Climate change and the environment were the forgotten issues of the 2012 election—at least, before Superstorm Sandy put them square on the map. But even before that hurricane slashed through the Northeast, killing more than a hundred people and causing likely more than $50 billion in damages, the U.S. was already in the grips of a slow-motion ecological disaster. 2012 saw one of the biggest and most severe droughts in American history, with the Corn Belt in particular gripped by withering heat and aridity. Yields of corn and soybeans—the staple crops of the U.S. food system—shriveled, leading to higher food prices and a hit to the U.S. economy that could be as much as 1% of GDP. But while the 2012 drought may have been the worst in a half-century, it has nothing on the great Dust Bowl of the 1930s. That decade-long drought—exacerbated by poor farming techniques that left topsoil crumbling in the wind—changed the face of the U.S. and led to massive migrations out of farming states in the Midwest. As the master filmmaker Ken Burns shows in his new documentary The Dust Bowl—airing on PBS Sunday night and Monday night—it’s a man-made disaster that still has lessons for us today. (The 4-hour documentary will also be available as a DVD-check it out here.) “The Dust Bowl has never gotten the attention it deserves,” says Burns. “But we can see today with this year’s drought, or with climate change, that we can affect the environment, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.” The Dust Bowl is vintage Burns, with the documentarian mixing archival photographs and footage with interviews of elderly Dust Bowl survivors. What stands out is that while the 1930s certainly saw a number of severely dry years, the sheer scale of the Dust Bowl had much more to do with farmer’s practices than with the weather, as well as the financial catastrophe of the Depression, which reduced demand for crops—all after farmers had spent the previous decade and half plowing more and more land. The … Continue reading Why the New Ken Burns Documentary on the Dust Bowl Has Lessons to Teach Us