How America’s Dust Bowl is playing out again
After a clear Sunday morning in mid-April 1935, Oklahomans experienced a soil blizzard the likes of which would become legend. That day took on the moniker Black Sunday, and contemporary photographs reveal why: a tsunami of dust fills the entire horizon as it approaches. But the dust isn’t brown, as we usually associate with such events. It was entirely black. The soil of America, at a continental scale, was being airlifted east at 100 kilometers per hour.
I’ve been recently watching the Ken Burns PBS series on the Dust Bowl, and it brought back many memories of my years running NSF’s Biological Sciences Directorate, where we used that disaster as a cautionary example to build support for our investments in ecological sciences.
Black Sunday wasn’t a single unitary event. It was a sustained ecological collapse that had marked the entire early 1930s in America’s plains. It resulted from policy error: land designated for intense agricultural cultivation of wheat and corn was entirely inappropriate for that activity. Pulling up the native grasses and tilling the soil created a disaster that was waiting to happen. When drought inevitably came, the soil across some 40 million hectares was already loose. There was nothing to hold it down. With some wind, at scale, it lifted off the ground and into the air.
Why should we worry about a century-old disaster in America? Perhaps you’ve heard the news about the Colorado River basin running dry. Or about the drought that is boosting shipping prices on Europe’s parched rivers. Or the smoke on the US East Coast from boreal forest fires two thousand kilometers away. Drought-driven disruption is everywhere, and it is putting soil at risk.
I asked my scientific collaborator, Eugene Kelley–he’s a soil scientist from Colorado State University who previously headed up the National Ecological Observatory Network about the entire era–what we now call the Dust Bowl and how it applies to us now. Here’s the quote he emailed to me:
“The Dust Bowl taught us that soil is fundamental to national resilience; today, science makes clear that it is also central to climate stability, water security, biodiversity, and human health. As soil degradation now accelerates beyond Dust Bowl-era rates, we cannot meet a planetary-scale challenge with yesterday’s investments. We know what is at stake, we know how to act, and future generations will judge whether we chose – or failed to choose- to sustain the science and institutions needed to protect the soils that sustain life.” E. Kelley
The key here is Kelley’s idea of national resilience. The policy mistake that made the Dust Bowl a reality offered short-term profits to farming families at the cost of their resilience. The need for increased cereal crop production driven by the First World War combined with the allure of cheap land drove in-migration of farmers.
Many became refugees as a result of the event–they had lost everything. There was a massive migration out of the region (hence the term Okies) to my native state of California in search of agricultural work. Even starting anew in the West, those families had lost their resilience along with their land. Today, we see mass migrations globally, driven by wars, economics and, as with the Dust Bowl, environmental catastrophe.
When we put the land that we grow our food on at risk, we are mortgaging our national resilience. Food systems, even at industrial scale and abetted by the latest technologies, ultimately depend on the health of soils and their underlying microbiomes. Those microbiomes consist of soil bacterial and fungal ecosystems that benefit the plants that hold the soil together. They can fix nitrogen from the atmosphere and repel plant pathogens, all without human intervention. When we dig up the soil (e.g., tilling it to plant a large-scale cereal crop), we damage those ecosystems. Not only are the native plants killed, but the soil becomes less fertile because its microbiome has been physically disrupted. The soil’s resilience is consequently lowered. At a microlevel, the soil’s connection to the land becomes tenuous.
Black Sunday’s tsunami of dust has become one of the preeminent symbols of ecological catastrophe. When I’d go up to the Hill to explain why the National Ecological Observatory Network might be a really important NSF investment, it was the Dust Bowl culminating in Black Sunday that staff and members would have heard of. And then they got it.
And its core lesson for stakeholders (of all stripes) is that it was a failure of resilience driven by short-sighted policy and economic gain. But there is a lot more: while the Dust Bowl was a regional disaster, its underlying cause–the destruction of soil health for short-term profit–is now a global crisis. What’s going on now is a similar, albeit more widespread, threat to soil resilience, driven by modern ‘Big Agriculture’ and accelerated by disruptions from geopolitical dysfunction at all levels. To my mind, we must move beyond simply acknowledging the problem toward something more proactive: a scientifically informed strategy to rebuild our soil’s health and, by extension, our global resilience.
In one of my NSF slide decks, the cautionary story of the Dust Bowl is followed by a modern satellite image showing a Saharan dust extending as a unitary weather feature over Southern Europe and the Eastern Atlantic–a ‘storm’ extending some thousand or so miles. It’s to show a global dust bowl in the making–now. And that’s because drought stress is acting as a catalyst. What happened in Europe this past summer is an example of this dynamic producing more frequent extreme weather–not just extremely hot weather in Paris, but also drought and wildfires in Southwestern France. This is just one example of a pattern playing out across the globe: unprecedented stress on agricultural systems worldwide.
The scale of the current problem dwarfs the regional one of the 1930’s Dust Bowl. Current estimates put the scale of that soil degradation at 40% of our planet’s land. This is no longer an American problem; it’s a planetary one.
The human and economic costs also go beyond the scale of the Dust Bowl. The ‘Okie’ narrative now extends to over 3 billion people, according to the United Nations. And to put that number into some perspective, as a planet, we are multiple billions of people over the planet’s natural carrying capacity–all as a result of the Green Revolution and Big Agriculture.
We should be very grateful for the Green Revolution. But we should also be wary of our dependence on its food systems. And this extends to individuals–losing one’s land means losing one’s livelihood for farmers. And the modern version of Black Sunday is unfolding today with increasing regularity from Sub-Saharan Africa to Central America.
None of this is a mystery we’re still waiting to solve. We already know, and are already practicing at real scale in some places, a different way of farming. No-till or minimum-till methods leave soil structure and fungal networks intact instead of shattering them every season. Cover cropping keeps living roots in the ground between cash crops, feeding the microbiome through the off-season and holding soil in place against wind and rain the way native prairie grass once did. Crop rotation and diversification break the monoculture cycle, rebuilding biodiversity below ground by varying what the soil above is asked to do. And agroforestry and perennial cropping systems go further still, mimicking the deep-rooted, never-tilled permanence of a natural ecosystem rather than resetting the land to bare dirt every spring. None of these are exotic ideas. They are old ideas, validated by new science, waiting on the will to scale them.
This isn’t a problem an individual farmer can solve alone, no matter how committed. A single operation practicing regenerative agriculture in a landscape still organized around short-term extraction is swimming against a current set by policy, markets, and subsidy design. We need a systemic response, not just a virtuous one.
This is where Kelley’s warning hits hardest: “we cannot meet a planetary-scale challenge with yesterday’s investments.” Most of the world’s agricultural subsidy structures, including our own, were built to reward yield and output, not stewardship. A farmer who maximizes bushels per acre this year is rewarded; a farmer who spends this year rebuilding soil carbon for the next twenty is, more often than not, left to absorb that cost alone. That’s backward. We know how to price and pay for the outcomes we actually want — carbon sequestered, water filtered, biodiversity restored — the same way we’ve learned to price and pay for clean energy. What’s missing isn’t the mechanism. It’s the political will to point it at soil.
And underneath the policy sits the science, which needs sustained investment of its own, not a one-time grant cycle. This is where NSF infrastructure like the National Ecological Observatory Network matters — not because a single sensor tower or a single soil core tells us much on its own, but because sustained, continental-scale monitoring is the only way we’ll see a slow-motion Dust Bowl coming before it becomes a fast one. Black Sunday was, in a real sense, as much a data failure as a land-use failure: nobody was watching the whole system closely enough, early enough, to stop the mistake before it compounded across a decade. We have far better tools now. What we need is the discipline to keep funding them past the next budget cycle, and the humility to let the data — not the next quarter’s yield report — set the policy.
Kelley put the stakes plainly: “future generations will judge whether we chose — or failed to choose — to sustain the science and institutions needed to protect the soils that sustain life.” I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. It’s a fairly literal description of the choice in front of us. This isn’t only an environmental issue, filed away with the others. It’s a moral one, about whether the world we hand to our children can still grow their food.
So: policy error plus drought stress degrades soil, and degraded soil is lost resilience. That was the whole story of the Dust Bowl, written in dust across the Plains in 1935. Today the same story is being played out again, only the variables have grown — 40 million hectares has become 40 percent of the planet’s land, and a few hundred thousand Okies on Route 66 have become three billion people whose land is failing under them somewhere in the world right now.
I keep coming back to that photograph from Black Sunday — the black wall of a continent’s topsoil, a kilometer high, rolling toward a farmhouse. It was terrifying to the people who lived it, and it’s still the image that makes a room full of congressional staffers go quiet. I think of it as a warning we’ve already been shown once, in enough detail that we have no excuse for missing it a second time. We have the soil science, the regenerative practices, and the monitoring capacity to see this coming and choose differently.
Discoverers and Discoveries 