The Dust Bowl and Lessons in Land Management

The Dust Bowl was a period of severe wind erosion and dust storms that struck the southern Great Plains of the United States, centered on the panhandle regions of Oklahoma and Texas along with parts of Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico, through most of the 1930s, with the most severe years generally dated from 1934 to 1936 and drought conditions persisting intermittently through 1940. The disaster resulted from the compounding of a severe multi-year meteorological drought with decades of agricultural practice, principally the widespread plowing under of the native, deep-rooted short-grass prairie that had historically anchored the region's thin topsoil, in favor of shallow-rooted wheat and other row crops during a wheat-farming boom driven by high World War I-era grain prices and the mechanization of plowing through the increasing availability of gasoline-powered tractors. Historian Donald Worster, in his influential 1979 study Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, argues that the disaster was as much a product of an unsustainable capitalist agricultural system, oriented toward short-term commodity-market profit rather than ecological limits, as it was a natural climatic event, a thesis that remains a central reference point in environmental-history scholarship on the period.