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By Root 1472 0

topmost layer of Oklahoma and blew it as far as Norway. The climate of the plains has remained relatively unchanged for hundreds of years, however, and there is no convincing evidence that such a disaster ever occurred before white men plowed up the sod and brought in cattle or, much worse, sheep to graze it down. Even after seven years of drought, the Dust Bowl would probably not have occurred had not man created the conditions for it. By 1932, in Texas alone, seventy million acres of land that had once been covered with a blanket of grass were growing mesquite and thorny weeds, which are poor at holding soil in place. The weeds had no business there; they were native to the ultramontane basins several hundred miles west. As Paul Sears wrote, “Weeds, like wild-eyed anarchists, are the symptoms, not the real cause, of a disturbed order. When the Russian thistle swept down across the western ranges, the general opinion was that it was a devouring plague, crowding in and consuming the native plants. It was no such thing. The native vegetation had already been destroyed by the plow and thronging herds—the ground was vacated and the thistles took it over.”

The Dust Bowl occurred after a profitable wheat market had coincided for years with, by plains standards, a spell of abundant moisture. Prices were high enough to inspire greed; the farmers began plowing up everything in sight. Millions of acres of fragile, highly erodable land, from New Mexico all the way up to the Dakotas, had their sod pierced and replaced by wheat. The farmers actually began going bust before the drought even began; a glutted market, international competition, high tariffs, and the impoverished condition of postwar Europe conspired to do them in. The Dust Bowl was the coup de grâce.

The second Dust Bowl is apt to result from hardship rather than 1920s-style prosperity, though the pattern of land abuse will be pretty much the same. As the Ogallala aquifer steadily runs out and the surviving farmers watch their debts mount and their living standards decline, they will be forced by financial need to acquire and dry-farm as much new land as they can. Unless they can still afford to pump irrigation water on an emergency basis during droughts—if there is any water left to pump under their land—they will no longer be guaranteed a respectable harvest every year. Because of the high profits of irrigation, the plains farmers took a lot of marginal farmland out of production over the past few decades. They could afford to. Now it is likely to be returned to the plow. In the East, marginal land usually means rocks or swamps or steep hillsides. On the rockless, swampless, tabletop plains, it usually means fine sand. Most of western Nebraska is sand; so is a lot of eastern New Mexico and West Texas. In western Kiowa County, Colorado, 150,000 acres of sandy Class VI land (Class I is the best) are already in production, losing twenty tons of topsoil or more a year. There is also a lot of marginal land in production in the Portales region of eastern New Mexico.

The winds blow hardest on the southern plains in late winter and early spring—days of sixty-mile-per-hour gusts ripping across empty space, powered by convoluted airflows battling one another. On February 23, 1977, some of those winds blew into Portales country and began raising dust. A dust storm works on the principle of an avalanche: wind scours up some loose soil and forms a dense, stinging cloud of fine particles, which scours up more loose soil, and more, and more, until the horizon is filled by an advancing wave several thousand feet high, churning and swirling millions of tons of suspended matter. When these storms were first sighted in the 1930s, farmers ran inside their houses, fearing torrential rain. When they went back outside, their homes had lost their paint and their chickens were featherless. The Portales storm, which lasted only about a day and a half, removed forty tons of topsoil per acre from parts of Roosevelt and Kiowa counties—as much topsoil loss as rainfall causes in a year in the most