Dust Bowl by Donald Worster (2004, Hardcover, Anniversary)

According to Donald Worster in Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, the environmental catastrophe of the Dust Bowl was unequivocally linked to the economical disaster of the Great Depression, “that the same society produced them both, and for similar reasons.” (p. 5) He discusses the people affected by the Dust Bowl: the “Okies” who fled to California, the families who remained in the Great Plains to fight it out, and the nation whose health was damaged by a decrease in air quality. More importantly, Worster explains that the greedy wheat farmers destroyed the ecological balance of the Great Plains during and after World War I. Furthermore, he argues that capitalist-driven greed led to an increased exploitation of the Great Plains, thereby laying the foundation for nature to do battle with much of our nation during the 1930s. He also carefully examines the tenets of environmentalism and compares them with the nature of capitalism.

The dust storms of the 1930s tortured the southern plains and “severely tested” the men and women who lived there. (p. 25) The grasslands that once “offered unexplored possibilities” wreaked havoc on those that chose to stay and forced others to flee from their homes. (p. 3) Just as John Steinbeck illustrated in The Grapes of Wrath, Worster discusses the plight of the “Okies” who sought refuge in California, only to discover that the state offered little more than meager pay as “migrant labor.” For those who chose to battle the blinding dust blizzards, Worster devotes two sections of his narrative. He observes that the residents of Cimarron County, Oklahoma, and Haskell County, Kansas remained unshaken and endured the dirt, dust, and grime. To avoid such future disasters, however, Worster calls for changes in the traditions of our society. We must, he advocates, respect the limits of the environment and make “peace with the natural order of this continent.” (p. 8)

According to Worster, historians tend to eschew the word “capitalism” in conjunction with the Dust Bowl. This is, he argues, a simplistic approach to a complex decade that “revealed fundamental weaknesses in the traditional culture of America, the one in ecological terms, the other in economic.” (p. 5) Studying the Dust Bowl and other environmental tragedies is, for Worster, a lesson for future generations; although nature is a source of capital that presents a “set of economic assets” for our nation, human beings are obligated to respect the environment while they use it for “constant self advancement.” (p. 6)

At the very heart of American society and culture is capitalism. Unfortunately, this concept has far-reaching ramifications. In the case of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, the entire nation endured a choking swirl of dust that often seemed never-ending; however, the residents of the Great Plains paid the highest price for economic advancement and the exploitation of nature. Worster concludes that science and technology lack the ability to heal wounds inflicted upon the earth; he appeals to all Americans to learn “how we might live on earth without depleting or destroying its fabric of life, without ignoring or abandoning our natural allies in the quest for survival.” (p. 254)