Black Blizzards of the Dust Bowl

values of the text. But here's just a little bit from the novel The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. The dawn came, but no day. In the gray sky, red sun appeared a dim red circle that gave a little light like dusk. And as that day advanced, the dust slipped back toward darkness, and the wind cried and whimpered over the fallen corn. Men and women huddled in their houses, and they tied handkerchiefs over their noses, and they went out and wore God to protect their eyes.

When the night came again, it was black night, for the stars could not pierce the dust to get down, and the window lights could not even spread beyond their own yards. Now the dust was evenly mixed with the air and the emulsion of dust and air. Houses were shut tight and cloth wedged around doors and windows. But the dust came in so thinly that it could not be seen in the air, and it settled like pollen on the chairs and tables, on the dishes. The people

brushed it from their shoulders. Little lines of dust lay at the door sills, and it goes on like that. But but I B it is a bleak existence, and Steinbeck captures it so so beautifully on the page. And uh.

And since we are in this podcast discussing uh, some of the science behind the dust bowl of the Great Depression and the measures that were used then and now to counter these traumatic ecological effects, it seemed fitting to kick it off with that, yeah, which was, of course the dust bowls that the backdrop for the Grapes of Wrath and or talking about is a time period between nineteen thirty one and nineteen thirty nine, so a good eight years of this sort of existence of drought and

winds and clouds of dust that just plagued people, and it just must have seemed like the end of the world for many people it was well and of course, and the other part of this is that the Great Depression was going on. So, um, those are a good field times, healthy lands, not at all. Yeah, Now the roots of it kind of stretched back. Of course, the roots of any bad time are always always go back

into a more prosperous eras um. So you you go back to the to the late nineteenth century of pioneers that moved into the semi aread midwestern southern plains of the United States. Um. And they're enjoying some prosperous years and they're they're they're planning, they're harvesting. It's going well. Um. But then a recession set's in following the First World War. Farmers need up their profits, right, staying up their reduction.

So they turned to the machines, the machine machines um, and not so much robot overlords or anything, but rather mechanized farming techniques. They bought plows and other farming equipment. In between nineteen thirty more than five million acres of

previously unfarmed land went under the plow. And so they were getting record crops in Yeah, which was great, but we also lead to overproduction, right, So that supply and demand was way off, and uh you know, as a as a result, you had a bunch of wheat um that was overproduced with a great depression, and that leads to severely reduced market prices. Yeah, there's too much wheat and there's not as much money to buy it with anymore.

So so whatater farmers gonna do. They're gonna try and earn back their production cost by planning more wheat, expanding their their fields even more in an effort to get blood out of that stone. Yeah, but the problem here is that wheat is not so great um in in a drought. In fact, the natural drought resistant grasses are best. But unfortunately a lot of those were peeled away with the plowing and the wheat again was placed in there, and also on any unused fields were also left bare.

So what do you see happening here? You see a lot of dust, right, and plus it uh, plow based farming, it kills the soil. So the fertile top soil that's so essential to anything growing out there, it gets uh it's it's it's literally turned up into the wind. The wind. It's it's it's it's turned up by the plow, the wind catches it and it blows away. So and without it, so the ground becomes less nurturing to anything you're trying to grow in it, and it becomes even more susceptible

to drought. Right, And then of course in two what they saw happen again this beginning nine that that's really when the drought set in and the pain stop. High temperatures, the sun's just bacon everything. Yeah, and just one year there were fourteen dust storms report of course he's were known as the black blizzards, and the number actually increased to nearly forty. Right, and you should I'll make sure that includes some sort of a historic photograph on the

blog posted accompanies this, uh, this what this episode. But if you do like just a Google image search for photos dust bowl, you will see some of these just just really apocalyptic looking images of just i mean just stuff right out of the grapes of wrath. Uh, you know, these these thin farmers and their their families standing there

and on the horizon, just dark, billowing dust clouds. Yeah, because we're talking about but just by the end of right, just just a couple of years into this, thirty five million acres of farmland ruined and the top soil covering one million acres blown away. Yeah. And you know the region again, as you've talked about, was that the Southern Grape Plains, but um in in really in particular Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico, and Colorado were affected pretty greatly. Yeah. So

what happens, I mean, the ramifications of this. You have farmers losing their land, they can't stay, they can't they can't pay for it. Uh, they're having to flee elsewhere to find work. They're going to California and try and find migrant labor jobs. Um. Yeah, if you've ever heard

the term okay, that's what it is. That's abejorative term, you know, referring to people who you know, you could have come from Kansas, but you might have been called in Oki after Oklahoma if you showed up in California. Mainly because there were only so many jobs available in um in California, and of course all the people coming in from the Great Plains really just made all the

the people in California pretty upset. Yeah, there's a lot of animosity between the native California's and the the the foreign workers in their midst exacerbated again by the economic conditions. So what so what really fascinates about me about all this is that, I mean, you have this, uh, this ecological disaster that occurs due to um in large part

to reagonized agriculture. Humans remake their world an attempt to uh better feed themselves and to uh to better um supply these standard of living they become accustomed to, and in doing so, they almost create a desert in the middle of the United States, um and uh. And luckily people realize what was happening, you know, and then they were like, well, let's let's fight this. Let's let's solve this problem before it gets any worse, because it was

already pretty bad. So it's it's interesting to look at these at some of the steps that they took to to fight the dust bowl, to fix what had been broken. And that's what I think it's so fascinating about this, because it really is this large scaled effort by the government to to come in and uh, you know, try

to reverse nature. Well, actually we shouldn't. The anti nature, I suppose you could say, well to to sort of take a more modern and futurist way of looking at It's It's kind of like when when you look at examples of climate change and people looking at the way that that humans have remade the climate of the planet and then trying to to fix it, sometimes with crazy schemes that also tinker with the environment, like the idea of of putting hole munch of mirrors in orbit or

essentially setting off all I mean, they're their whole list of different crazy seed clouding, various uh geo engineering techniques that have been proposed over the years where you know, it comes off like the water and the tub is too cold, so let's add some hot and then and then you can imagine a situation where the water in the in the tub is too hot, so let's add

some cold. Eventually does the tub overflow? I don't know. Yeah, And when we talk about see cloudy, we're talking actually about munitions shot up in the air, particularly during or right before the Olympics in Beijing, and they were doing that because they were trying to get actual rainfall to come down to clear some of the pollutants in that city. So that's what one of the things we're talking about.

We're talking about engineering your environment. Um, let's talk a little bit about how Fdr Franklin Deleanor Roosevelt actually created something called the shelter belt project. But of course there were other steps that were taken on a more economic level of various stuff with the new deal um civil conservation core that came into and created all these new jobs, and people are going around planting trees and digging ditches

and the like reservoirs. But the part that, you know, the part that really interested us, was some of these things such as the shelter belts, which again, imagine the situation here. You've tinkered with the natural environment. You've taken the landscape and changed it into wheat fields. And your problem here is the wind is just sweeping across with all this dust. So you want to somehow break that wind, break it with trees. Yes, exactly, you want to break

up the wind. You want to you want to build a wall against the wind. And what is nature's wall against the wind? Um in many cases, it is trees. So the idea of these shelter belts is to is to plant rows of trees besides fields to slow the wind and reduce wind to roach uh. And and of course that wouldn't be the only thing. And also there was also this push for no till farming, UH, so that you're not turned taking your precious top soil and turning it up and letting the wind take it. Um. Uh.

There's UH. And then there's also strip cropping. There was another technique which was you've seen pictures of this. I had seen pictures of this and didn't really realize what I was looking at un til now. And uh. And this is where you have a strip of crops planet and there's a strip of dirt and some crops planet and strip of dirt. And from an aerial view especially, it looks very it's very beautiful. It's like and there's

a pattern there across the fields. You've probably seen it if you've had any kind of you know, flights across the states. But the idea here is you're gonna use this section and you're gonna let this section of soil replenish itself and then the next year the parts of the parts, the strips that are crops will be dirt and the strips that are dirt will be crops. But the shelter belt, how did this play out? What was the original idea? Well, I mean this this idea it

was pretty huge. It was a project that was estimated to cost seventy five million dollars over a period of twelve years UM. And you know, of course funding disputes arose. FDR had to transfer the program from the Civilian Conservation Core to the w p A, where the project was a little bit more hamstrung. Um. So what they were talking about is replacing farmland with forest, and that of

course did not go over well with all the farmers, right. Yeah, they were talking about forest like structures that mimic natural conditions, basically walls made out of forest. And then yeah, this side argues about it. This side brings up some concerns and the the uh, the finished product is somewhat diminished

from the original design. Yeah. And in fact, you know, on a lot of the land that was supposed to be used kind of got um attenuated to the point where, you know, some some of the original plan was like have to the amount of plan that was actually able to be planted. Also, what was planted um was very different from the original plan. You know, Conifers were something that they thought would do well in some areas um, but politics and economics force them to instead rely on

cotton woods. And the reason why they planted cotton woods is because they grew pretty quickly and they were a much more flashy, obvious sign that there was a plan in place and being cultivated. And people were really kind of anty about this. Again, remember it's the Great Depression. Um.

You know, people are in dire circumstances. They don't want to wait twelve years to see this plan come to fruition, right, And you have politicians involved in this that are very concerned with not only the the act of helping, but the perceived act of helping, right, right. And but it's a huge effort, right because you have to get everybody on board with You have to get the farmers, you have to get the politicians, you have to get the

public um. And of course it's just always a problem when you try to get a bunch of people in the room to agree on something. So was it successful, um? Well, on on on one hand, no, they I mean they were able to completely um reverse the effects about the four d fifty million hectares of arid land in North America still suffers from moderate to severe desert desertification. But um, they did say that it reduced it by sixty from the amount of soil blowing around. So definitely definitely a

success when you look at it in that view. And yeah, and of course this is one of those things when you step back historically, it looks like much more of a success than at the time. And you know, some forming practices came out of it that we're really beneficial that are still being used today. Right, all right, we are going to talk about Stalin and why he let a quack biologist create his own sort of Great Stalin

Plan for the Transformation of Nature. That's the actual name of that, the Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature. I love that. It's it's so beautifully Um Soviet you know it is as well, we will bend nature to our will beginning now. Yeah, it was. It takes us back to October eighth. Soviet government announces that, uh, what was actually the world's first state centered program to reverse human induced climate change. Uh. They were going to construct

five point seven million hectares of forest in the Russian South. Um, you know, they were gonna irrigation canals, were gonna be built. It was a crazy gigantic project. They were gonna be shelter belts like we were talking about these these treat forest strips to break up the wind and uh, and they were gonna create like that. The idea was to

sort of recreate this imagined prehistoric state of the land. Yes, they were going to try to change the topography of this land, which I think is so ambitious and so sort of wonderful. But of course the problem is that Stalin had been taken by the ideas of this quack biologist, Trophim Dashenko. And this guy was given carte blanche over Soviet agriculture science um. And he had no solid scientific

theory on how to properly cultivate for shelter beds. And he actually understood plant and trees is coexistence in terms of class warfare. Yeah, and I mean seriously, this is this is sort of what his um, the whole plan was predicated on. Okay, and here's a little excerpt about what he actually had to say about it. And I will try my my Russian accent, although I'm gonna apologize in advance for these are mortally afraid of step grasses,

particularly colch grass and catchweed. Okay, I'm gonna stop doing that. The first attachment of step vegetation in the struggle between the step and the forest. And then he goes on to say planting oaks and dense clusters, however, could give them an upper hand in this battle. Wild plants, particularly various species of forest trees, possessed the biologically useful property of self thinning. At this point that someone would want to interrupt and be like, dude, are we still talking

about forests? What are you What are you really getting at? Oh no, no, it gets better, It gets better. He says. Dense sprouts of wild plants be these oaks in this case, so regulate their number by means of self thinning. But it's individual members cannot interfere or oppress each other. And at the same time, the entire area is occupied by this particular species. Other species competitors of a given species are not admitted to this area. And so I love

this um. And this is according to Malcolm McGrath. He's the author of Stalin and Modernity UM. He says the fittest oak trees survive and pass their genetic material to their offspring right while the less fit trees do not survive or reproduce. Leshenko suggestion that oak trees banded together and regulate their own growth, so it's not to oppress or interfere with each other. Violated this most basic notion

of Darwin's theory. Leshenko had a misunderstanding basically of genetics and biology, and he couldn't help really to to antimori

fize vegetation and imbue it with human traits. Like I can't help but imagine him like throwing a meeting together at work and doing this thing where like the proper trees to be planted will be the ones that do not steal other people's lunch from the refrigerator, and you know, we're just taking out some of the kind yeah yeah, and those oh those shrubs, Oh how they hate those

trees and those trees and shrubs. Um. But it would mean it was kind of a big deal because this was a huge project, and in fact, in celebration of the plan, they had symphonies and stories were written. In a painting showed Stalin unfurling maps of his agriculture schemes. But as so often happens with with schemes that are so attached to an individual, yeah, the individual dies, stal ends up dying. Uh in the and then it's kind

of falls apart. Yeah. See, that's that's that's the problem of a dictatorship in this uh well in many cases, but particularly here, because there's not a lot of voices that were being heard, a lot of voices of dissent, right. There weren't a committee of members brought in to say, hey, let's talk about this plan and how best to execute it. It was basically the brain child of this one guy who um who just thought it all had to do

with with these different socio economic classes of plants. Now throughout the world, I mean, we continue this, this struggle with and against nature. Um, you know, obviously continues to play out anywhere there's desertification or climate change taking place. I mean just in the same areas, the same regions that were affected by the dust bowl. I mean, people still make it there. It's still their job, in their their their passion to figure out how best to balance

agricultural practices and the natural environment. Um. And then in other areas, for instance, there's the Green Wall Sahara initiative, which called for the planning of three hundred million trees and three million hectares of of of land stretching across the African continent and the whole idea here of of course, to to keep the Sahara from advancing, to keep desertrification from taking hold in in in crucial land areas uh and then in in China there is there's likewise this

uh this green wall project there to prevent the Gobi Desert from expanding, and so that they've been projecting this uh D miles stretch that goes from outer Beijing through inner Mongolia. And this is again the forest belt, right, the forest belt to service that natural wall against the winds and the desert that it carries. And this is actually that the dust that's carried over is called the

yellow Dragon. And each spring, the dust from from this northern deserts is swept up and it just whips eastward, blasting to Beijing. And in fact, in the Sierra Nevadas in California, they've found evidence of that dust from China, you know, spreading over to the United States and actually changing they think there's some um, some somewhat definitive results coming back from studies now actually changing the climate there

in the Sierra Nevada. Well yeah, so these yeah, these dust storms, they can pose quite the problem from human civilization, right, I mean, and for for agricultural practices especially. Yeah, and in a lot of cases, this is a life or death matter, right, um, and trying to control it just sort of makes sense. I mean, it's unfortunate that there are ways that we have, um sort of screwed up the land man has. And then of course there's you know,

obvious weather patterns that we can't do anything about. But as much as we can go in and ameliorate this, you know, the better, And it actually gives me hope for terraforming in the future sometime. Yeah. You know, if we know what we're doing when we go into go into these these foreign worlds an attempt to recreate earthlike conditions, we'll have a better understanding of what earthlike conditions actually are. Right.

I think the more manipulation we can uh you know, do here on the Earth, positive manipulation, the better our chances are understanding other atmospheres and environments and sort of adapting to them. So, you know, we talked about the Dicen sphere, we talked about all these other um sort of what seemed pine the sky projects in the future, but really mean this is this is um sort of like where the Rubbert meets the road in terms of

trying to carry that out at a different level. Yeah, and I think that's it's one of the things that makes the desk bowl so fascinating and and and FDR SO and the US government's approach to dealing with it. It serves as an interesting, interesting model and an interesting, uh you know example. Well, all right, let's uh, let's ask the robot to bring us some mail. All right, thank you. Let's see what we have here. We heard from a listener by the name of inc No co Sorry,

the email confused me. Their ink and the email and then they're coal at the bottom. Uh. Cole's points out that HSW we were talking about using the saying hs dow here at work instead of how stuff works h And he says, HSW has five syllables because of W has three syllables. How stuff works has three syllables total. So I just clarifying there because I think I might as the said something about how it has the same

number of syllables if you actually speak the abbreviation. But yeah, you're actually using more syllables, so hs W how stuff works. I still think that it's still more economic to to you say H S W H S double U. That's five. How stuff works, that's three. I don't know if you break it down into syllables HS dow is just silly. But yeah, but I'm not going to draw out the W. Yeah wekay, all right, I'll let you have that one. Um,

let's see who else did we hear from here? We've heard from a listener by the name of Carlin, Uh writes in and says you failed them talking about our protest episodes with a couple of them. If you fail to mention one of the most successful protest movements of our time, the Tea Party protests he started across the country after the announcement announcement of Obamacare. They resulted in the election of Scott Brown h the change of control of Congress, and a takeover of the Republican Party. Yeah.

So I think that's valid. Uh. No matter what you think of the Key Party, it uh certainly is a caress roots movement that yeah, certainly involved protests. Do you making a face that me though? Okay, well, this is not a face, it's just a hey, that's a that's a piece of meal right there. All right, So anyway, Colin brings up a good point, so I thought, yeah, I agree, and uh, who else do we hear from? Here?

We heard from listener Sarah. Sarah writes in and she shared some interesting links with us that we'll we'll have to look at in uh in more detail later. But she also added during the summer's I either work at summer camps in Colorado or participate in medical camps in Africa. This gives me a lot of travel time to sit

and think and brood. Is for this reason that when I'm traveling or just left to my own devices, I like to tune into hs de WU because it keeps my self abusive brain occupied and less likely to ruin my good mood. I'm not sure if that is just masking a deeper societal issue, but it is a good enough reason for me to keep my podcast as handy. I'm a big fan of the HSB podcast, and I am happy to blame you guys for my healthy state of mind. Keep up the brilliant work. I like that

self abusive brain. I have to say that I think we all started with that sometimes. Definitely definitely, so yeah, to any extent that we can, we can help you guys out and occupy your mind and getting it, get your mind rolling u around some issues outside yourself, and then that's great. And to hire your mind. Now that's a protest. There you go, occupy your mind and uh. And also sounds like Sarah's up to some really good uh stuff. You're participating medical cancer in Africa. All so

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