Did anyone watch the documentary on "The Dust Bowl"?

Yep. It took a long time for Nature to develop the plants that slowly prepared Prarie soil for the species that coexisted and supported each other. Then farmers tried to get rich quick and ploughed it up and didn't have windbreaks and a change in weather resulted in erosion and dust storms.

Eventually the dust even got to Washington DC, which says a lot considering how far away that is from the affected areas.

We've got similar circumstances today with extreme drought, but surprisingly some people in those regions are asking for the deliberately planted windbreaks to be cut down since they're "heavy users of water". We already have dust storms now, imagine what would happen then.

These dust storms are not just nuisances or even economic issues from agriculture and loss of employment, but also cause medical issues. They labeled it "dust fever or dust pneumonia" but today it's called Coccidioidomycosis.

Don't know if it's the same special you're talking about, but one on the Dust Bowl can be watched for free on PBS:
[link to video.pbs.org]

It's a different documentary, but about the same topic. It can be watched for free here:
[link to video.pbs.org]

Watched it twice. The heroes of the story are those who held on.

Yes, this is the one by Ken Burns. Here is a picture of Black Sunday on April 14, 1935.

[link to www.latimes.com]

We 'could' have similar circumstances in the central region of the US, if we ever have a drought that lasts 10 years. Farmers plow up every inch of soil they can or chop down the last surviving tree to get that extra inch for the almighty dollar.

This was one of the best documtaries I've ever seen, because conservaton is our survival. I gained respect for President Roosevelt, because he didn't give up on the people, but brought in scientists and conservationists to help. He gave the poor farmers food and started government aid programs. He saved their lives.

The farmers didn't realize what they were doing. The 'Okies' had a good wet year and made good money off their wheat fields, but then the drought and wind came and lasted a decade. As if that wasn't bad enough, the grasshoppers then came. There was an over-abundance of rabbits eating what little vegetation they had, because the coyotes had been killed off.

It was horrendous, but because of the 'Dust Bowl' calamity, conservation methods changed and let to new ways of saving the environment.

One of the best documetaries I've seen!

Oh man, I'd have given up! There is a time to let go and save your children dammit. Who wants to stay in a dusty, brown environment and breathe dust day after day after day?

They always thought it would be better next year, but it didn't get better for ten years! Those young children had never even seen grass! Some of them died of dust pheumonia.

It's not easy to pick-up and leave. It was their home, but when it comes to saving their children and growing up with grass and trees, I'd have moved!

My granparents on both sides stayed, and both of my parents were raised in western OK during the dustbowl.

I'm sure it was a hard life. They had to be strong people to survive that.

I can't imagine a life without grass and trees.

Did your grandparents every talk about it.

I experienced one dust storm here in Illinois when i was a teenager, and it scared the hell out of me. You couldn't see anything, because everything was black.

I went home and everything in my house was covered with a layer of dust.

Anyone else that have grandparents that experienced it?

Truthfully, FDR messed up many times and acutally made the economy worse. There were policies like giving people seed to plant when the drought was on, and they just died. He supported Dixiecrats which threw people off of the sharecropper homes they lived in, and busted up unions, despite simultaneously supporting unions elsewhere.The programs of the New Deal were fraught with abuse.

In all honesty it was only when we began selling arms to Britain and then entering the war and regearing up the factories that there was an improvement in the economy.

I've never seen a bad Ken Burns film - don't think there is one. Wish the rest of the stuff on TV was even half the caliber of this one!

Roosevelt's programs did a lot of good things, and saved a lot of lives. If the country was in the same depths of depression today (and it may will get there soon), it would be damn near impossible to get programs like FDR instituted approved by the politicians in DC today. The tealiban would be screaming "No, just let 'em die, I don't want any of my tax money used to help them". This country has gone to the dogs - obscenely greedy capitalistic Wall St dogs, and those who who can only dream of being just like them.

Sure.

But it was simply 'life as it was'. They never refered to "the dustbowl". It was simply 'back in the '30s', or kind of referred to as 'when things were kind of tough for a while'.

It was such an integral part of life that they did not see it as anything unusual.

The frugality and self reliance required to survive those days would now be considered quite remarkable.

Contrary to popular belief that "poverty creates crime" -- quite the opposite occured. People slept with their doors unlocked. But they were an armed society.

Nowadays readers here often consider me brutal in commenting upon food stamp and welfare recipients.

There was no safety net back in the 30s here. None.

People did not resort to crime. They resorted to ingenuity.

yea they should ahve tried no dig method lol

What people like you don't understand is that 7 to 9 million Americans starved to death during that depression. It wasn't ingenuity, they fucking starved... to death. You're right about one thing though, those people were different. They were ignorant, and not one of them had a clue as to what was happening to them and who was doing it to them.

Today we know why we're poor and suffering and we know who's causing it. Food stamps are a pacification program to keep us just satisfied enough that we don't rise up and kill those fuckers.

Be careful what you wish for. If you want to see dead people in the streets, you go ahead and end food stamps. Obama's not stupid. He knows why he's handing those things out to all comers. It's a shame you don't.

Yes, what they're doing is destroying people's ability to take care of themselves, to be independent, killing jobs, killing food production, destabilizing communities through the mortgage debacle, not to mention the poisoning of the population by Big Medicine, and so much more. But ultimately, once the bulk of humanity is weakened enough to not be able to fight, through war/malnutrition/starvation/biochem, and has no way to survive except to cling to the system, they're going to pull the plug.