History Revisited

For years there has been a Sunday morning book club of sorts with market patrons as I trade two minute discussions on concurrent reads, get recommendations and offer suggestions based upon each customer's taste in literature. Sometimes hard copy shows up.

And then there are the surreal moments such as this week when I couldn’t tell the difference between the audiobook I’m listening to and the audio version of a story in the New York Times about the storms enveloping the southern plains. The longer I listened to Timothy Egan’s National Book Award winning The Worst Hard Time, an excellent suggestion from a customer, an eerily OMG swept over me. The book chronicles the events leading up to and through the Great American Dust Bowl, both political and environmental. And while news pundits today report current events as unprecedented, we’ve been here before.

While we’re quite familiar with Black Friday, how many have ever heard of Black Sunday? It occurred on April 14th 90 years ago and resulted in a mass migration of people that exceeds that of the people displaced by Hurricane Katrina by a million. Billed as the largest ecological disaster to hit the country, the enormous dust storm was the result of millions of acres of native sod that held the prairie soils intact from the violent weather patterns of the Midwest and supported a massive herd of megafauna for tens of thousands of years being plowed up to plant a cash crop of wheat in a financial boom that lasted only a few years. In one afternoon, more than 300 million tons of topsoil became airborne, more than all the dirt excavated to create the Panama Canal which took 7 years to build.

At the time, growing wheat was so lucrative that bankers in the 1920’s used depositors’ savings to finance more wheat growing operations, plowing up more and more once lush grasslands. Then a drought hit.

Native prairie grasses have root systems that tap deep into the soil with a thick mat-like web that creates an anchor while drawing and holding moisture. Did you know that originally part of the Midwest was originally referred to as Great American Desert until land speculators rebranded it as the Great Plains in an effort to lure immigrants farmers from Germany, Russia, and Ukraine?  They brought with them a variety of hard red wheat that thrived in a drier environment, but even it was no match for a mega drought that lasted several years. The drought combined with the economic collapse of 1929. Ironically, they also brought an invasive thistle, what we know as tumbleweeds.

But during this time soil scientists were clanging the warning bells of what was happening to the soils of the southern plains. Dust storms were becoming more frequent causing serious health issues for humans and livestock. Thousands died from a condition known as dust pneumonia where the lungs filled with mud causing infections. Livestock became so ill the farmers were paid by the government to kill them. Over 90% of the carcasses were deemed not fit for consumption. The dust also choked out crops and family gardens. Schools and businesses were ordered closed. Roads were impassible.

By 1932, economic conditions had become so dire in the heartland of America that the president of the American Farm Bureau told Congress that unless the farmers were bailed out, there would be a revolution. In response, governors invoked Marshal Law to implement policies they felt would benefit their state overall. This included using the National Guard to shut down cultural activities of the groups whom they felt threatened by—the same immigrants who had been lured to America with the prospect of land. Over 2 million Latinos who settled in the Texas panhandle and Oklahoma were not wheat farmers, but sheep herders. Their philosophy of farming is what today we’d call sustainable or regenerative and for that they were harassed, threatened, deported, and murdered despite being American citizens.

What was it that helped user America out of this great economic and environmental disaster? Was it mobs of farmers dragging judges from the courthouses and threatening to hang them? {Yes, that actually happened!} Or could it have been President Roosevelt’s New Deal which invested in conservation and infrastructure, created a social safety net and public health policies, and regulated the banking industry? 

One of the reasons the Midwest did not continue its desolation was the discovery of the Ogallala Aquifer. Have you ever flown over the Midwest and seen all those green circles? Those are pivot irrigation systems which are responsible for over 95% of the water withdrawn from the aquifer.  Unfortunately, this massive aquifer that spans from South Dakota  to  Texas is rapidly being depleted.  Without water or alternative crops that can withstand dry growing conditions, America is setting itself up for another dust bowl of epic proportions. While you may think it won’t affect us here in the east, remember that those massive dust storms carried particulate matter as far as New York City so thick it caused the street lights to come on at midday.

Shutting down scientific research and funding for climate change initiatives, research for agriculture, weather monitoring, and slashing budgets for critical infrastructure is only setting our country up to repeat history…and not in a good way.