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Examining Conclusions
| The story of the Dust Bowl as traditionally told is one of the unbridled expansion of agriculture using techniques ill suited to the grasslands of the Great Plains. The story goes that with the advent of mechanized technology, a huge growth in demand for winter wheat following World War I, and more rain than normal in the early to mid 1920s the result was an ecological disaster when drought returned to the region later in the 1920s. Recent research has put parts of the traditional story in doubt, however. Historians Geoff Cunfer and Myron Gutmann have used GIS techniques to create map overlays that suggest a somewhat different conclusion. In the following activity you will use your GIS software to examine census, soil, and climate data from the 1930s and test conclusions about the Dust Bowl for yourself. |
The classic account of the Dust Bowl is by Donald Worster in his award winning book Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. His thesis is laid out clearly in the introduction:
- The Dust Bowl was the darkest moment in the twentieth-century life of the southern plains. The name suggests a place - a region whose borders are as inexact and shifting as a sand dune. But it was also an event of national, even planetary, significance, A widely respected authority on world food problems, George Borgstrom, has ranked the creation of the Dust Bowl as one of the three worst ecological blunders in history.' The other two are the deforestation of China's up- lands about 3000 B.C which produced centuries of silting and flooding, and the destruction of Mediterranean vegetation by livestock, which left once fertile lands eroded and impoverished. Unlike either of those events, however, the Dust Bowl took only 50 years to accomplish. It cannot be blamed on illiteracy or overpopulation or social disorder. It came about because the culture was operating in precisely the way it was supposed to. Americans blazed their way across a richly endowed continent with a ruthless, devastating efficiency unmatched by any people anywhere. When the white men came to the plains, they talked expansively of "busting" and "breaking" the land. And that is exactly what they did. Some environmental catastrophes are nature's work, others are the slowly accumulating effects of ignorance or poverty. The Dust Bowl, in contrast, was the inevitable outcome of a culture that deliberately, self-consciously, set itself that task of dominating and exploiting the land for all it was worth.1
Drought happens, claims Worster, but it was American culture - expansionism, capitalism, and mechanized factory farming - that created the conditions necessary for the Dust Bowl. If true, there should be a close correlation between the areas of the worst dust bowl conditions and the most intensive plains farming. Was there? Or were there other factors that had a more significant impact? These are questions that you will consider for yourself using available soils, climate, and agricultural data.
An Example to Get You Started -
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Let's look again at the map showing the % of Land in Crops from 1930 - this time with an overlay showing the area of most severe dust storm activity at the height of the drought in 1935. There is some correlation between the counties where farming was practiced most intensely and the area of most severe storms. Over 50% of the cropland in a few of the counties in the dust region was planted in crops. But in many others the percentage was below 45%.
There were a number of other factors that may have contributed to dust activity. Livestock had grazed the plains in great numbers and concentration since the 1880s. Soils varied and so did the climate. Specifically, temperatures and precipitation differed from regional averages during the 1930s.
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Start-up your GIS software and let's explore the conclusions of a more recent history of farming on the Great Plains. According to Geoff Cunfer in an essay entitled Causes of the Dust Bowl:
- Drought played "a prominent role in causing the Dust Bowl. Plowing for crops certainly exposed land to erosion, ... but ... the ways people used the land had less to do with creating dust storms than did the weather. ... It is time for environmental historians to consider the possibility that dust storms are a normal ecological disturbance that conincides with extended periods of drought and high temperatures on the southern plains, rather than evidence of human ecological failure."2
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Continue with the Examining Conclusions worksheet.
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