According to answers.com, a dust bowl is a region reduced to aridity by drought and dust storms. The best-known dust bowl is doubtless the one that hit the United States between 1933 and 1939.
One major cause of that Dust Bowl was severe droughts during the 1930’s. The other cause was capitalism. Over-farming and grazing in order to achieve high profits killed of much of the plain’s grassland and when winds approached, nothing was there to hold the devastated soil on the ground.
The Dust Bowl affected the Great Plains which consist of parts of the U.S. states of Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming. Storms also reached the East Coast of the United States. The Dust Bowl especially affected Kansas and Oklahoma, where people died from dust pneumonia and starvation.
Mrs. Flora Robertson, former resident of Oklahoma, describes a Dust Bowl as a “huge black cloud”.
Bon Turner, another U.S. citizen whose life was affected by the dust storms, reports that one day he left a milk bottle on his back porch. When he came back after a while, it was two-thirds filled with dust. Bon Turner had to break dust on water like ice to water his horses.
Lawrence Svobida, a Kansas wheat farmer, speaks about farmers who decided to leave their farms; they loaded their possessions on trucks or trailers. He also mentions “endless processions” of people heading out of the Dust Bowl. Asked about the beginning of the Dust Bowl, he tells: "With the gales came the dust. Sometimes it was so thick that it completely hid the sun. Visibility ranged from nothing to fifty feet, the former when the eyes were filled with dirt which could not be avoided, even with goggles." Svobida is one of many farme...
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...at over planting can do to the land, the majority of the United States just moved on and continued to treat the land just as poorly as before. John Pursell views chemical fertilizer as a thing that turns soil into “chemical wasteland” and mentions that today’s soil is often not good enough to resist heavy rainfalls.
If John Pursell is to be believed, it is to say that maintenance of methods that provoked the Dust Bowl is a crime. The Dust Bowl was a disaster and must never happen again. This lesson has to be learned.
Sources
http://www.englishdiscourse.org (John Pursell)
http://www.altoona.k12.wi.us (Flora Robertson)
http://www.fhlbanks.com/
http://eh.net (James Butkiewicz, University of Delaware)
http://americanart.si.edu
http://faculty.washington.edu (James Gregory)
http://www.pbs.org
http://www.tqnyc.org
http://www.epodunk.com
http://www.answers.com
The Dust Bowl grazed across the Midwest of the United States, destroying the ecology and agriculture of the United States and Canadian Prairies"1. The Midwest had been experiencing a severe drought when the wind started to collect any loose dry dirt building up gigantic dust clouds. The 1920 's were so prosperous with many new inventions and lifestyles being adapted. Farmers now had the aid of a tractor to help plow the fields faster and farther.2 Was the newly plowed dirt the cause of the Dust Bowl, historian, Professor R. Douglas Hurt seems to think so.
Shindo, Charles J. "The Dust Bowl Myth." The Wilson Quarterly. (Vol. 24). .4 (Autumn 2000): p25. Literature Resource Center. Gale. New York Public Library. 6 Mar. 2011 .
The farmers had torn out millions of miles of prairie grass so that they could farm there. Without the grass, dust began to kick up and storm around the air causing dust storms.
The Dust Bowl in the 1930s was a very horrific event in the Southern Plains region of the United States. This was a period of severe windstorms & dust-storms that would blow over hundreds of miles. This stripped the soil of nutrients, and damaged the ecology and agriculture of these American lands. The 2012 drought in the Central Great Plains was a period that lasted only 4 months, through May to August, that eclipsed the record of the Dust Bowl, for the driest period. The Dust Bowl and the 2012 drought compare and contrast in many ways.
The drought, being the single most devastating effect on planting crops in the Great Plains, proved to be a force of devastation for many years. Moreover, since there was little rain it was virtually impossible to plant anything that could survive the harvesting season during the dustbowl. If you have no rain and no moisture
One of the factors in the dust bowl was the drought. These farmers are now planting drought resistant strains of corn and wheat. “We have really widespread irrigation use, which allows many farmers to buffer the effects of drought more than they would’ve been able to do in the 1930s.” ("Lieberman") Irrigation use is huge now. SO many farmers use it. Farmers when the dust bowl happened would not have been able to buffer the effects of drought. This is a farming practice that has been very important. “Fortunately, the next major drought will not cause a second dust bowl, as we are now better able to prevent soil erosion.” ("Lieberman") We are now better able to prevent soil erosion because of new farming practices implanted since the Dust Bowl.”Poor agricultural practices and years of sustained drought caused the Dust Bowl.” ("About the Dust Bowl" This is now preventable because we have new farming practices since the dust
Natural conditions contributed to the cause of the Dust Bowl. During the year of 1936, North America was dealt an extreme am...
Farming was the major growing production in the United States in the 1930's. Panhandle farming attached many people because it attracted many people searching for work. The best crop that was prospering around the country was wheat. The world needed it and the United States could supply it easily because of rich mineral soil. In the beginning of the 1930's it was dry but most farmers made a wheat crop. In 1931 everyone started farming wheat. The wheat crop forced the price down from sixty-eight cents/ bushels in July 1930 to twenty-five cents/ bushels July 1931. Many farmers went broke and others abandoned their fields. As the storms approached the farmers were getting ready. Farmers increased their milking cowherds. The cream from the cows was sold to make milk and the skim milk was fed to the chickens and pigs. When normal feed crops failed, thistles were harvested, and when thistles failed, hardy souls dug up soap weed, which was chopped in a feed mill or by hand and fed to the stock. This was a backbreaking, disheartening chore, which would have broken weaker people. But to the credit of the residents of the Dust Bowl, they shouldered their task and carried on. The people of the region made it because they knew how to take the everyday practical things, which had been used for years and adapt them to meet the crisis.
The drought caused a lot of unfavorable conditions for farmers in the southwest. In Worster’s book he says “Few of us want to live in the region now. There is too much wind, dirt, flatness, space, barbed wire, drought, uncertainty, hard work…” (Worster 105). The droughts caused many unfavorable condition throughout the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles and neighboring sections of Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico. Thus, roughly one-third of Texas and Oklahoman farmers left their homes and headed to California in search of migrant work. The droughts during the 1930s are a drastically misrepresented factor of the Dust bowl considering “the 1930s droughts were, in the words of a Weather Bureau scientist, the worst in the climatological history of the country.” (Worster 232) Some of the direct effects of the droughts were that many of the farmers’ crops were damaged by deficient rainfall, high temperatures, and high winds, as well as insect infestations and dust storms that accompanied these conditions. What essentially happened was that the soil lacked the stronger root system of grass as an anchor, so the winds easily picked up the loose topsoil and swirled it into dense dust clouds, called “black blizzards.” The constant dry weather caused crops to fail, leaving the plowed fields exposed to wind erosion. The effects of the drought happened so rapidly and progressively over time that
The Dust Bowl was "the darkest moment in the twentieth-century life of the southern plains," (pg. 4) as described by Donald Worster in his book "The Dust Bowl." It was a time of drought, famine, and poverty that existed in the 1930's. It's cause, as Worster presents in a very thorough manner, was a chain of events that was perpetuated by the basic capitalistic society's "need" for expansion and consumption. Considered by some as one of the worst ecological catastrophes in the history of man, Worster argues that the Dust Bowl was created not by nature's work, but by an American culture that was working exactly the way it was planned. In essence, the Dust Bowl was the effect of a society, which deliberately set out to take all it could from the earth while giving next to nothing back.
The Dust Bowl was also known as the “Dirty Thirties” which took its toll (Dunn n. pag.). The decade from the Dust Bowl was filled with extreme conditions such as tornadoes, floods, droughts, and dirt storms. The Dust Bowl occurred in the midwestern states of Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma. Within these states the conditions affected many peoples lives. The Dust Bowl had gotten its name after Black Sunday, April 14,1935( Ganzel n. pag.). While traveling through the midwest a reporter named Robert Geige, wrote, “Three little words achingly familiar on a western farmer’s tongue, rule life in the Dust Bowl of the continent- if it rains” (The Drought n. pag.). People back then used the term Dust Bowl to help describe the people that lived in the hard times of the drought stricken region during the Great Depression. The Dust Bowl is still a term we use today to describe the harsh times of the droughts and dirt storms. The Dust Bowl was a harsh time to live in, it affected many things such as: the way people lived and farming.
...elful of fine sand flung against the face. People caught in their own yards grope for the doorstep. Cars come to a standstill, for no light in the world can penetrate that swirling murk... We live with the dust, eat it, sleep with it, watch it strip us of possessions and the hope of possessions. It is becoming Real." said by Avis D. Carlson (Ganzel, The Dust Bowl). The farmers could have colorful fruits on one day, and then the next it would turn black the next. People were getting really tired of the drought and were desperate to try anything to let rain fall. This one guy named Tex Thorton had a crazy idea that explosions would give some excitement to the atmosphere and rain fall would happen. Surprisingly, after a couple of explosions; a little bit of snow began to fall from the sky. But it wasn’t what the people were looking for. Then on one random day a group
The Dust Bowl, like I said before, was a ten year dust storm that had brought tragedy to the states of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and New Mexico(Dust Bowl). Over weeks of time the sky could be dark for days and most homes that were stable still had thick layers of dirt on them. Topsoil was carried by the ton, from barren fields across hundreds of miles from the Southern and
To conclude, the droughts ended in the period of 1940. The Dust Bowl was much more complicated than a man-made environmental disaster. It was a huge catastrophe of the world you couldn’t even imagine happening in the present. It is known for the hundreds of storms killing everything in sight, especially children. McArthur points out "Although the rain brought back life to the prairie, the Dust Bowl remains a significance memory for all Americans. It was a learning experience for the Unites States, but a lesson that came with suffering.” (35). We are taking the experience of the Dust Bowl and bringing it into today’s techniques to avoid another environmental catastrophe.
On a website called Drought Disasters, sponsored by Browing University, it was written “the seeds of the Dust Bowl may have been sown during the early 1920s. However, overproduction of wheat coupled with the Great Depression led to severely reduced market prices” (Black Sunday). In the ICE case study number 288 Noel Sanders writes, “The region of the Dust Bowl was an area most affected by the drought - Kansas, southeastern Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Northern Texas. But a much larger areas, all the way to the east coast felt the impact” (Sander). With the help of new mech...