Dust Bowl

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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

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