Great story, local color.
I’ve heard that the Dust Bowl was mostly weather, but that plowing and farming land where rainfall fluctuated from year to year left the land vulnerable. A dry wind blowing over desiccated plowed land is going to pick up and move dirt, creating those dust storms. If the land hadn’t been farmed, there’d be tangled thatched weeds and grass holding the soil together (but of course, no food production).
Before I met her, my wife was in the Sahara during a dust storm, really a full blown sandstorm, which she described as intense, amazing, and awful. There, of course, the drought is perpetual, and the exposed soil and sand gets picked up by the wind. No one thinks much about it, except to blame subsistence farming at the periphery of the desert for extending it (possibly true to some extent due to local overpopulation).
If people want to call what occurred in Oklahoma “man-caused”, they’re partly right because of the poor soil protection techniques, but the ones who do so are saying it as if its somehow unique to modern times. Any time you have a multi-year drought without soil-protecting farm practice, you’ll eventually get consequences. It has nothing to do with world wide industrialization and CO2 generation from fuel usage.
That said, I’m really glad you put me onto Ed Berry’s web site.
I understand what you are saying but I would add, for those who stayed and suffered thru the three year drought, how many actually believed it would last three years and had any thought on how to deal with it?