Standing by Shaking Their Heads

And the Native Americans stand  by shaking their heads.

Recently Ken Burns did yet another excellent and prophetic documentary on the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

The documentary was excellent in its detail and accuracy.  The piece, in great detail, documented the dust bowl storms that killed thousands, and the reasons for the tragedy.

The dust bowl was almost entirely man's fault.  Fools, and I can't call them anything else, of today who deny global climate change, are  shown by the "Dust Bowl" to be the same fools making the same mistakes.

Man's greed triumphs over science is a very bad idea.

Settlers were enticed by unscrupulous land agents to settle on land that was called "no man's land" by the Native Americans.  They then tore up the land, plowed under centuries of prairie grasslands, in a mad rush to make money.

In fact, "no mans' land" was so bad, Comanches had been relocated there since is was "useless" prairie.  It was good enough however for illiterate immigrants  suckered by land speculators.

And the Comanches, who were even  pushed  off "no mans' land", looked on and shook their heads.

World War I did not help.  A vast market was created for American wheat, since the Russian Ukraine was unavailable due to war.

Poor American immigrants,  were enriched  by the wheat they grew on land that was never suited for farming.  And the Native Americans stood by, shaking their heads.

And the more the grew, the more they plowed; in unscientific ways.

Scientific farming was a thing  for losers.  Many of the farmers were poor, often illiterate, who did not know terrace plowing.  Others, who knew better, denied the science.

The rain, that did fall in the early 1900s, was said  not to be  an anomaly (in a drought area), but was a "new normal".   The land speculators said that.

And the Native Americans stood by shaking their heads.  After all, it was called the "Great American Desert" for a reason.

Government scientists, who warned that a catastrophe was in the offing, were said to be anti-capitalism and anti-jobs.  Reality was what the greedy farmers said it was, not what scientists said it was.

Boy does this sound familiar.  Then as now, self deception ruled the Dust Bowl.  In fact, today, Oklahoma, Texas Kansas and Nebraska are hotbeds of climate change deniers.

And the Native Americans stood by shaking their heads.

And so plow on they did.  And the war ended.  And the market busted.  And they plowed and planted more, since the price of wheat dropped (more is better-drill baby drill).

Today we are running out of oil, but rather than conserve, we drill more, we use more, and we accelerate global warming.  We are doing the same thing the "sodbusters" did!

True insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result.

Hard working farmers, who toil in spite of the odds, who outwork nature is one thing, stupid is another.

And then the 30s came, the rain stopped, the wind continued to blow and the "black lizards" blew entire states away.

The immigrant farmers, who were by now fiercely independent and hateful of government,  still disregarded reality and even plowed the sand dunes!

And people died, the depression wrecked havoc.

Finally, toward the mid-30s, they finally  asked, actually pleaded, for help from the government.  And the scientific plowing techniques, that had been there all along began slowly  to turn the tide.

And it finally rained in the 1940s.  And the "dusters" stopped.

The cost was incredible, thousands dead, millions displaced, a region destroyed.

Yesterday, in "Climate Progress" there was a chilling photograph.   The picture was from space, and it showed a "duster" running from Colorado to Texas, right through the Dust Bowl

The picture was taken this summer!

You see, the droughts are back, along with killer heat that is a product of yet another man made ecological disaster.  Only this time, the scope of the disaster is world wide.  Climate change is making for another dustbowl on a scale that we can barely imagine.

This time, it will be much longer and much worse.

And, the farmers in the Dust Bowl, are at it again, plowing up the soil and over planting to make higher profits.

And the droughts continue, and the wind blows.

And no man's land is about to strike us all down again.

And the Native Americans stand by shaking their heads.