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Popul Environ (2014) 35:391416 DOI 10.1007/s11111-013-0195-7
ORIGINAL PAPER
Jess C. Porter
Published online: 26 September 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract This article reports on an assessment of contemporary popular knowledge and perceptions of the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s. In a region prone to recurrent drought and evolving resource issues such as the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer, it follows that knowledge of the Dust Bowl can contribute to understanding and dealing with contemporary and future challenges to the humanenvironment dynamic of the region. An age-stratied sample of residents from 93 Great Plains counties provided their understandings of the three Dust Bowl concepts (era, event, and region) via questionnaire. When compared with the academic record on the subject, signicant variation between respondent age groups was identied. Successively, older generations of the historic Dust Bowl region maintain higher degrees of knowledge than their younger counterparts, regarding this exceptional chapter of American environmental history. This record of knowledge erosion not only speaks to the necessity of enhancing Dust Bowl educational resources, but can be utilized to underscore the salience of studying and documenting adaptive strategies to drought on the American Great Plains.
Keywords Dust Bowl Great Plains Environmental perception Drought
Introduction
What was the Dust Bowl? The Dust Bowl was a period of severe drought accompanied by high winds and high temperatures; the impacts of which were exacerbated by the rapid expansion of agriculture on the American Great Plains in the 1920s and early 1930s. This resulted in recurrent, severe dust storms, economic
J. C. Porter (&)
Department of History, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, 2801 S. University Avenue, Little Rock, AR 72204-1099, USAe-mail: [email protected]
What was the Dust Bowl? Assessing contemporary popular knowledge
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ruin, and great human hardship. This convergence of geophysical and anthropogenic factors conspired to create what is arguably the most severe long-term human ecological crisis the USA has seen.
The term Dust Bowl, as described above, is inherently ambiguous in that it refers to a phenomenon that can be considered discretely as an event, era, or region. More often, some amalgamation of historic and geographic analysis yields a multi-conceptual construction of the Dust Bowl. As one explores the historiography of the Dust...