The First Global Environmental Problem

This chapter challenges typical interpretations of the Dust Bowl and puts the disaster into a global frame, linking the past to the present. In so doing, the common roots of contemporary and past developments and struggles are revealed. The Dust Bowl was one spectacular instance of a global problem of soil erosion associated with capitalist colonial expansion. While the official interpretation suggests that agriculture suited for a humid region was imported to an arid region, precipitating the crisis, contemporaneous accounts illustrate how much larger the crisis was, tied up with specific social and economic developments that imposed new socio-ecological relations upon peoples of the world and upon the land irrespective of local climatic conditions. Ultimately, the common denominators across the world—from North to South America, Australia to Africa, and Southeast to East Asia—were not climate and geography, but capitalism and colonialism.

Dust to Dust: An Age Beyond Extremes

This chapter presents the salient features of the Epoch of Ecological Extremes contributing to the development of Dust Bowl conditions today. The twentieth century was deemed “the Age of Extremes.” It is clear, however, that the twenty-first century is poised to surpass the twentieth to become the Epoch of Ecological Extremes. Today the interconnected issues precipitating the new Dust Bowl era are the culmination of increasingly extreme exploitation—in terms of scale and technique—of the land, of the planet's hydrocarbon repositories, and of freshwater systems. As with the 1930s Dust Bowl, this extreme abuse of the global commons is mirrored in the extreme politics required to make such destruction possible. Also like the 1930s, these developments are associated with high levels of expropriation, social inequality, oppression, and dislocation.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides a background of the 1930s Dust Bowl on the U.S. southern plains, where the ancient grasslands that protected the soil from prairie winds and rains and nourished regional species were destroyed within just a few decades, following the violent opening of the plains to white settlement and the global market in the 1800s. Under pressure from the vagaries of the world economy, settlers sheared the land to expand cash-crop agriculture and ranching. As major drought descended on the plains, winds and static electricity lifted the desiccated, exposed topsoil, forming dust storms on an unprecedented scale. Such massive loss of soil and continued dry conditions meant the land could no longer support life as it once had. By the end of the 1930s, tens of thousands of people were displaced. Hence, when scientists today predict the increasing possibility of Dust Bowl-like conditions, they are signaling a particular kind of extreme ecological and social change.

No Empires, No Dust Bowls: Toward a Deeper Ecological Solidarity

This concluding chapter argues that the imperial origins of modern mainstream environmentalism resulted in a segregated environmental movement worldwide, and led to a stark divide between what activists and scholars refer to as “the environmentalism of the rich” and “the environmentalism of the poor.” Political and economic elites have an outsized influence and control over government and international environmental agencies. Indeed, mainstream environmental organizations are supported by, and dependent upon, the patronage of the wealthy, which impacts their priorities and strategies. The Dust Bowl did not arise because there was a lack of awareness of the issue or the technical means to address it. Like dust-bowlification today, the ultimate source of the crisis was social, not technological, thus requiring massive social change to address.

The White Man’s Burden, Soil Erosion, and the Origins of Green Capitalism

This chapter presents evidence that knowledge of both the dangers presented by soil erosion and the means to successfully address it exist deep in the memory and experience of agricultural societies and were understood by the white settlers who colonized North America. Yet, even as knowledge of the problem and efforts to contain it in the United States and around the world grew, so did the erosion crisis. As the erosion crisis developed in colonial societies, addressing its root causes was out of the question for those in charge because doing so “may well require a social and political revolution.” Colonial officials and colonists could not consider the radical social change needed to address the root cause of extreme socio-ecological crises because such change would threaten the racialized colonial social order. This is the denial represented by green capitalist and colonial approaches to ecological problems, which dominated early conservationists' attempts to address soil erosion.

Imperialism, White Settler Colonialism, and the Ecological Rift

This chapter addresses the question of what caused the Dust Bowl by looking at the social and economic developments driving the changing relations of humans to one another and to the land globally in the period immediately preceding it. A distinguishing feature of the new imperialism was the marked increase in the rate of territorial acquisition by Europe, the United States, and Britain. The racially justified expropriation of the land and people enriched and increased the capacities of Global North nations and their economic elites—who financed, carried out, and benefited from this expropriation—to reinforce their rule. As David Naguib Pellow writes, “natural resources are used and abused to support racial hegemony and domination and have been at the core of this process for a half-millennium.” Thus, expropriation, exploitation, and domination paved the way directly to the Dust Bowl and the global crisis of soil erosion by the 1930s.

“We’re Not Stakeholders”: Beyond the Langue De Coton of Capitalist Environmental Management

This chapter examines the limitations of mainstream 1930s environmentalism. Ecological modernizationists consider environmentalism at its best when it aligns with the agenda of powerful private and public actors. For advocates of ecological modernization, questions of substantive social change explicitly don't enter the picture. Regrettably, mainstream environmentalism has moved closer toward this line of thinking over the last forty years. Incomplete and misleading stories about the New Deal and Dust Bowl conservation serve to reinforce the notion that with the right set of techniques, policies, and/or voluntary adjustments by individuals and industry, capitalism is well suited to solving ecological crises. Many see the New Deal of the 1930s as evidence that the system can be reformed and the state geared toward social and environmental improvement, even in the heart of the empire of capital. This has led to repeated calls over the years for a Green New Deal.

Ecological Rifts and Shifts: The Accumulation of Catastrophe

This chapter argues that the Dust Bowl is a perfect example of the accumulation of catastrophe, the result of decision makers shifting ecological problems down the line and denying the nature of the changes required to develop sustainable farming on the plains. As a result, the plains and the people living there in the 1930s suffered what Russell Lord, who worked for the Soil Conservation Service, called “the most spectacular mass sacrifice to strictly commercial mores in the history of mankind.” Over the decades, cultivated soils have become more exhausted and eroded. Agricultural science often has been applied to mask the effects of this degradation rather than to restore natural soil fertility. Moreover, the increased use of insecticides and herbicides in lieu of more ecological approaches to controlling weeds and insects, and synthetic fertilizers to replace lost soil nutrients, has led to further problems.