OK, these tRumpified times are hard, but one shouldn't forget that they have been even worse, not all that long ago. tRump's ongoing war on science and recent closure of several kinds of science departments made me think of a very difficult time period: The days of the "Dust Bowl" in the 1930s that sent good and hard-working people down a depressing social slope. Many families left the hardest hit regions in Texas, Kansas, New Mexico, the Oklahoma Panhandle, and Colorado to make a new life in other parts of America: They went west, hoping for the best, even though they may have wanted to stay on what had been fertile land.
The reason for this disaster was severe drought, wind erosion, and violent storms. All the way to the coast of the Atlantic coasts there were risks of darkening skies and suffocating dust-filled air. It has been said that the Dust Bowl covered 100 million acres in 1935, but by 1940 it had declined to approxiate 20-25 million acres, but still the lands were desert-like, also for the lack of rain.
People suffered both mentally, physically and socially, one of the reasons for this evil "spiral downwards" being that science seemingly wasn't up to this situation. There should have been warnings several years before it happened, as there would be today when made possible. I don't say that there will be new Dust Bowls or other just as serious or even worse natural catastrophes, only that tRump's war on science is very, very short-sighted. After all, natural disasters may happen, and our only protection against them is vigilance and highly educated scientists.
Ironically enough, what really brought attention to the desperate situation was, that in 1934 a lot of dust fell on the Mall and The White House in Washington, D.C.. The same year The Dalhart Wind Erosion Control Project was established. Also there were measures, for instance in form of loans, to make the farmers protect their land, but still, many chose to leave their homes: Between 1935 and 1937 over 34 percent of the farmers in the area left. I take it that some of these were those who had been known as more or less slack farmers. After all, the Dust Bowl wasn't only a natural disaster, but - up to a point - also a human lack of diligence and reliability. Many seem to have given up on the art of agriculture, so to speak. They let the grass, that kept the soil where it belonged, get destroyed, both by having too many cattle feed on it, and ploughing it too hard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/dust-bowl
No comments:
Post a Comment