Return of the dust bowl?

This chapter challenges typical interpretations of the Dust Bowl and puts the disaster into a global frame, linking the past to the present. In so doing, the common roots of contemporary and past developments and struggles are revealed. The Dust Bowl was one spectacular instance of a global problem of soil erosion associated with capitalist colonial expansion. While the official interpretation suggests that agriculture suited for a humid region was imported to an arid region, precipitating the crisis, contemporaneous accounts illustrate how much larger the crisis was, tied up with specific social and economic developments that imposed new socio-ecological relations upon peoples of the world and upon the land irrespective of local climatic conditions. Ultimately, the common denominators across the world—from North to South America, Australia to Africa, and Southeast to East Asia—were not climate and geography, but capitalism and colonialism.

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Dust to Dust: An Age Beyond Extremes

Dust Bowls of Empire ◽

10.12987/yale/9780300230208.003.0002 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 17-37

Author(s):

Hannah Holleman

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Social Inequality ◽

First Century ◽

Dust Bowl ◽

Global Commons ◽

Freshwater Systems ◽

Salient Features ◽

Twenty First Century

This chapter presents the salient features of the Epoch of Ecological Extremes contributing to the development of Dust Bowl conditions today. The twentieth century was deemed “the Age of Extremes.” It is clear, however, that the twenty-first century is poised to surpass the twentieth to become the Epoch of Ecological Extremes. Today the interconnected issues precipitating the new Dust Bowl era are the culmination of increasingly extreme exploitation—in terms of scale and technique—of the land, of the planet's hydrocarbon repositories, and of freshwater systems. As with the 1930s Dust Bowl, this extreme abuse of the global commons is mirrored in the extreme politics required to make such destruction possible. Also like the 1930s, these developments are associated with high levels of expropriation, social inequality, oppression, and dislocation.

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Introduction

Dust Bowls of Empire ◽

10.12987/yale/9780300230208.003.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 1-16

Author(s):

Hannah Holleman

Keyword(s):

Global Market ◽

Dust Storms ◽

Dust Bowl ◽

Static Electricity ◽

Southern Plains ◽

The World ◽

Dry Conditions ◽

Crop Agriculture ◽

The U.S

This introductory chapter provides a background of the 1930s Dust Bowl on the U.S. southern plains, where the ancient grasslands that protected the soil from prairie winds and rains and nourished regional species were destroyed within just a few decades, following the violent opening of the plains to white settlement and the global market in the 1800s. Under pressure from the vagaries of the world economy, settlers sheared the land to expand cash-crop agriculture and ranching. As major drought descended on the plains, winds and static electricity lifted the desiccated, exposed topsoil, forming dust storms on an unprecedented scale. Such massive loss of soil and continued dry conditions meant the land could no longer support life as it once had. By the end of the 1930s, tens of thousands of people were displaced. Hence, when scientists today predict the increasing possibility of Dust Bowl-like conditions, they are signaling a particular kind of extreme ecological and social change.

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