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In Koppes article “Dusty Volumes”, the dust bowl is explained to be caused by both economical factors and natural reasons. It is important to understand that the Dust Bowl can not be simplified and purported to be a chance natural disaster. As ngojoseph emphasized, the majority of work on the Dust Bowl considers the event as an isolated diasater Koppes includes the work of James Malin to address the shortcomings of those works. According to Malin, “dust storms were natural phenomena pre-dating white persons’ agriculture”. Thus, the Dust Bowl is modeled by Koppes as a combination of regular geological circumstance and the cumulative effects of the population in the Great Plains.
To further stress the idea that the Dust Bowl was more then chance, economic reasons are provided. One of the main reasons, which points to a Marxist historiography, is Worster’s claim that capitalism partly caused the Dust Bowl. The work of Worster frames the lead up to the Dust Bowl as similar to a class conflict; farmers vs. ranchers. The farmers, owning the means of production, used new industrial technology to convert the plains into wheat fields. According to Worster, this human effect was the main cause of the Dust Bowl.