Summary Of Donald Worster's Dust Bowl

The setting of this book is in Oklahoma. The location of this “Dust Bowl” is accurate because in the nineteen thirties-nineteen forties, Oklahoma did go through four terrible droughts that led up to this “Dust Bowl” event. The “Dust Bowl” event led to terrible destruction. It also led to death in some cases. And it was overall a terrible event that occurred in Oklahoma.

The Dust Bowl Diary by Ann Marie Low is an incredible piece of documentation about the struggles and hardships that were faced during the infamous Dust Bowl. In this diary, Low dives deep into many different subjects of struggle and change, and it is truly fascinating. In today's society, people take everything for granted. The survivors and witnesses of these horrible years are people that everyone should look up to as an example. In our world, eating the same food, or sleeping in an uncomfortable way is unbearable, but those problems were the least of the concerns of these people.

The article What we learned from the Dust Bowl: lessons in science, policy, and adaptation, provides an insight on the effects of Harvest Gypsies’ publication. The article names the Dust Bowl era “the worst hard time.” This article has an emphasis on not only human hardships but also on how the dust bowl climate contributed to the era and the hardships associated with it. I found the connection between climate and migrant workers to be an interesting comparison. The article explains that during the worst years of the Great Depression, large areas of the North American Great Plains experienced severe, multi-year droughts that led to soil erosion, dust storms, farm abandonments, personal hardships, and distress migration on scales not previously seen.

The Dust Bowl was a terrible experience during a horrible time. In the 1930s post World War I America had a total collapse of the stock market causing the Great Depression affecting the economy on a global scale, but hitting hardest at home in the United States. However, the economy wasn’t the only thing that was hit hard during this time; seemingly unstoppable dust storms ravaged farming land from the west to east coast hitting hardest in the great plains in the middle section the the US became known as the Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl was not entirely a causation of bad luck on nature, it was caused by an increasing demand for crops, advancements in farming technology, while the final nail in the coffin was a lack of rain. During World War

Donald Worster is an environmental historian and his book Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s helped to define the environmental history movement as it was the first environmental history book published. He breaks the stereotype of how the Dust Bowl was viewed by writing it from an environmental standpoint instead of writing a social history by focusing solely on the people and their experiences. How it helped to define the environmental history movement is that it opened up this avenue for others to write about environmental issues. He is also an anti-capitalist and this book combines his interest in the environment with the effect that capitalism has on the environment.

During the Dust Bowl some people made the decision to stay at their farms. Huge drifts of dirt piled up on homesteaders’ doors, came in the cracks of windows and came down from the ceilings. Barnyards and pastures were buried in dirt. After about 850 million tons of topsoil was blown away in 1935 alone. The government responded to this by saying “Unless something is done, the western plains will be as arid as the Arabian desert.”

The Dust Bowl of the 1930’s was the worst dust storm of them all and there’s many reasons why. First, when a dust storm happened it was very scary. The kid inside of the first paragraph was shouting to his parents that a dust storm was happening and he was showing his fear by his tone because he was yelling. Second, in a situation where a dust storm was happening the family put wet towels at the windows and doors to prevent sand from coming in but it was getting in anyways. Third, the dust storms were destroying the land, making the soil not suitable for farming, they ruined the economy and threatened lives of people.

Dust Bowl and Economics of the 1930s The Dust Bowl was a very desperate and troublesome time for America. The southwestern territories were in turmoil due to the arid effect of the drought causing no fertile soils. As the rest of America was being dragged along with the stock market crash and higher prices of wheat and crops since the producing areas couldn't produce. This was a streak of bad luck for the Americans as they were in a deep despair for a quite some time.

TheBalance.com, 19 March 2018, https://www.thebalance.com/what-was-the-dust-bowl-causes-and-effects-3305689. But due to the shift in weather patterns, the jet stream got moved south which resulted in rain never reaching the Great Plains. It caused the region to live in a drought for almost a decade. There were four waves of droughts, one right after another. The droughts occurred in 1930-31, 1934, 1936, and 1939-1940.

Farmers across the great plains longed for rain. Day after day the weather offered on relief for anyone. The Dust Bowl covered three hundred thousand square miles of territory. It banked against houses and farm buildings snow and buried fences. All of the dirt penetrated into the engines of cars and clogged vital parts.

The Dust Bowl was both natural and human disaster, which some of it provoked by human activities. In the 1920’s the weather was favorable with plentiful of rain and technology such as tractors. This helped Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico, and Colorado’s great plains. Yet, farmers gave little consideration of the prairie grass that secured the topsoil. The topsoil was a great source for crops to grow.

The dust bowl was considered the “Worst hard time” in american history. The Dust Bowl was a big cloud of dust that took place during the 1930’s in the middle of the Great Depression. The dust bowl was located in the southern great plains as it affected states like Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. The three main causes of the Dust Bowl were drought (Doc E), amount of land being harvest (Doc D), and the death shortgrass prairie (Doc C).

Donald Worster’s Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s was an attempt to dismantle the prevailing interpretation of the event, recasting it from environmental to economic in origin. Marxist in his interpretation, but not in his definition of capitalism, Worster argued that the Dust Bowl “was the inevitable outcome of a culture that deliberately, self-consciously, set itself that task of dominating and exploiting the land for all it was worth.” (Worster, 4) To Worster, the dust storms that ravaged the region were a direct result of imported agricultural practices; particularly, the plowing up of millions of acres of sod for the purpose of sowing wheat. This was not, however, the inevitable outcome that Worster was referring to. Instead, he interprets the string of events as a byproduct of the nation’s dependence and allegiance to a specific form of capitalism, one which demanded aggressive expansion and ever-increasing annual yields.

The dust bowl was caused by severe drought,bad farming and change of weather. During the 1930’s,severe drought,failure to know how to farm and to prevent wind erosions,the aeolian processes. The impact this disaster had on the society was scared,because people didn’t know if they were going to make it. Another impact this horrific disaster had on the society was all of their crops were destroyed.

The dust bowl is very serious. “But in the summer of 1931, the rains disappeared. Crops withered and died. There had always been strong winds and dust on the Plains, but now over plowing created conditions for disaster. There was dust everywhere, because the people couldve worried about others than themselves.