We just finished watching The Dust Bowl, a two-part Ken Burns documentary on PBS.The stories were powerful, enhanced with diary excerpts, photographs and interviews with survivors.
I had never learned much about the dust bowl in school. I had heard the term and imagined an arid land with a few tumbleweeds blowing by (no doubt inspired by old westerns.) In reality, the Dust Bowl was the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history.
About three years ago, I was visiting my father and picked up a book, The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, that was on his dining room table. I read a few pages and was impressed with how well the book was written. I later borrowed the book; it lived up to my good first impression. Egan was one of the historians interviewed in The Dust Bowl.
I strongly recommend both the film and the book. It's important to learn what happened in the Dust Bowl, so we don't continue our short-sighted use of our land and threaten our long term survival.
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