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The Dust Bowl 3: Resolution

The Dust Bowl 3: Resolution

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 In two earlier episodes, we talked about the greatest environmental disaster in U.S. history: the Dust Bowl, which killed thousands and left millions homeless. It happened when the Great Depression and prolonged drought coincided, causing farmers to abandon their fields across the Great Plains. Winds carried a billion tons of soil into the air, creating devastating dust storms that blew across the country. The Dust Bowl era began in 1931. What ended it? As early as 1933, the government established soil erosion camps in the region. They dispatched thousands of workers to rehabilitate millions of acres and began to teach farmers how to protect their soils. In 1937, they stepped up these efforts, paying farmers to practice more expensive soil preservation techniques, like terracing, crop rotation, no-till farming, and planting cover crops. Within a year, this massive effort had reduced soil loss by 65 percent. But farmers still struggled. So the government began the Shelterbelt Project. It planted 200 million trees in a hundred-mile-wide belt from Texas to Canada, to contain soil and water and protect farms from wind. It remains the largest environmental remediation project in American history. Finally, in 1939 the rains returned, and the drought ended. Wiser, crisis-hardened farmers began growing crops again, using methods to better resist droughts common to this region.
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