Dust Bowl: The Dirty Thirties and Its Impact

The “Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s”, was written by Donald Worster, who admits wanted to write the book for selfish reasons, so that he would have a reason o visit the Southern Plains again. In the book he discusses the events of the “dirty thirties” in the Dust Bowl region and how it affected other areas in America. “Dust Bowl” was a term coined by a journalist and used to describe the area that was in the southern planes in the states of Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, between the years of 1931 and 1939. This area experienced massive dust storms, which left dust covering everything in its wake. These dust storms were so severe at times that it made it so that the visibility in the area was so low to where people

The stock market crash was a result of rapid growth, and banks and lenders overextending loans and investments. Overextending loans and investments resulted in factories shutting down, banks closing, people losing their life savings and millions of Americans out of work, thousands starving and homeless. The rural areas of America were much luckier than the urban in that they were not hit as hard by the depression, they were still able to grow their crops, raise their animals and continue on with life as normal for the most part. In 1930 a severe drought struck America which only helped to make the Great Depression worse for all of America, including those in rural areas with farms as it effected their ability to grow crops and water their animals. The droughts effected those in the Great Plains and their surrounding areas the most. For years the lands had been stripped of its natural vegetation and soil had been overworked to produce crops, mainly wheat in large amounts. Overworking the land caused it to lose its vitality, leaving no sod to hold the sand or powdery dirt down. Without rain these problems were just exasperated, vegetation was unable to grow back to replace what was

“The dust storms that swept across the southern plains in the 1930s created the most severe environmental catastrophe in the entire history of the white man on this continent.”(Location 445.) Had the area never been over worked and farmed to produce mass quantities of wheat and other crops the dust storms would never had happened. This is much like the economical blunder that caused the stock market crash of 1929 resulting in the Great Depression. Had the banks not been so eager to grow and approve credit and loans, essentially over working the money market, at an unusually high rate the stock market most likely would not have crashed. The causes of both the dust bowl and stock market crash were caused by the American society’s greed for wanting more than what they needed to sustain their way of