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Prolonged Drought and Poor Farming Practices Created an Environmental Nightmare

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Prolonged Drought and Poor Farming Practices Created an Environmental Nightmare Prolonged drought and poor farming practices created an environmental nightmare "With the gales came the dust. Sometimes it was so thick that it completely hid the sun. Visibility ranged from nothing to fifty feet, the former when the eyes were filled with dirt which could not be avoided, even with goggles," wrote Lawrence Svobida in his memoir of farming wheat in Kansas during the Dust Bowl years. "At other times a cloud is seen to be approaching from a distance of many miles. Already it has the banked appearance of a cumulus cloud, but it is black instead of white, and it hangs low, seeming to hug the earth. Instead of being slow to change its form, it appears to be rolling on itself from the crest downward. As it sweeps onward, the landscape is progressively blotted out. Birds fly in terror before the storm, and only those that are strong of wing may escape. The smaller birds fly until they are exhausted, then fall to the ground, to share the fate of the thousands of jack rabbits which perish from suffocation." 58n1.jpgClouds of dust turn the sky black in the Texas Panhandle, March 1936. 60n1.jpgA Kansas farmhouse is swallowed by dust as its residents flee, September 1939. 60n2.jpgDust threatens the small southeastern Colorado town of Springfield, 1935. Another witness, Avis D. Carlson, writing in the New Republic, recalled, "The impact is like a shovelful of fine sand flung against the face. People caught in their own yards grope for the doorstep. Cars come to a standstill, for no light in the world can penetrate that swirling murk.The ​ nightmare is deepest during the storms. But on the occasional bright day and the usual gray day we cannot shake from it. We live with the dust, eat it, sleep with it, watch it strip us of possessions and the hope of possessions. It is becoming Real. The poetic uplift of spring fades into a phantom of the storied past. The nightmare is becoming life." The period of drought and dust storms that ravaged a swath of land stretching over 50 million acres from western Kansas to eastern Nevada lives in the American memory as the Dust Bowl. Proven now to be the most severe drought in the nation's recorded history, the Dust Bowl resulted from unusually pro longed dryness and heat, coupled with a surge in farming on suboptimal land, using techniques based on a poor understanding of soil ecology. Farmers worked the soil as they had land farther east, believing that "rain follows the plow": More intensive cultivation and tree planting would increase precipitation. If farmers thought they could be rainmakers, they were worse than wrong. Intensive farming with disc plows that pulverized already poor soils eventually disrupted the thin layer of fertile topsoil that agriculture depends on. When dry, hot conditions settled in, this parched "skin" of the earth simply blew away, in terrifying, drifting "black blizzards." The droughts that created the Dust Bowl began in 1930 and occurred intermittently until 1939. During the worst year, 1934, drought afflicted about 75 percent of the country, and 27 states were severely affected. Many farmers and their families were forced to flee west, a migration memorably recounted in John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath. An estimated 2.5 million people left the Plains region, and many migrated to California's Central Valley to labor as farm workers. Meanwhile, the disaster of the Dust Bowl forced attention from the federal government. More than a billion dollars in aid ($13 billion in 2013 dollars) was distributed, and federal advisers instituted soil conservation practices. Crop insurance policies, underwritten by the federal government to reimburse farmers for losses they suffered or to pay them not to plant crops, also made their debut in this period. Just as the Dust Bowl transformed farming practices on the Plains, another transformation was occurring in California. Much of the Golden State is naturally too dry for farming, but in the 1930s extensive water-redistributing systems dramatically boosted the Central Valley's agricultural potential. And water drawn from the Owens Valley (in east-central California) and the Colorado River (on the Arizona border) helped supply semi-arid Southern California, which could not otherwise support a dense population. The system worked well for nearly a century, even through an exceptional drought of 1976-77, which the state weathered when its population was just 60 percent of today's total. California's current drought--now in its fourth year--is not the Dust Bowl, but it spells potentially even greater transformation, given the state's far higher population density and its more extensive and diversified economic development. The unusual intensity and length of the drought has drawn down reservoirs, and because of little snow and high heat, the Sierra Mountains are bare of the snowpack that normally supplies through melt-off more than half the region's water. Groundwater reserves, which normally supply the other half, are being depleted at an alarming rate, with wells being drilled to make up for the lack of surface water. According to the Los Angeles Times, in some parts of the San Joaquin Valley in central California the groundwater table has dropped 150 feet over the past 15 years and the land is sinking a foot a year. Already an estimated 12 million trees have died, taking with them the moisture they would have contributed to the air as well as creating fuel for fires. In 2014 the state launched a program to curtail water use, which included the first-ever restrictions on groundwater use, and in June 2015 water was withheld from senior rights-holders for the first time ever. Efforts to monitor and forecast drought conditions have been stepped up, but drought is a gradual process. It can be evaluated for intensity once it occurs based on precipitation, temperature, soil moisture and stream flow, but it defies prediction in the conventional sense. As Californians learn to conserve, climate scientists are trying to figure out if an unusually long-lasting high-pressure ridge that blocked the arrival of rains from the Pacific was related to global warming. The jury is still out. Already researchers are playing out scenarios of continuing water shortage. One study recently calculated that if the Colorado River, which contributes just more than half the water used in Southern California, ran dry for a year--with no other water available--the West could lose 16 million jobs, 7 million in California alone. A longer-range forecast, incorporating projections based on warming due to climate change, concluded that California and the Central Plains would likely face droughts lasting decades or more in the last half of the 21st century. That could make the Dust Bowl seem like a brief dry spell. 61n1.jpgDust Bowl refugees on Highway 99 near Bakersfield, Calif., November 1936. 1930s Dust Bowl Extent of damage: 50 million acres Intensity: drought coupled with high heat Duration: 1930s Federal aid: $1 billion, estimated, 1930s dollars ~~~~~~~~ By Sarah Richardson .
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