by Donald Worster
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Product Description
In the mid 1930s, North America's Great Plains faced one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in world history. Donald Worster's classic chronicle of the devastating years between 1929 and 1939 tells the story of the Dust Bowl in ecological as well as human terms. Now, twenty-five years after his book helped to define the new field of environmental history, Worster shares his more recent thoughts on the subject of the land and how humans interact with it. In a new afterword, he links the Dust Bowl to current political, economic and ecological issues--including the American livestock industry's exploitation of the Great Plains, and the on-going problem of desertification, which has now become a global phenomenon. He reflects on the state of the plains today and the threat of a new dustbowl. He outlines some solutions that have been proposed, such as "the Buffalo Commons," where deer, antelope, bison and elk would once more roam freely, and suggests that we may yet witness a Great Plains where native flora and fauna flourish while applied ecologists show farmers how to raise food on land modeled after the natural prairies that once existed.
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Average Customer Review:
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 My favorite book about the Dust Bowl, 2007-10-16
Looking at the cover, this book seems as if it's going to be something really academic--and it is scholarly and knowledgeable--but it's never academic in the bad sense, in the boring sense.
I read this right after reading Timothy Egan's "The Worst Hard Time," and found this book's descriptions of the devastation caused by the 1930s Dust Bowl to be much more vivid and gripping, this book's facts to be much quirkier and more interesting, and this book's scope to feel much broader and more widely felt. With "The Worst Hard Time," I got the idea that the whole thing really only affected a handful of counties, which I knew was wrong, but with this book there was no denying just how epic the whole ordeal was.
I loved this book (despite its author's amusing tendency to quote Marx) and consider it to be perhaps the very best book I've read about the Dust Bowl--and I've read a few of them. You should read it, for sure.
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
 Some interesting history and ideas in a very dry context, 2007-04-12
In the midst of the Great Depression in the 1930's, the Great Plains states faced the additional hardship of one of the worst environmental disasters commonly known as the Dust Bowl. Traditionally grassland, the area was not well-suited to the kind of extensive farming that preceeded those years. And once the natural grass which held the soil together was gone and the regular cycle of drought hit, there was nothing to stop the wind from blowing it across the land or into huge dust storms that raged for weeks on end. History usually focuses only on the social and economic effects of the Dust Bowl, but Worster adds the environment into the mix and seeks to find the root cause of this man-made disaster. He opens with a quote from Karl Marx, and although he dismisses that in his newly added Afterword as mere bravado, it seems apparent throughout his writting that he's a Marxist in his beliefs. He places the blame on American culture and Capitalism - not on the people, but the culture that encourages and drives them to create bigger farms and use machinery that more effectively tills the land. He argues that inherent to American culture is this behavior of exploiting the land for profit and only through government intervention and control can we avoid this kind of disaster in the future.
I can agree that the greed of Capitalism is laid bare in this disaster and that the land is probably not suitable to the kind of exessive use that happens there. But I'm not convinced that his Socialist suggestions (which unfortunately are not offered in a very concise or summarized way) are the answer. He seems to dismiss and ignore the inherent problems in Socialism and it's failure to provide for the people under it's rule. Capitalism may not be perfect, but it taps into mankind's natural desire to better one's position through individual efforts, while Socialism in theory recognizes the brotherhood of mankind but fails to provide for even the basic needs of the people (even the author recognizes it is this Capitalist economy that provides food for most of the world). And his suggestions for population control or that the people in that area should go back to bare subsistence farming seems far-fetched. But at least the author is exploring new ideas (or probably just regurgitating old ones from the 60's and 70's), and for that I give him credit.
But while I found many aspects of the book interesting and insightful, overall it's pretty dry reading (pun intended). The statistics become a bit boring and make the book feel excessively academic. The lectures against the evils of American culture were tiresome, and I felt he had a very condescending attitude when discussing the people affected. And I would have enjoyed a better discussion on the natural ecology of the land and it's native plants and animals, which I think would have been more inspiring. But on a personal aside, the one thing that made me realize how boring the book was becoming for me was when I kept losing my place (I'd forget to put the bookmark back where I left off). But when I picked it up again I would read for several pages before I realized that wasn't actually where I left off before. It was like it didn't matter where I read - it all kinda flowed together.
3 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
BEAUTIFUL LANDSCAPE, UGLY ECONOMICS, 2006-06-24
In the mid thirties, drought and land mismanagement created huge dust storms over the plains known as 'black blizzards'. Worster tells us something about them in the first chapter, but reserves most of his ink describing the economic and social conditions that allowed the disaster to happen. I disagree fully with his arguments, and also think he spent too much time on Oklahoma and Kansas. The storms affected a much wider area than just Cimmaron county.
Worster is a Marxist who is upset that we have used our land in this country to produce so much. He sees the creation of wealth as an evil to be controlled, if not eliminated. Our disregard for ecology created the dust bowl, he says, and will likely bring another in the future. Certainly he is right that some destructive farming practices made the drought situation worse. But are we not the most productive agricultural nation on earth? Clearly our capitalist system has proved its worth, on the farm as elsewhere. In the 70's, another drought period, we even fed the Russians, who were operating under a socialist, marxist inspired economy. Worster seems to yearn for a simpler time, a time when all was not caught up in the rat race. I believe we can all understand and even sympathize with this. But it is no excuse for lousy economics.
4 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
"Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s" , 2006-04-09
Donald Worster contends that the destruction of the southern plains was one of the most terrible ecological disasters in human history. Human beings, not nature, heaven, or hell, created this ecological tragedy. It was the result of unbridled greed and arrogance on the part of expansion driven Americans and their erroneous assumptions about soil, plants, and rain. According to Worster, the dust bowl happened because the system worked, not because it failed. Farmers of the Great Plains were a varied group, they were not merely families that worked the land and grew crops. They were individuals and corporations who, because of greed and an unyielding attitude, set out to break the land and force it to provide the lifestyle they chose. They were successful in their first goal; they did indeed break the land. The overwhelming failure and huge cost of the second goal are the main topics of the book, Dust Bowl.
The dust bowl was one of the three worst ecological blunders in history . The other two were the deforestation of China 's uplands circa 3000 BC, and the destruction of Mediterranean vegetation by livestock. China 's deforestation produced centuries of silting and flooding. The ruin of Mediterranean flora left once fertile lands eroded and impoverished. However, the big difference between the dust bowl and the other disasters is that the dust bowl took only fifty years to achieve. The irony of the label `dust bowl' is that while some thought the term was a satire on college football (orange bowl, rose bowl.
Drought was a major contributing factor to the dust bowl. Worster defines drought as a relative term dependent on one's concept of normal. Climatologists of the dust bowl era defined drought as precipitation deficiencies of at least 15 percent of the historical mean . The difference between earth and dust is that dirt is considered earth when it is in place growing food and offering humans a place on which to stand or build . Dust is when that same dirt is loose and becomes airborne (12-13). In the 1930s, once that dirt hit the air people in the dust bowl were on the look out for black blizzards and sand blows. Black blizzards were dust storms, or dusters, that rose off of the plains like a long wall of muddy water as high as 7000 or 8000 feet . These dusters were caused by a polar continental air mass that lifted the dirt high off the ground. Sometimes the black blizzards were attended by thunder and lightening storms, or worse an eerie silence (14). Sand blows were dust storms that were created by low sirocco-like winds that came from the southwest and caused sandy soils to form sand dunes.
In the novel The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck situated the Joad family in Sallisaw Oklahoma , on the Arkansas border about 400 miles east of Guymon and the panhandle dust center. The Joads had been evicted from their farm in what Steinbeck presumed to be the Oklahoma dust bowl. (In reality, that region of Oklahoma was not part of the actual dust bowl). It was greedy wheat farmers and suitcase farmers with combines and tractors that drove out people like the Joads. The homeless Joads migrated down Route 66 to California where they were abused and misused by a brutal agricultural system that exploited migrant workers. Migrants were fleeing not only drought, but the machine as well. Ultimately, the Joads were displaced by avarice as much as they were by dirt and machines.
7 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
Comprehensive, but a bit dry, 2006-03-19
I had to read this book for my American history class. It is a very comprehensive and insightful book about the Dust Bowl, but in not the usual historical way. It looks deeply into the environmental roots of the Dust Bowl and has some great photographs, both ecological and social. I would highly recommend this book for anyone who i s into environmental history. (But I'm not really, so it might be a bit dry and boring for those who aren't.)
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