The Dust Bowl And Informative Speech

In the book, The Worst Hard Times, author Timothy Egan explains the hard times that the families in the high plains experienced during the years near the Great Depression. Egan writes about "The Great American Dust Bowl" which originally was a place of lushes thick grass where the bison could graze and where the Indians in the area could hunt, until Texas cowboys took over the land for big cattle drives making the area a huge ranch. During the years that these cowboys worked the land, they noticed that before they started the cattle runs, the grass that was in the area kept the top soil in place on times of drought. Now that the cattle had been grazing and the cowboys had been working the area, the grass was not prospering creating huge dust storms when the wind blew and there was no rain or plants to keep it down. The dust storms posed a worry to the ranch owners that they would lose cattle and therefore lose profit that they decided to divide up and sell the world's biggest cattle

Government policies and their lack of intervention are also responsible for the strike of disaster. A report sent to Roosevelt by the Great Plains Drought Area Committee about the causes of the dust storm disasters concluded that the public homesteading act was greatly at fault (267). The homesteading policy and the stimulation of war time demands “led to over cropping and over grazing, and encouragement of a system of agriculture which could not be both permanent and prosperous “ (Egan, 267). War time demand was sought to drive up prices that stimulated record production. But by 1930 prices plummeted and led farmers to plow even more land in attempt to break even.

Dust Bowl, The Southern Plains in the 30’s written by Donald Worster and published in 1979, is an informative text on the Great Plains during the Great Depression. Donald Worster is a credible author because he not only earned a Ph.D. from Yale in environmental history, but he also had previously written a book on the environment and the economy. This book was written well and Worster did a good job of revealing how people and how they live have effected the areas environment. He spoke of places including, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas and many more.

Worster skillfully describes the various issues and lays out his argument with valid reasoning throughout his book. His argument is that the Dust Bowl was the result of the lack of ecological sensitivity and the oblivious outlooks

Prior to the occurrence of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, farmers had rows of crops because of the demand. Soon after, this all failed with the onset of the Dust Bowl. The drought and wind erosion that had occurred amongst the land in the southern Great Plains region of the United States is what led many farmers to be displaced. In the Grapes of Wrath by John Steinback, he gives us the harsh reality of what occurred during the era of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression. “And then the dispossessed were drawn west—from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out.

As long as they can earn money, the farmers will continue in these practices. Worster spends several chapters focusing on the different solutions to the Dust Bowl and how those solutions were utilized only when the farmers were being paid through President Roosevelt’s New Deal. However, once the quality of the land started to improve or it rained the farmers abandoned the practices in favor of more profit. He focuses on the solutions proposed by the conservationists, ecologists, and agronomists.

The Dust Bowl is a classic tale of humans pushing too hard against nature and nature pushing back (The Dust Bowl). The narrator of the film said it was the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history (The Dust Bowl). The groups of people that choose to live in this region choose to ignore the history of the land that included droughts and severe winters. Ignoring the severe winters of the 1880’s caused the “Beef Bonanza” to close and a severe drought in the 1890’s that pushed farmers off the land. Farmers ignored the ecosystem by ridding the land of the vegetation that had evolved.

Years ago in the 1930s, tragedy struck in America. Along with the wounding great depression, those in the Southern Plain were hit with a catastrophic dust storm known as the Dust Bowl. From acres of farms being destroyed to people losing their lives, the Dust Bowl was an unfortunate disaster. Some may say “the earth ran amok” (Doc A). The devastating Dust Bowl was ultimately caused by poor weather conditions, new farming technology and the immense removal of grass.

Due to this lack of acknowledgement from the community, it can be inferred that responses or other measures were not highly considered, only issuing forth new and stronger problems through this era. Another document demonstrating this is Document C, which examines how individuals had no plan for recultivating and supporting the land which was tilled to fill their crops. This document describes ways in which new technologies advanced the speed in which land was cultivated, but does not describe agricultural methods to maintain it. This is revealed through how “Folkers plowed nearly his entire square mile, and then paid to rent nearby property and ripped up that grass as well” (C). This uncovers the fact that farmers during the timer period surrounding the Dust Bowl were plowing land at rapid speeds without taking proper precautions into consideration.

Luckily Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to shine some light with a new deal. The Dust Bowl was what they called the Great Depression in the drought stricken areas. The condition of the areas around Oklahoma and Texas made living dangerous and futile. “When drought struck

In the 1930s, before the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression occurred. Life was harsh since many people didn’t have jobs, however, the Dust Bowl made the situation worse. In the Great Plains, while the United States was in the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl occurred because of the bad weather and soil erosion. Dust storms would occur because of the soil not being fertile enough plus the strong winds blowing across the soil which led to many people moving to the West. The Dust Bowl had many causes and effects that led up to the event and there were many significant changes that impacted the United States like restoring the Great Plains and preventing another Dust Bowl.

The third cause of the Dust Bowl was short grass prairie. In Doc B, it states that a lot of the grass was mostly Buffalo grass for the animals to eat. This ties in with the first and second paragraph because the soil was killing the grass. How it was killing the grass was since there was so much soil not being watered, the grass would die as well. The animals would starve as well since the grass was not watered.

Basically, writer Benson is warning that if the dust bowl destroyed living things in the farms it was time to make a big move and risk it. As a result of the drought.crops began to fail with the onset of drought 1931 exposing the bare over plowed farmland. “An estimated 650 million tons of soil blew away leaving farms devastated”. According to Benson during the storm and the wind carried off most of the crops and covered fences and cars, homes etc, and they tried to eat pastures of livestock and cause mud balls to form in there stomach as a result and many animals died. During this time in life Americans have a chance or working and getting there lives back together as FDR gets elected for

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 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.