The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan

From The Week of November 28, 2010:

Those of us old enough to have had parents or grandparents who lived through the Great Depression will have heard many stories of the pain and the hardship endured by those poor souls who suffered through the 1930s. But it is one thing to hear the stories, of the deprivation, of the weather, of the dust; it's entirely another to have the whole of that dark decade laid before us, bare and raw. Mr. Egan, a talented memographer, captures this time and its causes by marrying descriptions of the period with the policies that gave it life. And in doing so, he creates a completely gripping account of a time spent in Hell.

With or without the devastating agricultural policies that lead to the creation of the Dust Bowl, the 1930s would have been a time of economic hardship. The Dust Bowl merely symbolized the apocalyptic nature of the decade. This symbol rained down prairie land onto cities as far east as New York City and Washington D.C.. The cause of these massive dust storms? The systematic stripping away from grassland in the heart of the North American continent, beginning with the grass-burnings to drive out the native Indians and then completed with the turn-of-the-century free land policy which encouraged European immigrants to settle not with existing communities along the crowded east coast, but westward, in Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska. Believing that converted the destroyed grasslands into farmland could feed the country for decades to come, the prairies were transformed into agricultural land, but not without a monumental price.

Unprotected, the soil which nourishes our crops is naked to the vicious wind storms which blow through the flat prairies, scooping it up and incorporating it, transforming a simple wind storm into a gigantic shovel full of countless tons of dust and debris. Grass is what normally prevents this nightmare from occurring, providing the necessary shelter for the soil to stay rooted in the ground. But with the grass either burned off, or swapped out for crops, the soil was laid bare, free to be hurled with great force all over the continent, nutrient-rich material that took millennia to built up scattered to the winds by ignorance.

The Worst Hard Time is a wonderful illustration of the folly of acting without thinking through the consequences, of acting before one understands the system, of acting without regard to anything but ones own self-interest. Mr. Egan switches between eyewitnesses to the burning grasslands and the hellish dust storms and the policymakers who made it happen, but his narrative is most potent when it describes the phenomenal efforts of early environmental scientists to lobby for and implement a policy change that attempted to stanch the bleeding of the prairies and to go some way to repairing what had been destroyed. This is excellent work which will never allow me to forget the vivid descriptions of the terrible dust storms that destroyed so many lives. Unbelievable... (4/5 Stars)