Clayton R. Koppes article was about how farmers were to blame for the Dust Bowl.\u00a0 This was due to capitalism and the demand for crops.\u00a0 Koppes goes on to say that we must use nature to help improve ourselves even if it is at the cost of the environment.\u00a0 Farmers overworked the land and in time the land was no longer accessible for farming.\u00a0 Koppes goes on to say that the area where the Dust Bowl occurred wasn\u2019t meant for this type of intense agriculture.\u00a0 Nature and social conditions came to converge here because it didn\u2019t rain much in this area and three major weather systems converged in the area of the Dust Bowl making it hard for grass, which is the \u201cecological balance\u201d (Koppes p.536) to survive.\u00a0 Farmers brought in \u201cheavy technology to convert the grassland into wheat fields.\u201d (Koppes p.537)\u00a0 The land was over worked so bad that \u201con the eve of the dust storms, one-third of the region had been stripped of its grass cover.\u201d (Koppes p.537) We can see that this wasn\u2019t the first time man has had a hand in a so called \u201cnatural disaster\u201d.\u00a0 As MCKENNDY21<\/a> points out about the Johnstown Flood that \u201cit could have been prevented if people would have built the dam correctly\u201d we can also make that same argument about the Dust Bowl.\u00a0 If farmers would have not overworked the land then maybe the Dust Bowl could have been more preventable.<\/p>\n

In “Scaling the Dust Bowl”\u00a0the article touched upon the same points, but went into more depth, giving data.\u00a0 For example in terms of the weather that Koppes also mentioned in his article, \u201cScaling the Dust Bowl\u201d says that \u201c500 mm of annual precipitation, which is the rough minimum necessary to grow wheat.\u201d ( Scaling the Dust Bowl pg 105) This gives us a more clear view on just how much rain was needed to grow certain crops like wheat, which was the most common crop grown. The article then goes on to explain how dust storms weren\u2019t nothing new to the area, but the fact that a lot of grassland had been plowed this time around was key to what led to the Dust Bowl.\u00a0 Giving us this data shows us just how significantly man had an impact on the land where the Dust Bowl occurred.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clayton R. Koppes article was about how farmers were to blame for the Dust Bowl.\u00a0 This was due to capitalism and the demand for crops.\u00a0 Koppes goes on to say that we must use nature to help improve ourselves even if it is at the cost of the environment.\u00a0 Farmers overworked the land and in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":147,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-spring2017\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-spring2017\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-spring2017\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-spring2017\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/147"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-spring2017\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1798"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-spring2017\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1799,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-spring2017\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1798\/revisions\/1799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-spring2017\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-spring2017\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-spring2017\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}