In preparation for an interview next week, I am reading “The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl.”  It’s a great book, and I am enjoying it.  I was struck this morning by a description of the dust storms of mid-May, 1934 (82 years ago this week), which blew fine dust all the way from the panhandle of Oklahoma to New York City and Washington DC.  The amount of dust was so large that it caused streetlights in Manhattan (New York,  not Kansas) to come on in the middle of the day, and views from the Empire State Building looked like soup so thick that observers could barely see the ground because of the dust in the air.  If you’ve ever been there, it must have been an amazing sight.  If you think that human activity cannot affect climate, then you need to read this story.  You can read reviews about it at Amazon and other places here.  It’s clear that the Dust Bowl was not just the result of exceptional drought in the area (there was clearly a very bad drought at the time, although arguably not the worst ever there), but the result of humans plowing up the natural landscape in favor of what turned out to be short-term monetary gains that ultimately blew up in (or maybe in this case away from) their faces.

worst hard time cover