A New Dust Bowl Coming?

A New Dust Bowl Coming?

As we have commented on earlier in our examination of Pare Lorentz’s The Plow that Broke the Plains (1937), the idea of “eco-memories” are complicated and prone to be shunted aside for ideas of endless progress and boundless wealth extracted from “nature.” As the film asserts:

High winds and sun

A Country without rivers

And with little rain

Settler: Plow at your peril

Two hundred miles from water

Two hundred miles from town

But the land is new

Many were disappointed

The rains failed

And the sun baked the light soil.

The drought that is now plaguing a significant portion of the U.S., however, may soon lead to conditions favorable to a repeat of the parched 1930s. Everything is in place. A complacent set of state governments that refuse to acknowledge scientific facts, coupled with the over-farming in the Plain States, have created conditions that will, many people warn, lead to a recurrence of the catastrophe of the 1930s. Looking at Lorentz’s short documentary that carefully details the causes of the disaster also aligns with recent historical texts by Donald Worster, such as Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (1979) and Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (1985), as well as The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (2006) by Timothy Egan.

Endless stories about shrinking water supplies, depletion of aquifers, sale of cattle due to grass die off are also coupled with farmers exploiting marginal land for profit, stripping protective crop covers to feed stock, and opening up land that was set aside in the 1930s to prevent the very disasters that had just visited the water of the U.S.

Texas now is suing other states for access to river water. Oklahoma and Kansas are disaster areas due to a blasted out wheat crop. Farmers are selling their water allotments to energy companies to use for “fracking.” One more season of hard drought, paired with high winds, may produce the very conditions documented by Lorentz and novelists like John Steinbeck in Grapes of Wrath.

The fragility of the landscape is duplicated by the fragility of memory. Eco-disasters are quickly forgotten, and if they are repeated, it will not be because warnings were not present, but that people refuse to remember or believe that documentary images of whole cities being buried in “dust storms” are nothing more than the overheated imagination of liberal filmmakers in the faraway Neverland of Hollywood.