A Marxist Interpretation Of Donald Worster's Dust Bowl

Few would doubt the assertion that the ecological phenomenon that befell the southern plains of the United States during the 1930s, commonly referred to as the Dust Bowl, was one of the worst environmental disasters in our nation’s history. At first glance the story appears simple enough. Encouraged by above annual rainfall, the region was flooded with new arrivals in the form of people and crops. During optimum conditions the land managed to accommodate the increasing demands. However, by the late 1920s, precipitation fell back to historical levels, followed quickly by an extended drought. The land, withering from too many farmers and a wheat crop it was not capable of sustaining, quickly turned to a barren, cracked landscape. Without trees

Donald Worster’s Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s was an attempt to dismantle the prevailing interpretation of the event, recasting it from environmental to economic in origin. Marxist in his interpretation, but not in his definition of capitalism, Worster argued that the Dust Bowl “was the inevitable outcome of a culture that deliberately, self-consciously, set itself that task of dominating and exploiting the land for all it was worth.” (Worster, 4) To Worster, the dust storms that ravaged the region were a direct result of imported agricultural practices; particularly, the plowing up of millions of acres of sod for the purpose of sowing wheat. This was not, however, the inevitable outcome that Worster was referring to. Instead, he interprets the string of events as a byproduct of the nation’s dependence and allegiance to a specific form of capitalism, one which demanded aggressive expansion and ever-increasing annual yields. As the author writes, “Produce, produce, produce- was there ever a culture so tirelessly driven by that single idea.” (Worster,

More recently, however, a new study calls into question this economic interpretation as the root cause of the ecological disaster. By using sophisticated GIS mapping technology, Geoff Cunfer’s “Scaling The Dust Bowl” attempts to mitigate the spatial and temporal limitations of Worster’s study, which analyzed two hard hit counties, by examining over 200 affected counties in five states. Initially, his findings appear devastating to Worster’s capitalist argument. His mapping data shows that the areas most effected by dust storms overlapped more closely with the location of heaviest drought than with regions of heavy commercial agriculture. Cunfer’s findings demonstrate that in over twenty-five percent of the counties, at least half of the original sod and native grasses remained intact at the outset of the storms; seemingly calling into question Worster’s contention that farmers plowing up the soil was the primary cause of the problem. (Cunfer,