Our World and Everything in It

I caught a 2-hour special on the History Channel titled, “Black Blizzard.” Everyone should try to catch this as it relates to man and climate. The next airing will be this Sunday, April 26th, at 10:00 am. After seeing this I have to ask: Is history repeating itself in a bigger venue because there are a lot of similarities between the Great Depression and the Dustbowl drought with today’s global warming trend and worldwide recession? Let’s look:

1920’s-30’s U.S. Agricultural Economy

• Industrial Revolution is moving ahead yet agriculture still big part of economy.
• During Hoover’s presidency the Farm Board is created.
• Farm Board decides to boost income of U.S. farmers by withholding grains from world market to drive up prices and for federal banks to make liberal loans to farmers to sustain them while holding back their yields from the market.
• The Farm Board establishes the Grain Stabilization Corp. that begins buying up wheat, which boosts prices above world prices for a short time.
• Wheat farmers prosper causing a huge flow of people West to farm in areas known to suffer regular drought patterns.
• The plan backfires when other countries begin supplying wheat to the world markets and the U.S. wheat farmer loses out.
• The massive back load of U.S. wheat inventory further depresses market prices.
• The same happens to the U.S. cotton industry.
• Herbert Hoover refuses to intervene for the farmer and states the market will correct itself.
• Meanwhile, U.S. foreign trade decreases drastically and what should be a recession turns into a depression. The U.S. quits buying foreign and so the foreign powers default on their debts to the U.S.
• Everyone ignores the environmental impacts of over-farming the land and the dustbowl begins.

1920’s-30’s Climate

• Normal drought patterns in the central plains didn’t produce huge dust storms prior to the big wheat rush because much of the unfarmed areas are covered with desert grasses adapted over time to withstand drought and winds. These grasses keep soil from eroding.
• With the wheat rush farmers uproot most of these grasses. When wheat cannot endure normal patterns of drought no vegetation is left to stop the wind from blowing the dirt away.
• The most fertile layer of soil blows away. Dust storms are thousands of feet into the air and carry some 50 million tons of earth at a time not unlike volcanic ash rising like clouds across miles of terrain.
• The normal arrival of a jet stream from the New Zealand/ Australia area offering rain is diverted due to the massive dust clouds. 
• The dust storms increase in duration and strength perpetuating the drought.

The Great Dustbowl sets a precedent that man did and therefore can affect our climate. Much of what happened during the Dustbowl sounds familiar like forcing false markets, a greedy rush for a piece of the pie, destroying land/nature for wealth, a horrible economic crash, and subsequent devastation to ourselves and the earth.

Over farming aggravated the normal climate processes throughout the central states during the 30’s to the point it helped to sustain a prolonged and increasingly volatile weather pattern beyond the normal period of drought that had serious impacts for thousands of people especially their health. We still do not fully understand the extent to which all our ecosystems are intrinsically related. As was evidenced by the Great Dustbowl, setting one out of balance for even a brief period of time can cause increased and devastating climate patterns far past the norm.

Watch a video of the extraordinary dustbowl storms of the 30’s:

History Channel – The Black Blizzard: http://www.history.com/shows.do?action=detail&episodeId=366826

This website has many good reference sources: http://science.howstuffworks.com/dust-bowl-cause2.htm

This article relates man’s effects on the dustbowl although it leaves out the History Channel study about diverting the jet stream that would have brought drought relief: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080430152030.htm

If you can find a copy of The Surplus Farmer by Bernhard Ostrolenk published in 1932 about what was happening in the agricultural industry at the time, it should be a pretty good read. Ostrolenk stated: “The Farm Board had advised the farmer to gamble with his crop instead of urging him to market it, and these repeated statements of the Board had led farmers to believe that by withholding their wheat and cotton they could get higher prices. During 1930 it was the known surplus of agricultural commodities in the U.S. which forced farmers to face the most drastic price cuts in a decade.”

This gov’t. website correlates with Ostrolenk’s observations about holding back trade and the ensuing surplus: http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/eib3/eib3.html

Article about the forced market back then: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,846807-2,00.html

Tags: Agriculture, The Great Depression, The Great Dustbowl, The History Channel

This entry was posted on Friday, April 24th, 2009 at 9:28 pm and is filed under Drought, Earth, Environmentalism, Extreme Weather in U.S., Farm Bill, Farms/Farming, Global Warming, Health, Industry, Politics, Pollution, Science, U.S. Weather Patterns, Weather/Climate, You Tube. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.