American meteorologists rated the Dust Bowl the number one weather event of the 20th century. As as they go over the scars of the land, historians say it was the nation's worst prolonged environmental disaster. The dust storms, or dusters, were bad beyond belief. The idea of 200 mile blizzards of dirt that could blind a person or fill them with dirt so full that they would die is almost unthinkable. What is even more amazing is that people had such faith that it would once again rain that they lived through constant dust in everything, a severe multi-year drought that killed all crops, biblical bug infestations, and a diet that consisted of pickled tumbleweed and water. This amazing book is a mostly oral history of people the country forgot about from the 1900-1940's. Tremendous things happened to the world at that time but hundreds of thousands of Americans were living in dugouts and dying of "dust pneumonia". Ike Osteen, now in his 90's, somehow survived the terrible, forced depravity of the dust bowls and shortly after joined the army to find himself fighting the Germans on D-day. What an amazing story.What is even more astonishing is that we really haven't learned anything about environmental disasters. The belief that plowing millions of acres of fields or shooting on TNT into the clouds would induce rain draws strong parallels to those people that virulently deny global warming nowadays. In fact, in the same exact area of the dust bowl, pipes currently suck up water out of the Ogalalla Aquifer, the nation's largest freshwater source, at a rate 8 times faster than nature can replenish it. The water is used to raise cotton that is shipped to China so that China can make clothes to ship back to our big-box clothing stores. So what do we get out of the deal? Less water, fewer jobs, and mickey mouse t-shirts. Globalization at its best. Good grief.
