Dust Bowl Essay

With the help of mechanized farming, farmers produced record crops during the 1931 season.

He sums up the "capital ethos" of ecology into three simply stated maxims: nature must be seen as capital, man has a right/obligation to use this capital for constant self-advancement, and the social order should permit and encourage this continual increase of personal wealth (pg. The affects of the Dust Bowl caused settlers nearly a decade of suffering.

6) It is through these basic beliefs that Worster claims the plainsmen ignored all environmental limits, much like the brokers and investors on Wall Street ignored a top-heavy economy. No the Dust Bowl occurred in the plain states from 1931 to1939. What do people see when they think of the Dust Bowl? The Dust Bowl became so bad that the Red Cross called for a massive delivery of dust masks as breathing became difficult. After the Dust Bowl had occurred it changed many viewpoints of people.

Worster explains that our business-oriented society began to transform farming into a mass-producing industrial machine, becoming another excess of free enterprise that not even Roosevelt's "New Deal" could remedy.

­­When pione­ers headed west in the late 19th century, many couldn't resist the lure of the tall gras­sy land in the semiarid midwestern and southern plains of the United States. They were prosperous in the decades that followed, but when the 1930s rolled in, so did strong winds, drought and clouds of dust that plagued nearly 75 percent of the United States between 19 [source: PBS]. The Dust Bowl brought ecological, economical and human misery to America during a time when it was already suffering under the Great Depression.

The wheat market was flooded, and people were too poor to buy.

Farmers were unable to earn back their production costs and expanded their fields in an effort to turn a profit -- they covered the prairie with wheat in place of the natural drought-resistant grasses and left any unused fields bare.The Dust Bowl is a natural disaster that devastated the Midwest in the 1930s.It was the worst drought in North America in 1,000 years."Both events revealed fundamental weaknesses in the traditional culture of America, the one in ecological terms, the other in economic." (pg. "The Dust Bowl taught farmers new farming methods and techniques. The Dust Bowl was located in the mid west, but mostly in the southern plains. The Dust Bowl, which was about 100 million acres, was becoming a barren wasteland. Soil conservation techniques were now needed in the Dust Bowl. The drought continued and in 1939 the farmers of the Dust Bowl called it the "American Sahara," and left. Thanks to the events of the Dust Bowl we now have government backed plans to save the natural resources. 5) Worster proposes that in American society, as in all others, there are certain accepted ways of using the land. Students create an evidence-based argument about contributing factors and whether or not the Dust Bowl was a perfect storm.Source A: Columbia University: Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory article Source B: National Drought Mitigation Center: Rain follows the plow.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.But plow-based farming in this re­gion cultivated an unexpected yield: the loss of fertile topsoil that literally blew away in the winds, leaving the land vulnerable to drought and inhospitable for growing crops. By 1932, 14 dust storms, known as black blizzards were reported, and in just one year, the number increased to nearly 40. The government enacted aid programs to help, but it wasn't until 1939 when the rain returned that relief came.Next we'll explore the migration and the measures taken to save the heartland.