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.
Try alternating between the dictionary and the spell check program so that the meanings aren't altered, please.
You've got a great argument.
I agree that many parts of the arid SW should have never been tilled. That speaks to our "alterations". Our concept of Manifest Destiny has drove those alterations far beyond a sustainable and safe use of the land until disaster struck and we made corrections.