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发帖数: 1 | 1 North America is one of the largest wheat exporting regions in the world,
and the main grain-producing region there is the Great Midwest Plains of the
United States. The Great Plains is also nicknamed the "Banner of the World"
, with the so-called "Wheat Kingdom", "Corn Kingdom" and "Livestock Kingdom"
all located in the region.
But can you imagine that a hundred years ago, there was an apocalyptic scene
in this world's granary? Because of the largest ecological disaster in U.S.
history, the U.S. government has undertaken the only national ecological
transformation. Today we're going to learn about that dirty history.
The Great Plains mainly include Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New
Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming in the
United States, as well as Canada and Mexico part of the area. Image source:
wikipedia
The Great Plains of the American Midwest was originally a typical grassland
ecosystem, where the grasslands experience extreme droughts every 20 years
and mild droughts every 3-4 years.
How to grow crops in such a dry place? In fact, the early settlers of North
America felt the same way. As early as when European colonists first visited
the Great Plains, it was determined that the Great Plains was not suitable
for European agriculture, so the Great Plains was also called "the Great
American Desert" by the early colonists.
However, in the era of the Westward Movement (U.S. Midwest Development) that
began in 1862, the U.S. federal government encouraged farmers to develop
this "desert". To this end, the federal government promulgated the "
Homestead Act" that everyone read in textbooks: each immigrant was allocated
a piece of land and stipulated that as long as they lived and farmed in the
Great Plains for more than 5 years, they could get the title of the land.
Wheat fields in what is now Kansas in the Great Plains. Image credit:
wikimedia
Coupled with the rise in food demand driven by the First World War in the
early 20th century, and just like that, with the completion of the first
transcontinental railway in 1869, a large influx of new immigrants poured
into the wild pastures.
However, American farmers at the time lacked an understanding of plains
ecology. They have widely adopted deep ploughing and ploughing on the Great
Plains of North America, digging up native weeds with strong wind and sand-
fixing capabilities, and then planting crops based on wheat. This period of
barbaric land reclamation is also known as the Great Plow-up.
Image credit: pixabay
Climatologist Brian Fuchs of the National Drought Mitigation Center (
National Drought Mitigation) commented that the cultivation of the Great
Plains in the 1920s changed the local ecosystem with a history of millions
of years. The destruction of the ecology has bought the foreshadowing of the
impending catastrophe.
On the other hand, in the 1920s, the Great Plains had abnormally high
rainfall and good crops, which led to the superstition of American farmers
at the time - "rain follows the plow", That is, it will rain after ploughing.
This short-lived boom has led to unrealistic expectations for the future,
and the rapid growth of agricultural production has accelerated agricultural
expansion and ecological destruction.
However, the rains of the 1920s were only anomalies, not constant, and these
eventually proved to be impermanent.
The U.S. stock market crash of October 29, 1929. Image source:
businessinsider.com
On October 29, 1929, the U.S. stock market crashed and the Great Depression
began. The stock market crash was just an appetizer of what later
generations would call the "dirty 30s."
In 1931, the drought came unexpectedly. Throughout the next decade, the
Trailblazers paid for the government and their own recklessness: the
northern Great Plains suffered 4 of the 7 driest years since 1895, and
Kansas suffered 4 of the 12 driest years While the entire western part of
Texas did not receive normal rainfall until 1941.
A dust storm in Stratford, Texas, in 1935. Image source: wikipedia
Large-scale dust storms are also invited. There were 14 dust storms in the
Great Plains in 1932 and 38 in 1933. In 1934, about three-quarters (500,000
square kilometers) of the topsoil in Texas was blown away by the wind. This
is the origin of the nickname "Dirty 30s".
The dust storm of the 1930s was also called the Dust Bowl, after a report on
April 14, 1935.
Black Storm. Image credit: The Great Plow Up
On that day, a gust of wind blew about 300 million tons of dirt across the
Great Plains. According to the 2006 history book The Worst Hard Time: The
Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl The soil
weighs twice as much as the soil excavated when the Panama Canal was built.
When the dust storm hit on April 14, 1935, many even thought the end of the
world had come. According to a New Republic article by Avis D. Carlson,
people couldn't even touch doorknobs, ate and slept in sand. And Associated
Press reporter Robert E. Geiger happened to be in Boise, Oklahoma that day,
and he first used the term black storm to describe the conditions of the
black sand at the time.
During the Black Storm, residents' homes were covered in sand and dust.
Image source: The Great Plow Up
The dust storm on May 9, 1934 was the highest in the black storm period: the
wind and sand carrying about 5,500 tons of soil formed a line 2,400
kilometers long from east to west, 1,400 kilometers wide from north to south
, and 3 kilometers high. The black dragon swept across two-thirds of the
United States in three days, scraping all the way from the Midwest to the
eastern coastal cities.
During the Black Storm. Image credit: The Great Plow Up
On May 11, 1934, the Statue of Liberty, a landmark in New York, and Capitol
Hill in Washington, D.C., were covered in sand and dust. On that day, a dust
storm descended on the White House, and first-hand "documents" of the
drought in the West were deposited on the president's desk.
You may remember a scene from the 2014 sci-fi movie "Interstellar": a dust
storm swept the United States, causing a food crisis. Director Christopher
Nolan once said that this setting is mapped to Black Storm.
Sandstorm in Interstellar.
According to A History of Us: War, Peace and all that Jazz (Our History: War
, Peace and Jazz), a recommended reading of the new American Curriculum
Standard (CCSS), the black storm engulfed the disaster-stricken states such
as Texas and Oklahoma. 400,000 square kilometers of land, the affected
people were displaced because they could not repay their mortgages on houses
and crops, and the economic losses reached 25 million US dollars a day,
equivalent to 470 million US dollars in 2020.
Farm machinery in Dallas, South Dakota, buried by a black storm. Image
credit: wikipedia
Bankrupt farmers had to be displaced, and about 250,000 people left the
Great Plains in one of the largest emigrations in U.S. history.
But these poor and white dust storm refugees have been severely
discriminated against elsewhere. In California, the main destination for
immigrants, they are nicknamed the Okie. The Grapes of Wrath, later by Nobel
Prize winner John Steinbeck, depicts what happened to these immigrants.
Photographs depicting a devastated immigrant mother and her helpless child
were also taken by photographer Dorothea Lange during that period.
This famous portrait was called Destitute Pea Pickers in California (
Destitute Pea Pickers in California), which would later become an icon of
the Great Depression. Image credit: wikipedia
Black storms also cause rare physical phenomena. A lot of static electricity
was left after the wind and sand passed the border. Static electricity not
only made shaking hands a dangerous thing, but also made the car radio
system ineffective, and even caused lightning. Therefore, cars and
motorcycles in the black storm areas had to be equipped with a "ground wire".
Of course, similar dust disasters in human history are more than this one.
Desertification in the Sahel region of central and western Africa is also
due to drought and disorderly agriculture. In addition, since the former
Soviet Union began to reclaim grasslands in Kazakhstan and other regions
from 1954, in March and April 1960, southern Russia also suffered severe
dust storms, which affected an area of 鈥嬧40,000 square kilometers.
Dust storms in Niamey, capital of Niger in Africa's Sahel region. Image
source: wikipedia
But in the eyes of many scholars, black storms are unique in the entire
history of human civilization.
Donald Worster, academician of the American Academy of Sciences and Society,
emeritus professor at the University of Kansas, and distinguished professor
at Renmin University of China, has conducted extensive research on black
storms. The Great Plains won the Bancroft Prize, the highest award in
American history.
In Wooster 's view: "Black Storm is the top three, top four, or top five
environmental disasters in world history." Reclamation Years) called the
Black Storm the worst man-made ecological disaster in U.S. history.
People in the Black Storm. Image credit: The Great Plow Up
Since then, the US federal government has launched a series of stop-loss
measures. Roosevelt's New Deal was born of the Black Storm.
Roosevelt once said, "A nation that destroys its soil destroys itself."
Roosevelt's New Deal's famous "Farm Act" encouraged farmers to return their
farmland to forests, subsidized farmers who abandoned their farms, and
established nature reserves. The Shelter Forest Project in the Great Plains
is therefore also known as the "Roosevelt Project".
A stamp issued by the United States Postal Service commemorating soil
conservation.
Zhu Yongjie, a professor at Beijing Forestry University, commented that the
Roosevelt Project is the first in human history and the only national-scale
ecological environment construction project in the United States. The Soil
Conservation Service, established during Roosevelt's New Deal era, is now
the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS).
It seems that the establishment of each new bureau has an unbearable history
behind it. Where there is only a handful of yellow sand left, it may have
been a civilization that was extremely prosperous but could not correct
itself. |
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