The Dust Bowl

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

LEARN FROM HISTORY .... !!!!!!!!

The Northeast is still recovering from the flooding damage of Hurricane Sandy, the second “100-year storm” to blow through the region in two years.

PBS

A dust cloud looms over Boise City, Oklahoma, April 15, 1935.

Last summer, the midsection of the country was wracked by crippling wildfires and drought, an increasingly common weather pattern and one reminiscent of, yes, what happened in the 1930s.
The Dust Bowl may not persuade anyone unconvinced that mankind is contributing to the Earth’s verifiable changes in temperature and climate and the resulting wild weather. But it’s a powerful reminder that mankind can create massive environmental effects and that, once those take hold, mankind looks very small indeed in the face of them.

The ’30 catastrophe, of course, was about the soil, not the atmosphere.  The farmers overworked the land to earn money, especially from wheat. The prairie’s settlers found a rich soil, with moisture retained deep below the surface thanks to the native grasses. (The problem: those grasses were adaptations to the region’s frequent historic droughts.) When wheat was scarce and in demand during World War I, it became the area’s cash crop, and times were good–for a while.

When wheat drew a good price, they planted more wheat. When it was glutted and prices dropped, they planted more wheat to make up for it. The plains became a breadbasket, which is to say, a monoculture of one crop–wheat wheat wheat–which left farmers financially vulnerable to the market and the topsoil vulnerable to the droughts that grasses had protected them from. When the Depression hit, prices plummeted, and years of dryness hit on top of that, decimating crops and exposing soil. In March 1933, in Cimarron County, Okla., it did not rain at all.

 And then things got worse. Windstorms hit, as they had on the plains in the past, but now there was nothing to hold down the parched earth. Clouds of particles 10,000 feet high swept across the plains—”black blizzards,” and brown, red and sandy ones, depending where the wind was blowing from. Dust blew into homes through the merest crack. Newborn babies died.

If we show the same neglect to the limits of nature now as we did then, it is entirely possible that this could happen again.

Read more: http://entertainment.time.com/2012/11/16/tv-weekend-the-dust-bowl/#ixzz2Cc9PKbc9