Now that Arctic ice is melting, oil companies are rushing to stake their claims for exploration of oil resources in this newly uncovered territory.
The deep irony of using carbon-fueled climate warming to find and pump even more carbon into the air should make most Americans queasy. Yet no matter how cuddly we consider the polar bears, the loss of a few thousand doesn’t motivate us to put solar panels on top of our house, or to support increased taxes for renewable energy.
Here’s why we should care: When we gum up the mechanisms that balance the ecology of the Earth, we will reach a tipping point of changes cascading so quickly that we will be unable to cope with them.
For proof, we can look to the southeastern part of our state, in Springfield and the surrounding area, the belly of the Great American Dust Bowl, a disaster which meteorologists voted the worst sustained ecological disaster (so far) in the United States.
When I was young, my family would occasionally make the long, dry trip through Dust Bowl territory from our Colorado home south through Clayton, N.M., and on to Dalhart, Texas. My mother recalls, “The speed limit was 55, and out there, you felt like you were hardly moving because there wasn’t anything to gauge your speed by. No buildings, no trees. There weren’t even any tall bushes.”
It’s hard to believe that this land was the last, best hope of farmers who came in the early 1900s. It had been a grassland then, an ecosystem in which the roots of the bluestem and buffalo grass had held the ground in place during drought and steady wind for centuries.
The government agriculture office and the railroads told prospective land buyers not to worry about the sparse rainfall. “Rain follows the plow” they said, promoting the idea that soil disturbances somehow changed the weather patterns. The Santa Fe Railroad printed a map showing how the rain lines followed the establishment of new towns, the idea being that steam from the train engines would make it rain more in those areas. Obviously, this “wishful science” was promoted by those who stood to gain the most money.
Still, it wasn’t the drought that caused the Dust Bowl, it was the plowing. The farmers came, and they plowed the land, turning it grass-side down to the tune of about 1 million acres a year. For awhile, these high plains were a place of prosperity. Precipitation was unusually high, as were grain prices. By 1929, however, the U.S. and Europe had a grain surplus, and the price dropped precipitously. With debts to pay, the farmers responded by tearing up even more ground, turning up more soil to the sun and the wind, making the environmental catastrophe to come even worse.
Then, the rain stopped falling, and with no roots to hold it in place, the soil started to blow, creating black “dusters” thousands of feet high, so thick you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. You needed a scoop shovel to clear the accumulated dust out of your house afterwards. The static electricity generated by storms was powerful enough to short out the ignitions on cars and to deliver a painful shock if you touched someone next to you. Livestock, blinded and choked by the dust, died, their bellies full of dust.
No matter how carefully people placed wet towels around the doors and windows of their homes, the dust filtered in, past the face masks they wore, entering their lungs and causing dust pneumonia. The children and the elderly were the first to die of it.
By the time people realized what a mistake it was to plow under the roots that held the soil, it was too late. The land was on the move, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. On one single Sunday, more than 300,000 tons of soil blew east, twice as much dirt as we dug out of the Panama Canal.
We’re on the same path now, spewing thousands of tons of carbon into the air and changing the ecological balance. It would be comforting to think that all the smoke and exhaust we’ve put into the air isn’t going to affect us, but it’s just more “wishful science.”
And if we change the balance of nature so much that it turns on us, there may be no way to stop it. Just ask one of the survivors of the Dust Bowl.
Ellen Schroeder Mackey (emackey61@yahoo.com) of Littleton is a librarian and storyteller.
