What Can the Dust Bowl Tell Us About Climate Migration?
Prepare for a world on the move
How do you know when it’s time to leave home? Millions of people living on the Great Plains began to ask themselves this question when the rains stopped falling in 1934 and 1935. Many of the farms on the plains were only a few decades old at that point; they’d been established in the first two decades of the 1900s, when new technology and growing demand for wheat had promised to make farming in previously inhospitable climates a profitable concern. The government encouraged farmers to “homestead” in these areas, and a couple of decades of better-than-average weather had persuaded them to stay.
In the midst of the Great Depression, people living in states like Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas found themselves in one of America’s worst environmental catastrophes. A multi-year drought hit areas in which the prairie grasses — which naturally anchored the soil — had been cleared away. People’s crops withered under the merciless sun, and the topsoil, which made it possible for them to farm in the first place, simply blew away in the wind. People and their livestock choked on the dust in their throats while barren farms refused to yield any food or profit.
About 2.5 million people left the Great Plains as a result of the droughts of 1934–1940. To leave was an…
