Milestones
Dust Bowl
Also Known As The Dirty Thirties
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The 1930s ecological disaster of the American southern plains, when drought met decades of deep ploughing that had stripped the native grass holding the soil. Dust storms buried farms and darkened cities a thousand miles east, hundreds of thousands of families left the land, and the response, the Soil Conservation Service, shelterbelts, contour ploughing and eventually no-till, founded modern soil conservation.
Facts
Milestone Year Whencirca 1930 to 1940, worst in 1934 to 1936 1 LocationSouthern Great Plains of the United States and adjacent Canada 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Nationally promoted from 1935 by the new Soil Conservation Service, formed as a direct Dust Bowl response
The Dust Bowl is cited as the American precedent for large-scale land-degradation response, including as a parallel for China's modern reforestation efforts
Modern no-till spread as a response to the erosion lessons of the Dust Bowl
Overgrazing and Dust Bowl-era degradation were direct pressures behind the discipline's twentieth-century formation
Wind erosion at drought-year scale, made worse by mechanized deep plowing, is the Dust Bowl's own mechanism
Caused By
Drought plus decades of deep ploughing that displaced the native grasses holding the topsoil
Sources
1. Dust Bowl (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationDrought and dust storms sectionQuote, Drought and dust storms section
On April 14, 1935, known as 'Black Sunday', the day started out clear and warm, with temperatures in the 80s and the air completely still
Soil Conservation Service (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationHistory sectionQuote, History section
Bennett's motivation was based on his knowledge of the detrimental effects of soil erosion and the impacts on U.S. lands that led to the Dust Bowl in the 1930s.
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