Dust Bowl (Great Plains of the United States in the 1930s)

Author: Donald Worster
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-01-01
Features: "Ecology and Humanity" Translation Series. Historian Donald Worster grew up on the Great Plains. This record of the destructive era between 1929 and 1939 is both a general history of the Great Plains and a focused study of two special dust bowl regions—Cimarron County, Oklahoma, and Haskell County, Kansas. Worster explains how the same society that caused the Great Depression also bred the dust bowl, and how President Roosevelt's New Deal failed to grasp the root causes of the disaster. He also pays special attention to exploring whether the conditions mentioned earlier still exist today and whether they could potentially lead to even more severe crises. The Dust Bowl demonstrates how an ecological perspective can shed light on our history and even our future.