Oh, bleakness.

I just finished reading The Worst Hard Time, a companion book to the All Pikes Peak Reads book for ‘08, The Grapes of Wrath, and man if that book didn’t punch me directly in the balls of my soul.

The Worst Hard Time provides a pretty holistic look at the Dust Bowl, from the initial colonization to the environmental reasons for collapse to stories of folks who stayed behind, and a lot of it can be put directly at the feet of the government, who were coerced by the railroads and land companies into spurring a migration into southeastern Colorado, north Texas, eastern New Mexico and western Oklahoma, instructed people to cut up the native grasses and topsoil and who, once drought began, would not intervene to help them. (This is, of course, a vast oversimplification.) It took years of WPA, CCC and other New Deal programs to slow down the erosion, and by that time, a large segment of Dust Bowl citizens had died or left the area. It’s one of the most depressing stories of large-scale failure in American history, and we’re at least geographically close to a lot of it; the book cites a community in Baca County, CO.

We’re reassured that the Great Depression can’t happen again, that the minutiae of the stock market and the way banks operate won’t allow it. But what caused the Dust Bowl was much more a symptom of massive policy failure pushed by corporate interests and government complicity than of economic depression, and something like that seems right around the corner, given how thoroughly our government has screwed its citizens and our world. Even now, after a blanket agreement that the southern American plains just aren’t right for agriculture, it’s a place of huge-scale factory farming, the water being supplied by the Ogallala Aquifer at a rate of one million acre-feet per day, draining it at an unbelievable pace. Parts of that Aquifer, which stretches from the Dakotas to Texas will be dry by 2010. Seriously—and this applies to pretty much every aspect of American politics—have we learned nothing?

(Oh, and The Worst Hard Time author Timothy Egan, will be in Colorado Springs on October 2, for a luncheon at Garden of the Gods Club and a lecture at, speaking of wastelands, the Rampart Range campus of Pikes Peak Community College.)

Posted by: Aaron Retka in Uncategorized | Permalink