fI’m reading an interesting book chronicling the Dust Bowl of the 1930s through historical and eye-witness accounts. I wonder if the sandstorms my nephews experienced in Iraq are similar to the dust storms in the Texas panhandle in the early 1930s. It was interesting that they generated so much electricity that cars shorted out and you could see it traveling along the barbed wire fences if you could see at all. The worst one happened on a day like we’ve had this week, with temperatures in the 80s (last week) dropping like a rock and the winds coming from North Dakota on down, picking up dust as they went.
The causes of the Dust Bowl were thre-fold—the boom in wheat prices in the 1920s, up to $2.00 per bushel, the consequent plowing up of all of the prairies on the high plains of Kansas, Colorado, Texas and Oklahoma to plant wheat, the Depression and subsequent fall in wheat prices which caused a lot of the people who came to this area to farm wheat to abandon the land, naked of its grass cover and naked of any other cover crop, and a drought which lasted several years in this area. The drought was part of the usual weather cycle, and the grasses of the prairie had evolved to withstand droughts of this kind, reviving when the rains finally came.
The book tells the story through the eyes of several families in the region and is quite interesting and readable.
It’s sobering to realize that we as a nation created the conditions that caused such ecological, economic and personal disasters. People died of dust pneumonia. Went crazy. People went broke. And within my parents’ lifetimes which at this point in my life doesn’t seem so long ago! Should I take global warming more seriously? Will the prophets of doom who warn us of ice ages to come brought on by our greed and cavalier disregard of the ecology of Mother Earth be vindicated in my, or my grandchildren’s lifetimes?
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