SOS 117 - Media Analysis 1: The Dust Bowl

We thought we had it handled.  We thought we had it under control.  We were going to learn from the mistakes of our elders and do better.  This would never happen again.  Not to us.  Not to the "Greatest Country on Earth." But did we really learn?  Are we farming ourselves towards a repeat of The Dust Bowl? 

At the turn of the twentieth-century, our forefathers followed a dream they had called “Manifest Destiny” that led them west, to cultivate the Great Plains region of North America, a place previously determined to be completely unsuitable for agriculture because of its lack of trees and water.  Yet, we did it anyway. Led by The Homestead Act, we settled the land, dug it up, planted monocultures, and believed that “rain will follow the plow.”  And for a while, things went great!  There was plenty of rain, crops flourished in the rich soil, and we got more efficient at farming through technological advancements. 

Then disaster struck. 

A once-every-hundred-years drought struck, a drought that would last 10 years, and cause untold damage, not just to the region, but to the nation as a whole. Crops died. Livelihoods were lost. The soil blew away in the strong prairie winds, suffocating everything in its way. The term “Dust Bowl” has become synonymous with the famine of the entire region, and for a while, we were in a bad way.

But we fixed it. We planted trees from Texas to Canada to halt the winds.  We taught farmers about soil preservation and even paid them to practice a much more sustainable form of agriculture.  The winds died down.  The great heat waves ended.  The rain returned.  And we patted ourselves on the back for a job well done. 

Then we went back to farming the land.  

In fact, according to an October 20, 2020, Science Magazine article (Links to an external site.), we not only went right back to the way we had been farming before, but now we were digging up more land to do it.  Cattle farms have expanded, adding to the already growing problem of Climate Change, which, according to CBS News (Links to an external site.), is hurtling us towards heat waves that will far outpace the hottest year on record - 1936.  Monocultures are still present, both grain to feed the cattle, and - as added irony - corn for new biofuels to replace fossil fuels, according to The Smithsonian (Links to an external site.).  And we're draining the local aquifers for irrigation.  According to the US Department of Agriculture (Links to an external site.), we're on pace to drain one of the largest aquifer's in the Great Plains region - the Ogallala aquifer - within this century.  And it would take the Earth 6,000 years to replenish it. 

A massive drought like the one experienced in the 1930's is not only on the horizon; it's coming in hard and fast due to Climate Change, according to The Daily Mail (Links to an external site.), which we have only aggravated with our unsustainable agricultural practices in the region.  While droughts, like the one that happened in the 1930's, used to be very rare (once every hundred years or so), new calculations put us on track to see the same kind of "megadroughts" at a speed of every 40 years due, in large part, to agricultural practices that are outdated and non-sustainable.  When - not if, but when - the next megadrought strikes America's Heartland, it will not only cut our own reserves by 94%, but it will decrease our exports by half.  It's not just our own necks on the line this time.  We are talking about global famine on a scale like we have never seen before, all because we haven't changed the way we have farmed a grassland region since the turn of the twentieth century... even though we know better. 

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Grade: 88/100

Professor Comments: Great work on this, Kathleen. As ever, a few comments on the rubric. 

Rubric Comments
Media Sources: 15/15 - Excellent selections for your sources, Kathleen. 
Depth of Discussion: 10/10 (no comments) 
Hyperlinks: 10/10 (no comments)
Design and Presentation: 8/10 - For this assignment, you'll want to make it a PDF or DOC/X so you can play with design, e.g., title, headings, insertion of visual material, etc. I did appreciate that you broke up your text into manageable pieces. The single sentences were particularly well done. 
Ease of Reading: 10/10 - Your writing style was perfect for a blog post. 
Graphics/Visuals: 0/10 - Please see note above
Peer Replies: 30/30 - I appreciated that each of your comments was specific to that student, engaging with what each one of them had to say. You had a conversation and this was great to see!