How Did The Dust Bowl Affect Society

In the book To Kill a Mockingbird took place in the 1930s which is the same time the Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl, also known as the Dirty Thirties, had a great impact on people and places in the United States and Canada; after the dust bowl ended, it affected many people’s lives and how the president at the time dealt with this disaster. The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s. The Dust Bowl was caused by the persistent dry weather which caused the crops to fail, leaving the fields exposed to wind erosion. So when the wind blew it would cause enormous clouds of dust. Farmers also caused the Dust Bowl by them plowing over 5.2 million acres of deep-rooted grass which kept the soil rich. It first affected the states of Texas and Oklahoma and then moved on to parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas(“Dust Bowl”).

It caused many people to get sick with dust pneumonia which was caused when people and the dust got into their lungs. 500 people died of dust pneumonia; there was no cure but people attempted to treat themselves with vaseline, lard, kerosene, turpentine, and skunk oil. It got so bad that they had to close schools and if you were outside too long you could suffocate or get lost in the dust storms(Morgan, Ethan, and Cole).Scholars at the University of Illinois agree with the idea that the Dust Bowl occurred to a combination of human and ecological factors, meaning that it might not of have been 100 percent preventable, but its effects could have been less severe with better farming practices. To prevent another Dust Bowl they use widespread irrigation use, which allows many farmers to buffer the effects of drought more than they would’ve been able to do in the 1930s. Also new planting techniques including drought-resistant strains of corn and wheat(“Could the Dust Bowl Have Been Prevented”