![]() With the passage of time, “Dust Bowl” has become more broadly and generically used to describe droughts in western North America for example, the 2012 drought in the midwestern US spawned articles in a range of popular journals including Forbes, the Herald Tribune, National Geographic, the New York Times, and Time asking if a “new Dust Bowl” was upon us. In fact, similar environmental conditions prevailed across large parts of the Great Plains that were not popularly associated with the Dust Bowl, including the Dakotas and southern portions of Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada (Fig. A study by Porter and Finchum ( 2009) found twenty-eight different published cartographical representations of the Dust Bowl, with people who actually lived on the southern Great Plains during the 1930s tending to identify its location in much the same way as did Worster ( 1979) in his well-known environmental history of the region, which was in turn based on US Soil Conservation Service wind erosion maps (Fig. The exact boundaries of the Dust Bowl are subjective. The phrase “Dust Bowl” originated in a 1935 newspaper account of a tremendous dust storm that drifted across Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, and was quickly adopted more widely as a term to describe that part of the southern Plains where dust storms and soil erosion were especially common and severe (Hurt 1981). What were “the Dust Bowl” and the “Dirty Thirties”? We have found that our knowledge of the physical causes and human impacts of Dust Bowl era droughts remains incomplete and that the Dirty Thirties still have much to teach us about life in the present era of global warming. We have also sought to identify potential avenues for future research, considering in particular future policymaking and human capacity to adapt to environmental change. We have sought to draw out common themes in terms of not only what natural and social scientists have learned about the Dust Bowl era itself, but also how insights gained from the study of that period are helping to enhance our understanding of climate–human relations more generally. In this article, we review and synthesize the current state of scholarly knowledge of Dust Bowl era droughts, their ecological or socio-economic impacts, and the use of events from that period as a means to develop insights into related phenomena. Comparisons of the 2008 financial crisis to the Great Depression and the effects of recent droughts on global food prices are additional elements that influence current Dust Bowl research. These include, but are not limited to, growing interest in the causes of droughts and their return frequency, the availability of new atmospheric datasets, greater analog-based research on the human dimensions of climate change, new directions in environmental migration research, and the growth in global environmental change scholarship more generally. ![]() There are a number of potential explanations for the increase in scholarly attention. ![]() This includes one subset of works that seeks to explain or interpret the causes and consequences of events of the 1930s and another that uses events of the Dust Bowl era as learning vehicles and analogs to test datasets, methods, and theories with broader applicability to global change research. What is also notable, and is the focus of the present article, is that there has been considerable growth in scholarship on the subject in recent years, across a wide range of natural and social science disciplines. The subject of hundreds of popular books and films in subsequent decades, “the worst hard time” as author Timothy Egan ( 2006) has called it, has enjoyed a resurgence in public attention following the 2008 financial crisis, recent droughts in the US corn belt, and the November 2012 release of the Ken Burns documentary film The Dust Bowl. Known colloquially as the “Dirty Thirties” or “the Dust Bowl years,” they captured an important place in wider popular memory through John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath ( 1939) and the iconic images of US Farm Security Administration photographers. During the worst years of the Great Depression, large areas of the North American Great Plains experienced severe, multi-year droughts that led to soil erosion, dust storms, farm abandonments, personal hardships, and distress migration on scales not previously seen. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |