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This introductory chapter provides a background of the 1930s Dust Bowl on the U.S. southern plains, where the ancient grasslands that protected the soil from prairie winds and rains and nourished regional species were destroyed within just a few decades, following the violent opening of the plains to white settlement and the global market in the 1800s. Under pressure from the vagaries of the world economy, settlers sheared the land to expand cash-crop agriculture and ranching. As major drought descended on the plains, winds and static electricity lifted the desiccated, exposed topsoil, forming dust storms on an unprecedented scale. Such massive loss of soil and continued dry conditions meant the land could no longer support life as it once had. By the end of the 1930s, tens of thousands of people were displaced. Hence, when scientists today predict the increasing possibility of Dust Bowl-like conditions, they are signaling a particular kind of extreme ecological and social change.

This chapter challenges typical interpretations of the Dust Bowl and puts the disaster into a global frame, linking the past to the present. In so doing, the common roots of contemporary and past developments and struggles are revealed. The Dust Bowl was one spectacular instance of a global problem of soil erosion associated with capitalist colonial expansion. While the official interpretation suggests that agriculture suited for a humid region was imported to an arid region, precipitating the crisis, contemporaneous accounts illustrate how much larger the crisis was, tied up with specific social and economic developments that imposed new socio-ecological relations upon peoples of the world and upon the land irrespective of local climatic conditions. Ultimately, the common denominators across the world—from North to South America, Australia to Africa, and Southeast to East Asia—were not climate and geography, but capitalism and colonialism.

Chapter Two analyzes CCC conservation projects on a national scale, and links the landscape changes caused by such work to both a broadening of conservationist concerns and to Franklin Roosevelt's desire for political support from rural America. It argues that although Corps conservation work appeared haphazard and static, it actually evolved over time and involved two types of labor on a trio of rural landscapes. While the Corps began its work in forests, primarily in the far West, the Dust Bowl of 1934 forced CCC enrollees onto the nation's farms as well, both on the Great Plains and in the soil-eroded South. This first type of conservation work involving both reforestation and soil conservation not only embodied the goals of Progressive era conservationists, who advocated the efficient use of natural resources, but also popularized the New Deal throughout these rural regions. During the late-1930s the Corps expanded its work projects yet again, this time into the country's state and national parks where CCC enrollees built hiking trails, campgrounds, motor roads, and visitor centers to increase public access to outdoor recreation. This second type of Corps work, which echoed the Boy Scouts' desire to rejuvenate Americans through healthful contact with nature, represented a broadening of conservationist ideology beyond the wise use of natural resources to include concern for public health. Chapter Two concludes that the dueling progressive philosophies that influenced Franklin Roosevelt's creation of the CCC—those of the conservation movement and of the Boy Scouts—became physically realized across the New Deal landscape.

This chapter argues that the Dust Bowl is a perfect example of the accumulation of catastrophe, the result of decision makers shifting ecological problems down the line and denying the nature of the changes required to develop sustainable farming on the plains. As a result, the plains and the people living there in the 1930s suffered what Russell Lord, who worked for the Soil Conservation Service, called “the most spectacular mass sacrifice to strictly commercial mores in the history of mankind.” Over the decades, cultivated soils have become more exhausted and eroded. Agricultural science often has been applied to mask the effects of this degradation rather than to restore natural soil fertility. Moreover, the increased use of insecticides and herbicides in lieu of more ecological approaches to controlling weeds and insects, and synthetic fertilizers to replace lost soil nutrients, has led to further problems.

This chapter considers how migrants changed California and also how they were changed by their contact with California and Los Angeles. In the first few years after the exodus began, Okies were subject to a well-organized media scapegoating campaign that portrayed migrants as threatening folk devils. Media attacks not only stirred up moral panic about Okie intentions but also persuaded California authorities and legislators to pursue restrictive and discriminatory measures. The chapter notes that this led some migrants—especially stars in the Los Angeles music and radio industries—to create counterimages by singing, talking, and writing about the members of the Dust Bowl migration as a coherent and praiseworthy group.

This chapter presents the salient features of the Epoch of Ecological Extremes contributing to the development of Dust Bowl conditions today. The twentieth century was deemed “the Age of Extremes.” It is clear, however, that the twenty-first century is poised to surpass the twentieth to become the Epoch of Ecological Extremes. Today the interconnected issues precipitating the new Dust Bowl era are the culmination of increasingly extreme exploitation—in terms of scale and technique—of the land, of the planet's hydrocarbon repositories, and of freshwater systems. As with the 1930s Dust Bowl, this extreme abuse of the global commons is mirrored in the extreme politics required to make such destruction possible. Also like the 1930s, these developments are associated with high levels of expropriation, social inequality, oppression, and dislocation.

Beginning with Woody Guthrie and Merle Haggard, this chapter introduces the social movement of country music in Los Angeles. It follows the history of country music culture in Southern California from the height of the Dust Bowl migration in the mid-1930s to the relocation of key components of the local country music industry to Nashville in the early 1970s. The chapter discusses Okie country music and the rise and fall of an eclectic liberal populism, and also reassesses the cultural politics of country music. It concludes that the cultural ethnicity of country music is the Grapes of Wrath culture, a testament to the fans and performers that the Okie experience continues to resonate so powerfully within country music today.

This chapter addresses the question of what caused the Dust Bowl by looking at the social and economic developments driving the changing relations of humans to one another and to the land globally in the period immediately preceding it. A distinguishing feature of the new imperialism was the marked increase in the rate of territorial acquisition by Europe, the United States, and Britain. The racially justified expropriation of the land and people enriched and increased the capacities of Global North nations and their economic elites—who financed, carried out, and benefited from this expropriation—to reinforce their rule. As David Naguib Pellow writes, “natural resources are used and abused to support racial hegemony and domination and have been at the core of this process for a half-millennium.” Thus, expropriation, exploitation, and domination paved the way directly to the Dust Bowl and the global crisis of soil erosion by the 1930s.

This concluding chapter argues that the imperial origins of modern mainstream environmentalism resulted in a segregated environmental movement worldwide, and led to a stark divide between what activists and scholars refer to as “the environmentalism of the rich” and “the environmentalism of the poor.” Political and economic elites have an outsized influence and control over government and international environmental agencies. Indeed, mainstream environmental organizations are supported by, and dependent upon, the patronage of the wealthy, which impacts their priorities and strategies. The Dust Bowl did not arise because there was a lack of awareness of the issue or the technical means to address it. Like dust-bowlification today, the ultimate source of the crisis was social, not technological, thus requiring massive social change to address.

This chapter examines the limitations of mainstream 1930s environmentalism. Ecological modernizationists consider environmentalism at its best when it aligns with the agenda of powerful private and public actors. For advocates of ecological modernization, questions of substantive social change explicitly don't enter the picture. Regrettably, mainstream environmentalism has moved closer toward this line of thinking over the last forty years. Incomplete and misleading stories about the New Deal and Dust Bowl conservation serve to reinforce the notion that with the right set of techniques, policies, and/or voluntary adjustments by individuals and industry, capitalism is well suited to solving ecological crises. Many see the New Deal of the 1930s as evidence that the system can be reformed and the state geared toward social and environmental improvement, even in the heart of the empire of capital. This has led to repeated calls over the years for a Green New Deal.

This chapter identifies ways that American authors and filmmakers during the 1930s and 40s depict the ecological, economic, and/or cultural value of wilderness spaces and inhabitants. While Walt Disney’s Bambi (1942) celebrates the value of nonthreatening forest animals through innovative animation techniques and critiques of human carelessness and hunting, Aldo Leopold, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway acknowledge the ecological importance of nonhuman predators in their hunting stories. In his novel The Surrounded (1936), D’Arcy McNickle critiques the social and environmental legacy of the frontier by uncovering the environmental, social, and cultural effects of frontier practices on indigenous communities and lands.

Mapmakers typically depict the aridlands of the world in colors like buff and buckskin, in contrast to the greens of wetter regions. Their choice is true to reality, for dry places usually produce scant vegetation, and the bare ground, baked by unobstructed sun, tends to wear a washed-out shade of dun, or one of its cousins. In the North American Southwest, you might add a touch of rust to reflect the widespread iron-rich geology. In many areas, oxides of iron produce the pinkish flesh tones that make it easy to think the landscape is alive. If you also brush in some piney greens and spruce black for upland woods and forests, and dab smaller areas white to represent high-country snowcaps, you have a fair start toward capturing the palette of the region. But you would still be missing the most definitive color of the Southwest, which is found not beneath the feet, but overhead. You can look up, straight up, almost any day of the year, and there it is: an intense, infinite blue, miles deep and beyond reach. It is not merely bluish, not the watery blue of Scandinavian eyes, not the black-mixed blue of dark seas or bachelor buttons, not the hazy blue of glacier ice or distant mountains, but an Ur-blue, an über-blue, a defining quintessence. It is to other blues as brandy is to wine: a distillation, pure and heady. It can be a little deflating to reflect that the ethereal blue of southwestern skies results from mundane forces, that it is the product of solar radiation and atmospheric gases interacting in an environment shaped by climate. If the air held more water vapor, the sky would whiten overhead, as it does at the horizons, where the light that reaches our eyes has more atmosphere and diffusing vapor to travel through.

By late April, the snow is gone from the beaver meadow. The promises of March are starting to be fulfilled: insects are on the wing, some of the willows have furry catkins along their branches, and fish jump from the quiet waters of the beaver ponds. I can no longer easily get around the beaver meadows on foot unless I wear chest waders. The sound of the beaver meadow in March was primarily wind. By April, the sound is primarily moving water. The water gurgles, shushes, and whispers. In another month it will roar with the melting snows. Another three miles up the creek valley and 1,500 feet higher, one of my long-term study sites still lies under 6 feet of snow, but in the meadow I see only one patch of tenacious snow-ice in the deep shade beneath a spruce along the northern edge of the meadow. I know that snow will still fall here during late spring storms, but it will melt quickly. March felt on the cusp, as if it could as easily tip toward winter or spring. Late April is definitely spring headed toward summer. The beaver meadow remains a riverscape more brown and tan than green. The willows are still leafless, although some of the branch tips are turning pale yellow-green and others seem to be taking on a more vivid orange hue. I can see the leaf buds starting to swell. The grass has just begun to grow in dark green tips steadily forcing their way through the thick mat of last year’s dead stems. Clusters of new leaves on low-growing wintergreen are the only other sign of green outside of the channels. Some of the smaller side channels are thick with emerald green algae undulating slowly in the current. A stonefly lands on my hand. Its slender, dark gray body seems surprisingly delicate for a creature that has hatched into the vagaries of April air, with its potential for blasting winds and sudden snow squalls.

“ If you run the math,” says Brad Udall, “You sort of go, wow, Arizona, they may be totally out of their Central Arizona Project water.” Udall is referring to Arizona’s unenviable position as California’s aquatic whipping boy. The two states have long fought over water, and although Arizona has won a battle or two, it has taken a beating in the war. A key result of their combat has been to make the majority of Arizona’s Colorado River water rights expressly junior to California’s. This means that during inevitable and possibly imminent periods of shortage, the people of southern California, under a strict interpretation of the law, will be able to wash their cars, water their lawns, and keep their showers streaming while the millions who live in Phoenix, Tucson, and points between watch the flow from their taps slow to a dribble. Fortunately, events are unlikely to turn out so apocalyptically. When crisis comes, emergency negotiations will produce a less black-and-white outcome, and Arizona’s groundwater reserves (some of them recharged in recent years with CAP water) will be tapped to meet priority needs—at least for a time. Nevertheless, the potential for a winner-take-all showdown between large populations highlights the vulnerability of the urban centers of the arid West in an era of climate change. Fates are hardly fixed. How the cities of the region grow and change in the years ahead will significantly determine their ability to withstand the shocks of a hotter and drier future. How well they respond to the challenges ahead will also determine the future of their states and of the entire West, for in an arid land, a modern society is obliged to be an urban society. The survival of aridland cities and the struggle to preserve their quality of life will become a matter of national concern, even obsession, and the entire world will watch their stories unfold. Arizona has always been jealous of California’s economic power, its political heft in Congress, and its early and abundant claims to Colorado River water.

In 1816, Against A foreboding climatic background, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. She might well have begun: “It was a dark and stormy decade …” During the previous year, much of the world had been shrouded by the great ashen veil cast across the skies by the massive Tambora volcanic eruption in April 1815. Europe’s 1815– 1816 was a cold, gloomy, and tumultuous time. Crops failed and temperatures fell. Bonaparte was consigned to the rocky island of St. Helena, Beethoven entered his more radical and introspective late period, and minor autocratic monarchies around the continent came under increasing political siege as democratic impulses stirred. This chapter examines some of the shorter-term climate shifts and extreme weather events that have occurred over the last two centuries. The disrupted weather following the Tambora eruption, for example, shows how small changes in temperature and rainfall can have major consequences, including failed harvests and epidemic outbreaks. In mid-nineteenth-century Ireland, the failure of the potato crop in wet and relatively warm conditions contributed to food insecurity that devastated the local population. Unusual weather extremes in late-nineteenth-century China, including a period of cooling, facilitated the Third Pandemic of bubonic plague, which spread rapidly through populations already under stress due to harvest failures, conflict, and political turmoil. Such events may intensify in the coming decades as the Earth’s average temperature rises and climatic cycles are disrupted and become more variable. Additionally, the consequences for human population health are amplified by social and political mismanagement and turmoil. We can expect climate change to act as a “force multiplier,” exacerbating many of the world’s health problems. From the mid-nineteenth century, the northern hemisphere’s Little Ice Age receded as solar activity regained its twelfth-century peak level. The depths of the cold had been reached around 1700 C.E., and the cooling influence of the Siberian High was now receding. The almost year-round ice and snow in northern Europe during those super-chilled earlier times were long gone, and the snowbound, though increasingly grimy, White Christmases of early-1800s Dickensian London were waning.

What Does the Story about human experiences of past natural climatic changes tell us in broad terms? At the least it points to the types of risks to the health, survival, and social stability of diverse populations likely to result from this century’s human-driven climate change. This chapter and the next look to that future, and to how humankind might avert the looming environmental and social crises. In preparation, paleoclimatologist Raymond Bradley argues that we should seek “insight into the nature and magnitude of past regional [climatic] anomalies and their human impacts by examining the Holocene paleoclimate record.” This chapter asks whether there are discernible patterns in the long story of past climate change and population health adversity. Have particular conditions and factors determined vulnerability to those adverse impacts? On this basis, how vulnerable are today’s populations, rich and poor, tropical and polar, to the climatic stressors and associated risks anticipated in this twenty-first century? An overview of the Holocene’s 11,000-year climatic experience, a mere sliver of the total Homo sapiens experience of climate variation, provides a good entry point. This latest of the nine interglacial periods during the past million years has been the one in which anatomically and behaviorally modern humans began exerting increasing control over the environment and its carrying capacity by shifting toward growing crops, herding animals, managing water flows, and building settlements. That agriculturally based era is shown near the top right in Figure 10.1, a moment in geological time. Throughout the Holocene, the climate was, as ever, naturally variable, and the gods of rain, sun, wind, and warmth held great sway over harvests, hunger, and viability. We will summarize here the main points from earlier chapters as the basis for a discussion of patterns in the past which may point to future vulnerability and implications for human well-being. The Holocene has been a period of relative climatic constancy, with an average global surface temperature of 15oC Changes in temperature and rainfall spanning several centuries have occurred, as have many shorter-term fluctuations.

By late November, snow covers much of the beaver meadow. I visit on a sunny day well above freezing, but the low-angle light comes with long, long shadows. The meadow is noisy with continuously rushing wind that keeps the bare willow branches swaying and sculpts the snow on the lee side of plants into streamlined mounds. Individual grass stems have traced downwind crescents on the snow surface. Tracks of wind, tracks of animals: the activities of the meadow are once again made visible in the footprints of moose, hare, squirrel, coyote, and birds. The snow is mushy in the warmth and many of the tracks are blurred, but I also cross fresh, sharply defined traces left by four little leaping paws, with just the brush from a long, slender tail behind them. The prints are so delicate that they barely indent the snow, but clearly a mouse was stirring here recently. The fragile tracery of tiny claws in the snow seems vulnerable, but I know the animal is probably better adapted to the cold than I am. The main channel of the creek remains open, the water golden brown between white banks bulbed with ice along the edges. The creek flows quietly, the sound of moving water submerged beneath the wind. The larger side channels also remain open and green with filamentous algae, but I break through the snow-covered thin ice on the smallest side channels. The off-channel ponds are frozen more solidly. Mats of dried algae quiver in the wind on one newly drained pond. Downwind, the snow is dirty with silt blown from the exposed bed. A layer of sticks, sand, and muck floors the pond with a woody carpet created by the beavers. The main beaver lodge is freshly plastered with mud and sticks, but the ice on the surrounding pond remains unbroken and the snow is trackless. Away from the pond, snow into which I sink to mid-calf obscures the details of the ground. The upright stems of willows and aspen trunks dominate the foreground.