Of droughts and dust bowls
Libby J. Goldstein (WLockeretz@infonet.tufts.edu)
Fri, 24 May 96 14:12:12 EDT
Julie Elfving's recent posting on the current drought in the Plains is right
on the mark in differntiating drought, a natural phenomenon, from dust
storms, a (largely) man-made phenomenon. There have been many serious
droughts on the Plains before; in fact, in every odd-numbered decade has had
one at least since settlement by whites in the 1870s, leading to a "feast or
famine" pattern of settlement (and de-settlement). The seriousness of the
resulting soil erosion depends greatly on how the land has been treated. The
"dirty thirties" reflected severe abuse of the land, arising from the great
plow-up prompted by World War I, overspecialization in cash crops, mainly
wheat, because of extreme economic pressures during the agricultural
depression of the 1920s and the Great Depression of the 1930s, indiscriminate
tilling of highly erodible grasslands when gasoline tractors became available
(1920s), and other human factors.
Around the time of the severe 1970s drought (and its attendant soil erosion,
which was bad but not as bad as in the 1930s), I ended an article on the
subject this way: "That there will be another drought we can predict quite
confidently, since drought is a physical phenomenon entirely outside our
control. But how much damage it will do is very much within our control and
therefore much harder to predict" ("The Lessons of the Dust Bowl," American
Scientist 66(5):560-569 [1978]). Unfortunately, it seems we are about to
learn (once more).
William Lockeretz
Tufts University