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I agree that the functional source for the dust bowls was the loss of the dense prarie grass root structure, OK, we plowed it up. However, as we were doing so, we also deforested the scrub trees, western pines and cedars, cottonwoods and all other trees that grew in the prairie.

The homesteaders cut them down for firewood and buildings and fences. Those trees and treebreaks would have greatly dimished the dust bowls. Where treebreaks were enforced by law in Minnesota and Iowa from the 1860's on and later in N and S Dakota, the dustbowls ended.

Treebreaks would have minimized the dustbowls and protect the Midwest from them now.

Many of my relatives remember having to leave S Dakota once the trees were gone.

The laws on treebreaks are still enforced rigidly in the northern prairie.

Those trees and treebreaks would have greatly dimished the dust bowls.

Greatly? I doubt it. You know the northern prairie far better than I but the worst of the dust bowl was in the southern areas where the drought hit hardest, where there was no snow melt to soak the soil and where the sod was long gone. The distances between those natural tree breaks in the southern areas was too great to make a difference. Today, there is irrigation which keeps the soil from drying out.

But "deforestation" had no part in the great dust bowl years. It was the first time (after only 30-40 years years of intensive settlement in those areas) that prairie farmers hit a multi-season drought. They have had others since then that did not cause the damage of the 1920s and it wasn't trees that made the difference. It was electricity from coal-burning power plants that ran their pumps and irrigated their fields that kept the soil from blowing away.

If humans are going to live at anything above the "hunter-gather" lifestyle and a 30-year life expectancy, we need to alter nature. Every alternation to nature has consequences and every failure to alter nature has it's consequences as well. Its life.