A Sense of Place

Just as many political historians examine moments of conflict and controversy—believing that episodes of social divide expose underlying tensions that are otherwise easily camouflaged during less tumultuous times—many environmental historians have become interested in studying human-induced “natural” disasters.{1} Such events provide useful windows into the long-term environmental consequences of human action. Donald Worster’s Dust Bowl, first published in 1979 and recently reissued in a twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, pioneered in its exploration of a profound ecological-economic crisis in American history. The book won the Bancroft Prize and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. It became one of the most influential works in environmental history and a mainstay in agricultural and Western history as well. Dust Bowl also had much to offer historians of technology, and it still does.{2}

Richard White once observed that Worster sought to place “environmental history at the point where the natural and the cultural intersect and interact with each other,” a scenario that in no way ignores technology.{3} Worster treated technology as an expression of culture, one that had steadily enlarged its power to reshape the earth. He did not view technology as an independent, driving force so much as a set of tools and techniques that magnified and accelerated the environmental impacts of human occupation rather than determining the path or nature of those impacts. Farmers thus were viewed as businessmen who turned to machines to maximize profits, often by ignoring the natural limits of a particular place.{4}

To Worster, capitalistic culture was the essential factor underpinning the Dust Bowl. By distorting human relationships with the land, capitalism made the aggressive employment of agricultural mechanization an irresistibly attractive option. Such farming practices exacerbated the destruction of the native sod that had evolved on the Great Plains, which in turn led to the devastating dust storms of the 1930s. In Worster’s view, science and technology had never represented the solution to such problems. Neither new and improved technologies nor increased scientific understanding of Great Plains ecology offered protection from the recurrence of similar environmental calamities, he warned, so long as capitalism’s values, norms, and priorities dominated. Capitalism trumps all other suits in Worster’s story. No talk of progress here. In fact, it is quite the reverse.{5}

Fig. 1 The federal government commissioned photographers to document the hardships and conflicts faced by farmers in the Dust Bowl. The original Farm Security Administration caption card for this 1938 Dorothea Lange photograph reads: “Leveling hummocks in dust bowl, thirty miles north of Dalhart, Texas. Farmer: ‘Every dime I got is tied up right here. If I don’t get it out, I’ve got to drive off and leave it. Where would I go and what would I do? I know what the land did once for me, maybe it will do it again.’ Son: ‘It would be better if the sod had never been broke. My father’s broke plenty of it. Could I get a job in California?’” (Source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, reproduction number LC-USF34-018264-C.)

The roots of Worster’s work on this topic ran deep. He openly acknowledged his personal attachment to the southern plains—an expanse of grasslands spreading over 100 million wind-swept acres in the states of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas. The hardships associated with the Dust Bowl eventually drove his parents from the region. They perched temporarily in California—where Worster was born—before resettling in western Kansas as soon as conditions improved. Worster stated that the book’s origins sprang from a longing to revisit the plains, to “take another look at the land and people who gave me so much to start with” (p. vii). This emotional attraction to the subject did nothing to blur his vision or dull his critique, however. Indeed, he knowingly predicted that his conclusions would displease many plainsmen.

As a socially caused ecological calamity, the Dust Bowl has been surpassed in magnitude only twice in human history, according to Worster: by the Chinese in around 3000 b.c.e., when upland deforestation triggered centuries of severe flooding and silting, and later by the brazen overgrazing of Mediterranean vegetation that led to the erosion and impoverishment of this once quintessentially fertile territory.{6} In comparison to these earlier landscape degradations, which resulted from generations of human activity, the Dust Bowl occurred far more rapidly and could not “be blamed on illiteracy or overpopulation or social disorder.” As Worster explained:

It came about because the culture was operating in precisely the way it was supposed to. Americans blazed their way across a richly endowed continent with a ruthless, devastating efficiency unmatched by any people anywhere. When the white men came to the plains, they talked expansively of “busting” and “breaking” the land. And that is exactly what they did. Some environmental catastrophes are nature’s work, others are the slowly accumulating effects of ignorance or poverty. The Dust Bowl, in contrast, was the inevitable outcome of a culture that deliberately and self-consciously set itself that task of dominating and exploiting the land for all it was worth. (p. 4)

Prior to Worster, few authors had drawn connections between the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression of the 1930s. He argued that these events were inextricably intertwined and that they revealed “fundamental weaknesses” in American culture, both ecological and economic. During the 1920s, the Great Plains had been “extensively plowed and put to wheat—turned into highly mechanized factory farms that produced unprecedented harvests. Plains operators, however, ignored all environmental limits in this enterprise, just as Wall Street ignored sharp practices and a top-heavy economy.” Perhaps in other, more forgiving ecological circumstances such agricultural practices might not have been so destructive, but on the southern plains there was little to buffer the impact of commercial farming on the course-grained soils, and little to prevent farmers from assuming the risks they were “willing to take for profit” (pp. 6–7). It was, Worster argued, “the work of man, not nature” that created the Dust Bowl.

Admittedly, nature had something to do with this disaster too. Without winds the soil would have stayed put, no matter how bare it was. Without drought, farmers would have had strong, healthy crops capable of checking the wind. But natural factors did not make the storms—they merely made them possible. The storms were mainly the result of stripping the landscape of its natural vegetation to such an extent that there was no defense against the dry winds, no sod to hold the sandy or powdery dirt. The sod had been destroyed to make farms to grow wheat to get cash. (p. 13)

Throughout much of the country’s mid-section, Worster noted, “great phalanxes of clanking, smoking machines [remade] the face of the earth,” grinding under its rural culture in the process (p. 58). Landowners who received federal agricultural assistance often purchased tractors and displaced their tenants. Despite the drought and depression, tractor ownership increased dramatically during the 1930s in the southern plains. Farm mechanization changed farming patterns and pushed people off the land.{7}

The ecological and geological history of the Great Plains owes much to the Rocky Mountains, which cast a vast rain-shadow over most of these lands and contributed to their immense flatness. As the mountain range’s rocks and soil gradually eroded, they formed an enormous alluvial fan that slowly obliterated the region’s topographical features under layer upon layer of sediment. The climate in this semiarid region was extreme and unpredictable. Rainfall averaged twenty inches or less per year. Worster explained that

[a]gainst these powerful forces organic nature had struggled over millions of years, determining by trial and error what would flourish best in this dry corner of the good earth—now losing ground, now gaining it back. Nothing was fixed or permanent; man did not come into a perfectly stable or finished world on the plains. . . . All the living things needed each other, depended on each other, to withstand the harsher side of climate. (p. 66)

The earliest human settlers understood and respected that interdependency. Their successors did neither. With periodic droughts a normal occurrence, grasses were among the few plants that possessed the resilience needed to survive under such conditions. Plowing those grasses on a scale measured in tens of millions of acres—a process begun in the late nineteenth century—was a recipe for disaster. It was an act that caused the sand-laced land literally to fall apart.

Comparing the development that took place between 1910 and 1930 to previous activities on the Great Plains, Worster observed how technology intensified society’s environmental impact. Cowboys and sod-house farmers of that earlier era had adopted traditional approaches: “herding animals by horseback, walking behind a plow and team.” As America embraced the success of “long assembly lines turning out automobiles, trucks, and tractors,” the grassland also “was to be torn up to make a vast wheat factory: a landscape tailored to the industrial age” (p. 87). The post–World War I recovery in Europe provided a huge financial incentive for wheat production in the southern plains. Millions of acres were planted in winter wheat, and the increased use of farm machinery drove down the per-acre labor requirements. Gasoline-powered tractors were the main transforming technologies, especially when coupled to the one-way disk plow, and they were complemented on the Great Plains by the combined harvester-thresher, or “combine,” as the innovative contraption was more commonly known.

The new machines cost money, and this raised the capital investments needed to farm. The new machines also allowed for economies of scale, an encouragement for farmers to invest even more in equipment and land. Speculators could move their specialized machines from field to field, becoming “suitcase farmers.” Technology, Worster wrote, “made possible, and common, an exploitative relationship with the earth: a bond that was strictly commercial, so that the land became nothing more than a form of capital that must be made to pay as much as possible” (p. 93). From 1925 to 1930, farmers plowed under 5,260,000 acres of native grasses in the southern plains. Without this indigenous vegetation in place when the drought and winds came, there was little to stop the earth from blowing in the wind. “When the black blizzards began to roll across the plains in 1935, one-third of the Dust Bowl region—33 million acres—lay naked, ungrassed, and vulnerable to the winds” (p. 94).

Today, few films are screened more frequently in history-of-technology courses than Pare Lorentz’s 1936 documentary, The Plow That Broke the Plains.{8} Its argument that technology was the cause of the Dust Bowl and that technology—if redirected in the beneficent hands of the New Dealers—offered the best solution to the problem has drawn a sound rebuke from Worster: “Explaining the plow that broke the plains requires one to explain the powerful expansionary and autonomous thrust of American society” (p. 96). It is the cultural force of capitalism that truly explains this event, he insisted: “The attitude of capitalism—industrial and pre-industrial—toward the earth was imperial and commercial; none of its ruling values taught environmental humility, reverence, or restraint.” Especially on the southern plains, “where the grass had always struggled to hold the land against powerful winds and recurrent drought,” in a place situated—in Worster’s words—“on the edges of the fertile earth,” Americans seemed to find it most difficult to express “all the cooperative, self-effacing, cautious elements” needed to sustain the land (p. 97). “Living within the ecological order requires knowledge, of course, and appropriate technology,” he wrote, “but more important is the capacity to feel deeply the contours of that order and one’s part in it” (p. 164).

Responses to the dirt storms of the 1930s varied widely. The U.S. Department of Agriculture clung tenaciously to its longstanding goal of increasing crop production, particularly through the use of farm machinery, fertilizer, pesticides, improved seed, and irrigation. The pervasive belief that more was better hamstrung effective conservation-reform efforts, totally sidestepping the environmental limits of the Great Plains. Ecologists offered yet another perspective. Granting the unfeasibility of moving people off the southern plains, they urged that land use strive for a steady state (or, in today’s parlance, “sustainability”), which generally meant working to adapt oneself to local conditions. Reform spurred by ecologists was limited, however. They tended to provide ecological insights and then back off rather than propose solutions to alter human behavior on the Great Plains.

Agronomists formed a third group of New Deal conservationists. Led by the newly established Soil Conservation Service, they stressed the importance of farming methods, or technique. Accepting that their contribution would be to adhere to the prevailing political economy, which called for using land for cash crops, they attempted to persuade farmers to use the right tools to grow the right crops. The mantle of science helped strengthen their message. Unlike the ecologists, the agronomists contended that sod-busting was not the problem; the trouble rested with the subsequent agricultural practices, they said. The harrowing impacts of the Dust Bowl could be rectified, and the land made whole again, by technology. Echoing the conclusions of The Plow That Broke the Plains, the agronomists pushed “salvation through technique” and promised “recovery through scientific manipulation of the land” (p. 211). In the end, conservation agronomy proved to be the most popular of the reform alternatives, but like its competitors, it left untouched the underlying economic system.

As shown by subsequent events, the agronomists’ prescriptions for reworking the Great Plains brought little lasting protection. From 1954 to 1957, the rain stopped falling and the wind started blowing again, doing damage to a wider swath of land than in the 1930s—the result of having even more land under the plow. The results would have been worse than during the 1930s save for the fact that the rains returned. Technique was neither the solution nor the problem. The cause of the Dust Bowl, in Worster’s analysis, was the motivation of capitalistic farming: the quest for extracting as much profit from the land as possible. And the situation was aggravated by the government’s continual willingness to clean up the worst of the messes whenever they occurred. With such an economic formula, making more money requires taking more risks, and that has spelled trouble for semiarid regions like the southern plains where the land has continued to be perceived as a commodity. Government officials had “offered farmers a technological panacea for ecological destructiveness, when the root issue was motivation and values—a deeply entrenched economic ethos” (p. 229).

For historians of technology, Worster’s highlighting of the fundamental role of capitalism in creating “natural” disasters offers a framework for engaging the most notable of Melvin Kranzberg’s “laws”: that “technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”{9} At the micro-level, land use (and the use of technology to work the land) involves individual assessments of risk-taking, and these decisions can vary from person to person. On a macro-level, however, clearer patterns emerge, shaped by the overpowering currents of culture and the political economy, as was so painfully evident in coastal Louisiana and Mississippi following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.{10}

Historians of technology have often been drawn to the social and political dimensions of their topics. It is worth recalling therefore the milieu within which Worster wrote Dust Bowl. The 1970s witnessed the coming of age of the environmental movement, with heightened knowledge of ecological problems and an insistence that society address them. The merging of political activism and the involvement of scientists helped raise awareness of the earth’s limits and the responsibility of nations around the world to adapt accordingly. Technology was frequently suggested as the cure-all for problems, with mixed results, as documented now by many historians. Themes such as these saturate Dust Bowl, offering lessons about understanding limits and about scrutinizing more carefully proposals for quick reform.{11}

History, Worster tells us, involves more than human society (of which technology and politics are parts). It also involves place: that context of the physical and biological world where stories unfold. Technology has shaped the contours of those stories, of course, but so too has nature. This insight, this truth, has been increasingly pursued by a range of scholars committed to examining the intersections of technological and environmental history, an effort spurred in part by Worster’s exemplary analyses.{12}

In Worster’s case, the history of place provides lessons also useful in interpreting the present condition of that same region. Since the severe drought of the 1950s, farmers on the southern plains have redoubled their reliance on technology to fend off the threat of future dust storms. They have done so largely through sophisticated irrigation projects fed by galaxies of efficient, deep-well pumps tapping into one of the world’s largest subterranean lakes, the Ogallala aquifer. This immense irrigation enterprise has nurtured crops that have anchored the soil, and advancements in water-conservation technologies (such as center-pivot sprinklers and drip irrigation systems) have greatly reduced the percentage of fossil groundwater lost to evaporation. Nevertheless, the Ogallala is being mined at rates vastly exceeding the meager pace of replenishment, which means that this vital and virtually nonrenewable resource is diminishing precipitously, making all but inevitable the reassertion of the region’s environmental limits on society.{13} Technology will surely be called upon to help forestall the forces of nature. As Donald Worster teaches us, the history of the region suggests that culture, money, human choices, and—above all—place will also play a role in directing the outcome.

{1} For a discussion of this trend among environmental historians, see Richard White, “Environmental History, Ecology, and Meaning,” Journal of American History 76 (1990): 1115.

{2} Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York, 1979); the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, with an eleven-page afterword by Worster, was published by Oxford University Press in 2004. Worster’s influence in helping to revitalize Western history can be seen in such works as: Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York, 1987); Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman, Okla., 1991); Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin, eds., Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence, Kan., 1991); William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991); William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, eds., Under a Western Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (New York, 1992); William G. Robbins, Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West (Lawrence, Kan., 1994); and Frieda Knobloch, The Culture of Wilderness: Agriculture as Colonization in the American West (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996). For examples of Worster’s subsequent contributions to environmental history, see: Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York, 1985); Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (New York, 1992); The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York, 1993); An Unsettled Country: Changing Landscapes of the American West (Albuquerque, N.M., 1994); and A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (New York, 2001).

{3} White, “Environmental History, Ecology, and Meaning,” 1111.

{4} For a discussion of how Worster treated technology and human history in his later book, Under Western Skies, see Hal K. Rothman, “The Sky’s the Limit? Technology and the American West,” Technology and Culture 35 (1994): 168–73. For a survey of the historical literature on American agricultural technology, see Deborah Fitzgerald, “Beyond Tractors: The History of Technology in American Agriculture,” Technology and Culture 32 (1991): 114–26.

{5} For a comparison of the trajectory of Worster’s narrative with that of a more traditional account of the Dust Bowl, see William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78 (1992): 1347–76.

{6} Jared M. Diamond’s best-selling book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York, 2005), drew widespread attention to the extent and diversity of human-created ecological calamities across history.

{7} Farm mechanization, soil exhaustion, and a depressed agricultural economy were already contributing to rural out-migration—even from the Great Plains—during the 1920s. See James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York, 1989) and Walter Nugent, Into the West: The Story of Its People (New York, 1999). For an engaging treatment of the struggles endured by those who remained on the southern plains during the “dirty 30s,” see Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Boston, 2006).

{8} The Plow That Broke the Plains and Pare Lorentz’s follow-up New Deal documentary, The River (1937), both included original scores by Virgil Thomson, and both came to be considered landmark documentaries. In January 2007, Naxos released a one-volume DVD (catalogue no. 2.110521) containing the two films, each of them featuring newly recorded soundtracks. For an insightful discussion of Lorentz’s work as well as how other photographers and filmmakers addressed the interactions of nature and technology on the Great Plains during the 1930s, see Finis Dunaway, Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform (Chicago, 2005). The Dust Bowl images most deeply seared into the American consciousness, of course, were created by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath (New York, 1939), which was adapted the following year for the big screen by 20th Century Fox.

{9} Melvin Kranzberg, “Technology and History: ‘Kranzberg’s Laws’,” Technology and Culture 27 (1986): 545.

{10} For thought-provoking essays commissioned by Technology and Culture (vol. 47, January 2006) on the natural/unnatural nature of these storms, see: Craig E. Colten, “The Rusting of the Chemical Corridor,” 95–101; Todd Shallat, “Holding Louisiana,” 102–7; and Carolyn Kolb, “Crescent City, Post-Apocalypse,” 108–11. See also Martin Reuss, “Searching for Sophocles on Bourbon Street,” Technology and Culture 47 (April 2006): 349–56. For a more sweeping assessment of the question in general, see Ted Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (New York, 2000).

{11} For Worster’s reflections on the nature and development of environmental history, including the significance of its emergence during the 1970s, see Donald Worster, “Doing Environmental History,” in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, ed. Donald Worster (New York, 1988), 289–308.

{12} For a survey of this literature, see Jeffrey K. Stine and Joel A. Tarr, “At the Intersection of Histories: Technology and the Environment,” Technology and Culture 39 (1998): 601–40.

{13} See John Opie, Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land, 2nd ed. (Lincoln, Neb., 2000) and John Opie, “The Drought of 1988, the Global Warming Experiment, and Its Challenge to Irrigation in the Old Dust Bowl Region,” in A Sense of the American West: An Anthology of Environmental History, ed. James E. Sherow (Albuquerque, N.M., 1998), 261–89. For an assessment of land use on the Great Plains based on county-level census data from 1870–2000 in which technology is credited with helping farmers maintain a general level of stability in this region, see Geoff Cunfer, On the Great Plains: Agriculture and Environment (College Station, Tex., 2005).