In a story wondering whether the oil gushing in the Gulf is the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced, several environmental historians agreed:
“The Dust Bowl is arguably one of the worst ecological blunders in world history,” said Ted Steinberg, a historian at Case Western Reserve University.
Across the High Plains, stretching from the Texas Panhandle to the Dakotas, poor farming practices in the early part of the 20th century stripped away the native grasses that held moisture and soil in place. A drought that began in 1930 exposed the folly.
Boiling clouds of dust whipped up by harsh winds buried homes and cars, destroyed crops, choked farm animals to death and sent children to the hospital with pneumonia. At first the crisis was ignored in Washington, but then the apocalyptic clouds began to blow all the way to New York, Buffalo and Chicago. A hearing in Congress on the disaster was interrupted by the arrival of a dust storm.
This is one passage from the American Experience episode on the dust bowl that brought the horror of it home for me:
Narrator: 1935. After years of drought and dust, the land was now being destroyed by another kind of plague. Hundreds of thousands of starving jack rabbits came down from the hills, devouring everything in their path.
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Dust Bowlers were forced to begin an extermination campaign. Almost every Sunday people gathered to take part in rabbit drives.J.R.Davison, Texhoma, Oklahoma: When we first came over the — the hill there on this one drive, there were big line of us. Just looked like the country below us just all began to move. Looked like a herd of sheep, but it was jackrabbits.
The first rabbit drive that I ever witnessed was with shotguns, but that was kind of dangerous, so then they decided later that they’d have some more of these rabbit drives, and we’d just use clubs. So they would form lines of people, and these lines of people would march down through that country and come together, and funnel these rabbits into those pens, and any that tried to get back by you, which would be a lot of `em, why you were supposed to knock them in the head with the club as they came by.
And then after they got them all in these pens, why, the young fellows would get in those pens with these clubs, which was like an old axe handle or something like this, and — and just club them to death. I can imagine, you know, what the Humane Society would say about that now. Whew.
Margie Daniels, Hooker, Oklahoma: You could hear the rabbits screaming you know. That’s what was scary to me. I think that sound affected everyone. I know it sounded terrible to me as a little girl. And you know I’d think sounds like a baby cryin’ or squealin’, or, you know, being hurt. It was really sad.
And then this dirt storm was coming in at that time. And it was starting to get dark. And you know, some people felt that was the wrath of God coming upon them when they’d kill these rabbits like this.
More powerful when you see and hear Margie Daniels tell it, she shines a different light on the children seen in this 1930s footage of those dust bowl jackrabbit drives. Those same farming practices that made the plains into one of the most prosperous regions of the country, with drought turned it into barren blowing fields of dust.
Even after the cause was known and conservation practices were developed to stop it, farmers kept on with the old destructive planting and plowing methods. Ultimately, the government had to pay them to change their ways. It makes me wonder about industrial agriculture and climate change denial. And our unwillingness to deal with carbon fuels dependence in the face of a very real oil disaster.
Do we ever learn? Here’s Jon Stewart on the last eight presidents promising an energy-independent future: