You might have heard snatches of conversations about food and shortages water, climate change, and other disturbing subjects. If you painted them as irrelevant or unrealistic, you might want to reconsider that. If you think humans are too weak to affect the environment or cause disasters, consider this & mdash; it has already happened.
During the 1930s, when the Great Depression was already wreaked havoc on the lives of millions, a series of droughts hit the American prairies. Droughts are simply natural events, but the damage to the earth & mdash; and subsequently to life and residents mdash; could have been easily avoided.
During this period, clouds of dust reaching about 0 miles in width would cover whole cities. The clouds blocked the sun and covered everything in the dust.
Clouds of dust enveloping entire towns was a common, if not an event daily throughout the West in the 30s Drought caused the topsoil, bulk overexploitation, to blow.
The dust storms were so huge they blew across the country and affected the cities of the East Coast, including New York and Washington, DC
Since the farmers at the time had limited knowledge appropriate agricultural techniques to the natural landscape, they had been inadvertently damaging their land for decades. They plowed too deeply into the topsoil, which killed off the native grasses whose roots long helped keep the soil and water in place.
This looks like a huge fire, but it is dust.
Depression has caused wheat prices to fall, and if the Government advised reducing production, many farmers planted more crops. Before that, the First World War and various other world events have caused an increase in prices, and the region has seen farmland are increasing from 100 to 1920. The regions increased agricultural land for less natural spaces and the potential 'erosion. In addition to erosion, many cotton farmers usually burn their fields at the end of the season, which was sucking the nutrients from the soil.
All this means that, when drought struck in 1932, conditions were much worse than they could have been. A drought would have been difficult for farmers, but nothing like the decade of the devastation that followed.
Many people have compared to the end of the world, and some thought that the end of time had come. They had good reasons: natural disasters that happened closely resembled the biblical plagues, such as dust blotting out the sun and make it dark at midday. Because most of the land had been rendered sterile, swarms of insects and rabbits herds really do descend on the cities in search of food, their natural habitat provided nothing.
The meadows have become like deserts, dust drifts burying buildings and cars.
states that have been hardest hit were Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, Colorado and New Mexico. This huge swath of the country has provided a significant amount of food for the population.
A farmer and his two young children heading into a dust storm in Oklahoma, 1936.
Humans also felt the effects of storms. With dust blowing everywhere, many fell sick and died of dust pneumonia, which causes the lungs to be coated in dust that they can not be erased. Others have died of malnutrition. Oklahoma and Kansas have been particularly affected by these deaths.
Blowing dust was so thick that everyone, including animals the necessary masks. Here two children in eastern Colorado tie a towel on the nose of their horse.
Denver Post
Two girls try to pump water Colorado while keeping their hands on their face to keep from inhaling dust.
with their farms and livelihoods out of commission, many families simply left.
They headed west in "greener pastures" migration, with a large number of migrant workers become farms of California. to date, this era the largest American migration brand in a short time, with 86,000 people moving in one year.
He was not only farmers who have left. business owners and other professionals who have made their lives in agricultural communities also left. Some went to the west coast, while ' others simply moved to the next county. During the 1930s, there were also many migrants in the plains indicates that there were residents.
this detached house was one of the last houses still occupied in this area of Texas. Most families had left this time.
In response to this situation, President Roosevelt launched a number of soil conservation programs to achieve a balanced ecology again. Food and clothing were distributed to the needy. In the late 1930s, after the use of better agricultural techniques, farmers soil erosion fall by almost 65%.
huge belts of trees were also planted to stop the winds and retain water and soil. The drought ended in 1939 with a return of steady rain, but the land had been seriously depleted. Worst of all, many farmers have gone back to the use of unsustainable agricultural methods.
The devastation was so great that pictures of it, and excerpts of interviews with survivors, were used in the 2014 movie Interstellar , which deals with a world Dust Bowl-like scenario.
A dust storm in Stratford, Texas, April 1935.
Today, it is still concerned about whether or not sustainable food production. Our agricultural technology is new, but there are doubts about what he might do to the earth, both locally and globally, and its impact on human health. The country has finally rebounded from the Dust Bowl, but we hope something like this does not happen again to make us more cautious.
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