Dirty Thirties: The Dust Bowl

Throughout the 1930’s American and Canadian prairies faced an environmental crisis known as the both the Dust Bowl and as the Dirty Thirties. The Dust Bowl had severe ecological and agricultural effects that coined the symbolic picture of the Great Depression in the prairies. The three aims of this paper are to describe the Dust Bowl as an environmental problem, detail the long- and short-term economic costs, and provide a summary of the policy responses put in place.
Description of the problem
The Dust Bowl is the name for the drought that affected almost two-thirds of the United States and parts of Mexico and Canada. The Dust Bowl became infamous for its severe dust storms that, and the economic effects of the Great Depression, drew the populace away from the Great Plains further west (Schubert, Suarez, Pegion, Koster, & Bacmeister, 2004). There are two main causes of the Dust Bowl; the drought and the failure of farmers to employ proper farming techniques that led to a loss in wind erosion. The …show more content…
One of the struggles farmers had to face against during the dust storms was that their farm equipment would be constantly buried and in order to start the work day equipment would have to be dug out. The Dust Bowl had an intensifying effect on the Great Depression that caused many of those who lived in the western prairie states of America to move to California; as many as 12 percent of the population in the affected counties of the Dust Bowl moved elsewhere. This loss in population coupled with the uselessness of the land due to the inability to produce agricultural outputs caused major economic losses. The economic costs of the Dust Bowl are noted to have decreased the value of each acre of the Great Plains to be as much as 30 percent in highly eroded areas and to be 15 percent in averagely eroded areas (Hornbeck,