The Southern Plains in the 1930s By DONALD WORSTER
Dust Bowl,The Southern Plains in the 30s by Donald Worster published in 1979 had been considered as one of the most important works of environmental history. This classic work of Donald Worster shapes the understanding of human interactions with the southern plains consisting of the states of Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas sprawling over 100 millions acres of land. According to him, the Dust Bowl was as a result of the irrational and insistent exploitation of the southern plains through out the twentieth century resulting to environmental in- balance that wreaked havoc and was felt by the entire United States of America and even of planetary significance. Others like George Borgstrom of the world food program considered the Dust Bowl as one of the three worst ecological blunders in history. The Dust Bowl was considered the darkest moment in the twentieth century life of the southern plains as described by Donald Worster coinciding with the 1930s Great Depression all resulting from the same societal production for similar reasons. Worster begins the first chapter his book with a description of the severe drought that gripped the nation beginning in the early 1930s referring to it as the “dirty thirties”. Traditional explanations of the Dust Bowl emphasize the lack of rain as the fundamental cause of the severe dust storms that struck the southern plains. It represents a period of drought, famine, and poverty that existed in the 1930's not withstanding the crisis of Great Depression. Worster considered the cause of both crisis as a chain of events that was perpetuated by the basic capitalistic society's need for expansion and consumption with elusive breath as private property, business, laissez-faire, profit maximization , pursuit for self interest, free enterprise, an open market and the bourgeoisie. “In Worster word,during the laissez-faire expansionist 1920s, the plains were extensively plowed and put to wheat-turned in to highly mechanized factory farms that produced unprecedented harvests. Plains operators, how ever, ignored all environmental limits in this enterprise. In a more stable natural region, this sort of farming could have gone on exploiting the land much long with impunity. But on the plains, the elements of risk were higher than they were anywhere else in the country, and the destructive effects of capitalism far more sudden and dramatic. There was nothing in the plains society to check the progress of commercial farming, nothing to prevent from taking the risks it was willing to take for profit. That is how and while the Dust Bowl came about”. Considered by some as one of the worst ecological catastrophes in the history of man, Worster argues that the Dust Bowl was created not by nature's work, but by an American culture that was working exactly the way it was planned. Therefore he considered with certainty that the Dust Bowl was the effect of a society which deliberately set out to take all it could from the earth while giving next to nothing back. Worster goes forward to explained that the farmers actions on the lands were insufficient to explained the damages on the plains without taking in to consideration the social systems, set of values and economic order that brought them to the region. Therefore the concurrent existence of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression during the 1930's. Worster sets out in an attempt to show that the tragical Dust Bowl and Great Depression of the 1930s existed simultaneously not by coincidence, but by the same culture, which brought them about from similar events. Worster argues that it is no coincidence the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression struck at the same time. In fact, one of the principal themes of his book is the link between fundamental weaknesses in traditional culture of America, the one in ecological terms, the other economic. According to Worster, both suggested the need and presented an opportunity for fundamental reforms. Both events revealed fundamental weaknesses in the traditional culture of America, the one in ecological terms and the other in economic. Worster was convinced that in American society, as in all others, existed certain accepted ways of using the land. He sums up the capital ethos of ecology into three simply stated maxims which he represented as:
Nature must be seen as capital in the form of assets that can become a source of profit or advantage; Man has a right and obligation to use this capital for constant self-advancement through profits maximization and private properties accumulation; and finally the social order should permit and encourage this continual increase of personal wealth therefore protecting individuals aggressive use of nature. It is through these basic beliefs that Worster claims the plainsmen ignored all environmental limits much like the brokers and investors on Wall Street ignored a top heavy economy. While acknowledging other "contradictory values" at work in American history, Worster concludes that "capitalism was the major defining influence" in American treatment of the land, and particularly in "the laissez-faire, expansionist 1920s," the decade that laid the conditions for both the Depression and the Dust Bowl. Worster lay more emphasis on Cimarron County, OK and Haskell County, KS, to explain the effect of these ecological precepts at work. Dirt, dust, and grime, loosened from the soil as a result of excessive over plowing and "sod busting," enveloped the country and choked the lungs of the nation. And New Deal officials, un-cognizant of the deeper environmental origins of the storms (they, like farmers, blamed it on "drought") offered the afflicted only superficial hope and failed to alter "the system of non-resident tenure, factory like monoculture, and market speculation that had dominated “New Era agriculture”. Not only did it fail to induce these changes, the emerging welfare state actually prevented their occurring. In the main it propped up an agricultural economy that had proved itself to be socially and ecologically corrosive." (163).
Worster explains that our business oriented society began to transform farming into a mass producing industrial machine, becoming another excess of free enterprise that not even Roosevelt's New Deal could remedy. The dirty thirties, as it was called by many, was a time when the earth ran amok in southern plains for the better part of a decade. This great American tragedy, which was more devastating environmentally as well as economically than anything in America's past or present, painstakingly tested the spirit of the southern plainsmen. The proud folks of the south refused at first to accept government help, optimistically believing that better days were ahead. Some moved out of the plains, running from not only drought but from the new machine controlled agriculture. As John Steinbeck wrote in the bestseller The Grapes of Wrath, it was not nature that broke the people they could handle the drought. It was business farming, seeking a better return on land investments and buying tractors to pursue it, that had broken these people, smashing their identity as natural beings wedded to the land. The machines, one crop specialization, non resident farming, and soil abuse were tangible threats to the American agriculture, but it was the capitalistic economic values behind these land exploitations that drove the plainsmen from their land and created the Dust Bowl. Eventually, after years of drought and dust storms, the plains people had to accept some form of aid or fall to the lowest ranks of poverty in the land, and possibly perish. Although overall three out of four farmers stayed on their land, the mass exodus depleted the population drastically in certain areas. The government set up agency after agency to try and give federal aid to the plains farmers. Groups such as the Farm Credit Administration, the Works Progress Administration, the Land Utilization Project, and the Agricultural Adjustment program, among others, were formed to give the plainsmen some sort of relief from the hardships of the Dust Bowl. In Cimarron county, Oklahoma 306 households were drawing government relief in June 1934 of which 60 of them were paid entirely in commodities and the rest mostly in cash. President Roosevelt and the government of the United Sates seemingly planned ways to give the plains aid and when later the Supreme Court ruled that a certain agency was unconstitutional, Roosevelt was ready replaced it with another one in its place. Worster was not quite convinced with the government response to this tragedy, arguing that the government agencies relief actions were not sufficient to improve the lot of the large number of poor, marginal farmers, and in fact, none of the federal activities altered much of the factory like culture of the plains. In coherent terms the government programs failed to induce the changes that were needed to save the southern plains. Some communities were able form groups outside of the government in order to help the plains with their own plan of actions. Communities like the Haskell County, Kansas were able to organized Local women,s groups. These groups were aimed at strengthening the most common counter force of the outside consumer society with attention on the family. Ultimately though, as Worster writes, the effect of the magnetic outward pull of the capitalistic ideals was stronger than the principals of the family. Others like Lewis Gray who was a Post-Progressive Conservationists also tried to lend a hand in correcting what went wrong in the Dust Bowl. Gray was looking at possibilities to end homesteading completely, add unprofitable private lands to the public domain, and extend agricultural conservation. Although here, Worster claims these attempts were not enough, calling men like Gray problem solvers, often bogged down in the immediate issues of Depression America and did not give enough attention to the broader issues, nor did they talk boldly enough about the dimensions of change. Ecological conservationists like Paul Sears using their expertise also suggested important measures to solve the miseries cause by the dust bowl tragedy. Worster argues, though, that the conservationists would evaluate the problem, make a diagnosis, and then back off leaving the plainsmen to fix the problems. Ecologists were doomed to futility and self-deception as long as they supposed that man's use of the land was controlled by disinterested reason alone or that recommendations served up with scientific credentials would necessarily be adopted. The dust bowl tragedy was also an opportunity for agronomists to come in, introducing new farming techniques such as terracing and planting shelter belts of trees as an attempt to recapture the essence of the land. The agronomists, although they were more successful in getting their version of conservation translated into action, were ultimately ineffectual, too. Worster finally claims that neither the federal land-use planners, ecologists, nor the agronomists made a lasting impact on the region. Conservation as a cultural reform had come to be accepted only where and insofar as it had helped the plains culture reach its traditional expansionary aims. The Dust Bowl, even more so than the Great Depression, became the dominant national symbol of bankruptcy and ecological decay-the irony is that it was the capitalistic values that our country holds so highly that ultimately facilitated both the creation of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. This classic work of Worster is very important in understanding and confirming the effects of our society today, which largely is consumer based and it consequences on nature,s land. Worster set forth a strong argument and supported it finely with great details. Worster arguments about dust bowl tragedy was real but what actually happened on the southern plains were as a result of the increasing pressure from the capitalistic sector of the country. A society based on purely expansionist consumption-consumer culture. So to say in my opinion, the only way for the Dust Bowl to have been curtailed sooner would have been for the people there to stop breaking the land all together and let mother nature take over and fix herself. Of course, that would be asking the impossible since it would mean the plains people would have to give up, and lose to the capitalistic society of which they were trying to keep up with. For as much as attempts were made to curb the dust bowl tragedy, it only goes to maintain the status-quo of increasing consumerism and the dust bowl itself. Droughts and famine will come and go during our time here on earth, but we must learn to look to the earth for the remedy and give back to the earth what is rightfully hers for capitalism cannot fill the needs of human life without the resources of the land.
Finally, Worster's book is not intended as a work of history alone, but a cautionary tale. "For he declares, "is the agriculture that America offers to the world: producing an incredible bounty in good seasons, using staggering qualities of machines and fossil fuels to do so, exuding confidence in man's technological mastery over the earth, running along the thin edge of disaster." (234) Ultimately, Worster declares, man "needs another kind of farming by which he can satisfy his needs without making a wasteland." (243) . Worster stresses the need for societies to be ecologically adaptive, in other words,a culture that is in-syn with the environment,s needs rather than continuing the pursuit of capitalist desires that essentially destroy the land.
Fomukong Julius Ntonibe
MSc. Student ICTA UAB, Spain.
Bibliography:
Donald Worster: “Dust Bowl; The Southern Plains in the 1930s” Oxford University Press 1979.
