to make it. Another impact this horrific disaster had on the society was all of their crops were destroyed.

“ The story highlights a very real and relatable experience about a family driven out of their home due to economic hardship and drought. Also known as “The Dirty Thirties,” the Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms causing major agricultural damage to the American west—especially the Oklahoma panhandle area, Kansas, and northern Texas. Farming methods at the time contributed to the severity of the problem. The arrival of farmers to the Great Plains created conditions for significant soil erosion during naturally occurring periods of cool sea surface water temperatures that regulate precipitation. “ http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/dustbowl/legacy/ 3.

During the Dust Bowl some people made the decision to stay at their farms. Huge drifts of dirt piled up on homesteaders’ doors, came in the cracks of windows and came down from the ceilings. Barnyards and pastures were buried in dirt. After about 850 million tons of topsoil was blown away in 1935 alone. The government responded to this by saying “Unless something is done, the western plains will be as arid as the Arabian desert.”

A drought was brought upon in California along with dry, hot winds. The winds grew increasingly strong and started what is known as the Dust Bowl in 1930. Crops were ruined and it was almost impossible to grow new ones because of how dry the soil was. The Dust Bowl created a huge burden to all farmers everywhere. Dealing with the banks and loans also contributed to the problems the farmers had to face.

Dust Bowl and Economics of the 1930s The Dust Bowl was a very desperate and troublesome time for America. The southwestern territories were in turmoil due to the arid effect of the drought causing no fertile soils. As the rest of America was being dragged along with the stock market crash and higher prices of wheat and crops since the producing areas couldn't produce. This was a streak of bad luck for the Americans as they were in a deep despair for a quite some time.

The Dust Bowl was a huge catastrophic event that happened during the Great Depression throughout the United States. The dust bowl actually took place from 1930 to 1939, and is known as “The Dirty Thirties”. There are many different factors that contributed to the cause of the dust bowl. The dust bowl did not just happen one day.

The FDR speech paints them in a more innocent light as victims to a cruel world while the informative text puts the blame on the farmers for using horrible land techniques. “The Dust Bowl” state “. They made two big mistakes. First, in order to plant as much wheat as possible, they plowed over all of the natural prairie grasses that kept the topsoil2 in place. Second, they planted crops too often, instead of giving the soil a break every now and then.

In fact, there were nine years of below-average rainfall resulting in droughts. As a consequence of the drought, it caused the land to be arid and created a water shortage that led to crops dying. This is an impeccable condition for Dust Bowl as the wind blew across the plains to pick up the dirt forming massive swirling dust storms. To sum up, the dust bowl was provoked by both humans and nature combined, poor farming techniques and droughts. If people had not over-plowed and over-grazed the prairie plains, maybe the dust bowl might not have taken place.

The disaster known as the Dust Bowl was a major setback for American and Americans in the Midwest. The Dust Bowl was a time in history where drought was at its peak. The drought was throughout the states; Colorado, Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. The Dust Bowl lasted for six years, 1930 to 1936. The 1930s was not only known for the Dust Bowl, but for other reasons also like, The Great Depression and WW1.

The third cause of the Dust Bowl was short grass prairie. In Doc B, it states that a lot of the grass was mostly Buffalo grass for the animals to eat. This ties in with the first and second paragraph because the soil was killing the grass. How it was killing the grass was since there was so much soil not being watered, the grass would die as well. The animals would starve as well since the grass was not watered.

“With the gales came the dust. Sometimes it was so thick that it completely hid the sun. Visibility ranged from nothing to fifty feet, the former when the eyes were filled with dirt which could not be avoided, even with goggles ”( Richardson 59). The Dust Bowl was a huge dust storm in the 1930s that stretched from western Kansas to New Mexico. People that lived in that area could not step outside or they would get dust in their lungs.

Donald Worster is an environmental historian and his book Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s helped to define the environmental history movement as it was the first environmental history book published. He breaks the stereotype of how the Dust Bowl was viewed by writing it from an environmental standpoint instead of writing a social history by focusing solely on the people and their experiences. How it helped to define the environmental history movement is that it opened up this avenue for others to write about environmental issues. He is also an anti-capitalist and this book combines his interest in the environment with the effect that capitalism has on the environment.

The dust bowl is very serious. “But in the summer of 1931, the rains disappeared. Crops withered and died. There had always been strong winds and dust on the Plains, but now over plowing created conditions for disaster. There was dust everywhere, because the people couldve worried about others than themselves.