Suffolk Punch draft horses.
I just finished reading Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time. This is a non-fiction work about the Dust Bowl of the nineteen thirties. I had, of course, been aware of this great man-made disaster, if from no other source then from Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. I picked up this book because I had been thinking lately (as have many people) of humankind’s assault on Mother Earth.
After the Comanche were finally driven off the range, there was a deliberate assault on the great grasslands of the High Plains. The buffalo were driven virtually to extinction not just by greed, but by an actual program to exterminate them. Then came the two Homestead Acts (I think it was two). The lands promised to the Cherokee and other groups was opened up to farming. What about grazing you say? Well, the market for cattle/beef collapsed, and the bright idea of mega wheat farming took over. The grasses which held the plains in place were plowed under, and the rest, as they often say, is history.
The Egan book, which I found to be a page-turner, explores the facts and tragedy of the human despoiling of the Great Plains. I commend it to your attention. As alluded to above, I find the story an object lesson for our times (I’m thinking here of global warming and other crap us happy campers are foisting on the planet). It is a classic tale of greed, bad public policy, and, in the end, human suffering. Here’s a bit from the epilogue:
“The High Plains never fully recovered from the Dust Bowl. The land came through the 1930s deeply scarred and forever changed, but in places it healed. All told, the government bought 11.3 million acres of dusted-over farm fields and tried to return much of it to grassland. The original intent was to purchase up to 75 million acres. After sixty-five years some of the land is still sterile and drifting.”
What we, the human species, are doing to the Earth is likely going to make the Dust Bowl look like just a breezy day. Whether any of the climate-caused disasters we are seeing now are related to global warming, I do not know, but I do wonder. Hunker down, folks. Hunker down.
