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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.