Similarities Between The Great Depression And The Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl, was a catastrophic event that affected millions of people in the plain areas of the central United States. Another great event that happened around the time of the Dust Bowl was the Great Depression which itself was the crash of the stock market and left most the population the Unites States struggling to live day by day. These two completely separated events seem to be not linked what so ever due to their differences, but for Donald Worster, the author of the book Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, there are many other factors to take into account, in his argument he specifies,” Is that there was in fact a close link between the Dust Bowl and the Depression… That the same society produced them both, and for similar

While the ones that left were facing new and unknown areas the ones that stayed had to deal with a land that had no life and the winds full with sand that killed whatever they could produce from the soil. The land that was left, houses, plains or farmlands turned back to nature, with no one to keep exploiting the land, the land started to repair itself.

Nature had reached its maximum and it was made clear to the communities at this time, that nature was not the limitless bank of resources they had thought before. People now understood the damage that the land had been facing for so many years of exploitation. “Man’s adaptation to nature in never a matter of technical understanding and inventiveness.” (Worster, 175) Man adapts to nature through trial and error, much like Worster expresses, people from the affected communities learned how to adapt to nature, learned how even something so natural as soil can become over