The Dust Bowl Offers Key Climate Change Lessons for the U.S.

The day started clear but soon turned to darkness in “No Man’s Land,” the colloquial name for the Oklahoma panhandle, epicenter of the Dust Bowl. On April 14, 1935, dust clouds 200 miles wide and 2,000 feet high rolled into the region like the end of the world was at hand. The day, Black Sunday as it came to be known, saw the era’s worst storm.

A year earlier another massive storm carried dust all the way to the East Coast, blanketing New York City and Washington D.C.in a veil of dirt, and awakening the country, and ultimately federal lawmakers, to the tragedy those in the Dust Bowl had been enduring since the start of the 1930s. The Dust Bowl encompassed southern Nebraska to the North, Kansas to the East, Texas in the South, and Colorado in the West. The miserable conditions endured by those in the region persisted throughout the entire decade until the dirt finally returned more reliably to the land, ending what environmental historians have called one of the longest and most devastating environmental disasters in American history.

Looking back on the Dust Bowl today offers important lessons for the United States as it grapples with severe droughts and rising temperatures caused by climate change. While the Dust Bowl, a largely man-made environmental emergency, lays bare the destruction humans can wreak on the environment, it also shows how large-scale collective response can help mitigate environmental disaster, including the climate crisis today, historians and climate activists say.

The story of how the “dirty thirties'' came to decimate a land and scar a generation began decades earlier, with the westward march of white Europeans, who, in conjunction with the U.S. government, killed and forced Native Americans who inhabited the Great Plains onto reservations. Then came the cattleman and the “beef bonanza,” but severe winters made it impossible for the herds to survive. Homesteaders soon arrived to farm the territory, motivated first by the lower cost of land in the Plains, and then, after 1909, by the U.S. government, which passed the Enlarged Homestead Act to entice movement toward “the last frontier of agriculture.” The start of World War I five years later brought rising demand and prices for wheat, attracting even more farmers to the region.

“The government encouraged people to go into agriculture and expand production. That was partly a wartime thing, but there was a long history before that of the government trying to promote settlement of the American West, to clear out Indians of territory, to clear out wildlife to set up a homestead,” environmental historian Donald Worster, professor emeritus at the University of Kansas, told Teen Vogue.

For a while, the arrangement seemed to be working well for the homesteaders. With the help of new mechanized farming techniques, the farmers plowed up the native grasslands and planted wheat, which sold at high prices and grew abundantly in the wet years of the 1920s. “There was a huge expansion of farming during those years,” in what historians now call “The Great Plow-Up,” said Worster. “They were in a great fever to get some money out of this place. I compare it to the people on Wall Street during that period who were investing in new production facilities everywhere.”

But then, as the ‘20s turned into the ‘30s, the rains stopped, and the Plains entered a period of severe drought. “The region had some droughts, but in the 1930s, you had a major drought event that happened and pulled the rug out from under a lot of farmers because they didn’t have a history of dealing with drought,” Ben Cook, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told Teen Vogue.

The farmers' practices, borrowed from the higher rainfall regions of the East, no longer translated. “They’re entering this landscape, this environment of the semi-arid plains that they weren’t familiar with, and applied these old farming techniques and just assumed it would work. The wet years gave them confidence it was fine, and then the dry years came along and hit them,” Julie Courtwright, an associate professor of history at Iowa State University, told Teen Vogue.

The farmers accidentally helped create the perfect confluence of factors to feed major dust storms. While native grasslands had deep root structures that held the soil in place even in drought periods, the short roots of newly planted wheat couldn’t stop the soil from being carried away by high winds once the plants died.

“The Dust Bowl is really an erosion event. When the soil is exposed to the elements, wind can rather easily mobilize topsoil, which is where all of the nutrients for plants are. These were highly fertile soils, which is why farmers gravitated [towards] them, but when the land lost its productive topsoil, farmers were no longer able to support agricultural activity on the land and it created all sorts of horrible scenes across the country,” said Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, a professor of soil biogeochemistry at the University of California, Merced who is now President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. Soil loss is such a serious issue, she added, because it takes 100 years to create an inch of soil.

At some point in the 1930s, dust was blowing across the entire western grasslands, from Texas north to Canada, but the worst of it was concentrated in the panhandle of the southern plains. The majority of people, many of them poor already, were invested emotionally and financially in the land, and didn’t have the resources to leave, Iowa State Professor of History Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, told Teen Vogue. About a quarter of the Dust Bowl population ultimately left, mostly to California, but the rest stayed and endured. Several thousand people also died, primarily from “dust pneumonia.”

“From February through August, there were days when the air was just filled with dirt, and it was miserable. It’s really wearing on people, and on top of that they have the Great Depression, which means everything is just worse,” said Riney-Kehrberg, pointing to widespread food insecurity in the region.

The scenes of human hardship and environmental degradation shocked the country, and officials in Washington debated whether they should employ the Resettlement Administration to move people out of the area. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, however, wanted to help save the land and people, implementing a series of ambitious programs to restore the Great Plains as part of the New Deal. The Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation brought food to those destitute in the Dust Bowl, and the Civilian Conservation Corps, Works Progress Administration, and National Youth Administration, helped provide jobs, and critical income, to the nearly quarter of the unemployed population, putting them to work on public works and service projects.

Perhaps most important for the rehabilitation of the region was the Soil Conservation Service. The program brought soil experts into and from the Dust Bowl to teach erosion prevention and soil and water conservation techniques, and paid some farmers to return their land to native grasslands. It also established soil conservation districts that helped farmers band together to prevent erosion in their region. “A lot of what the soil conservation districts did was shift from hyper-individualism behavior to community-based organization and a realization that what happened to you affected your neighbors, so it’s important to cooperate and collaborate to enact some form of erosion control measures,” said Cook. By the 1940s the rains returned, and with new sustainable management practices in hand, the region was able to weather future droughts without causing major dust storms.

Seen through today’s climate crisis, and especially the increased temperatures and drought in much of the southwestern U.S., youth climate activists, historians, and scientists say the Dust Bowl is both a foreboding and hopeful tale. “One of the big lessons of the Dust Bowl is yes, we can deal with environmental catastrophe, but it requires large-scale community effort,” said Cook.

Soil can store more carbon than plant biomass and the atmosphere combined, so soil degradation is a huge contributor to the climate emergency, said Berhe. “What we’re dealing with now is a sustained and progressive changing of the climate, and this is happening at the same time that a third of all the world’s soils are now degraded because of overuse and abuse of soils by human actions,” she added.

But soil’s incredible ability to store carbon also means it can be part of the solution. Using smart land management practices to sequester carbon has been shown to achieve a third of all the cost-effective climate change mitigation we need to avoid the worst disasters that could be associated with climate change, Berhe continued. Combined with fossil fuel emissions reductions, soil restoration can help mitigate climate change, and will also go a long way toward helping feed the increasing number of communities globally whose food security has been threatened by land degradation, just like those communities that went hungry in the Dust Bowl. Here in the U.S., the current resistance to adapt our agricultural practices and crops to drought conditions and soon-to-be depleted aquifers recalls the circumstances that created the Dust Bowl, said Worster.

Youth climate activists say the response to the Dust Bowl provides a helpful roadmap. “Our generation is coming of age at a time of spiraling crisis. With an economic downturn, climate crisis, and a pandemic, we have realized that the new normal that we’ve grown up with has never worked for us, so in order to create a society that truly has the best interest of our futures at heart, we’re going to need to revamp and fundamentally transform our country and governance over the next 10 years. Back in the Dust Bowl that was the New Deal, and for our generation it’s the Green New Deal,” said John Paul Mejia, 18, a spokesperson with the Sunrise Movement.

Lily Gardner, 17, another Sunrise spokesperson, said the kind of infrastructure investment implemented during the New Deal to help pull the Plains out of environmental crisis and economic depression would go a long way towards a just transition for her Eastern Kentucky community, where the coal and fracking industries have left environmental destruction but few jobs. “Infrastructure investment in the renewable energy and care sectors means that people who live there can live dignified lives and support themselves and their families. I don’t think it’s an extreme request, but an answer to the fundamental question of how we’re going to support people,” said Lily.

Across the country, Sunrise member Madeline Ruddell, 16, has packed 10 evacuation bags in the past four years alone to prepare for fires in her home of Sonoma County. Describing scenes one could easily confuse with accounts of the Dust Bowl, Madeline said, “Last year, with the orange skies, I remember it was 1pm...and my house was dark despite the lights being on. I have asthma and there’s been times I couldn’t leave the house for five days straight because the smoke was so bad. I’ve missed weeks of school for fires.”

Like her peers in the youth climate justice movement, Madeline yearns for some kind of collective action to address the crisis. “You keep hoping that some sort of big sweeping climate legislation is going to come to prevent this, but it’s not happening,” said Madeline. “There’s this constant looming fear that this is the year the fires will come and take everything. It’s infuriating that nothing is being done, and terrifying that this is going to happen again and again until we take accountability.”

Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: 17 Young People on the Moment the Climate Crisis Became Real to Them

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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue