Donald Worster’s Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930’s combines economic theory and environmental history to examine a larger question about how production and culture intermingle. Within fifty years of settling the plains the American spirit tore apart the land and put settlers in harm’s way . A simple way to think of Worster’s book is to focus on the word erosion. He equates erosion to the, personal, cultural, and geological failings of Americans during the 1930’s . What is at stake in this study is the question of what it ought to mean to be American. Worster does not fault the pioneers for taking risks to carve out a new life, rather he questions the necessity of cash farming and the nature of the settling of the West. The persistent and all-encompassing need for growth and consumption fueled an America which could not be sustained. The frequency with which people gambled success and failure meant that when drought came, and the unexpected ecological event of the dust storms manifested, the settlers had little…show more content… Cimarron was devastated by the winds of the Dust Bowl, nearly half the county was abandoned as former residence fled West. Those who had made their living in ranching fared better, Worston observed, due to their cultivation of grass. Those who remained resolute throughout the ecological nightmare, rejoiced at the end of the decade as stability returned in 1938 and 1940 . Their neighbors could not contend with the difficulties of taming the land but they had, and now they would reap the benefit . Haskell county was saved by the New Deal , farmers were provided security by their government and able to maintain their rural community. This had the lasting impact however of bringing the Agricultural Adjustment Administration into the region and an eventual reliance upon welfare which Worster laments as a part of the erosive forces at work within the area
