Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s

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OUP USA, Sep 16, 2004 - Business & Economics - 290 pages
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.
 

Selected pages

Contents

INTRODUCTION
3
A DARKLING PLAIN
9
The Black Blizzards Roll In
10
If It Rains
26
Okies and Exodusters
44
PRELUDE TO DUST
65
What Holds the Earth Together
66
Sodbusting
80
Unsettled Ground
140
The Wheat Farmer and the Welfare State
148
A Sense of Place
164
A NEW DEAL FOR THE LAND
180
Facing up to Limits
180
Learning from Nature
198
Make Two Blades of Grass Grow
210
ON A THIN EDGE
231

CIMARRON COUNTY OKLAHOMA
99
Frontier in Ruins
100
When the Cattle Ate Tumbleweeds
108
Hard Times in the Panhandle
118
HASKELL COUNTY KANSAS
139
AFTERWORD
244
NOTES
255
INDEX
283
Copyright

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About the author (2004)

Donald Worster is Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Kansas and the author of A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell.