Dust Bowls of Empire by Hannah Holleman

Author:Hannah Holleman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300240887
Publisher: Yale University Press

Prior to the war, Hugh Hammond Bennett—student of the global history of soil conservation, father of soil conservation in the United States, first head of the Soil Conservation Service, and proponent of business-oriented conservation until his death—would become a kind of international celebrity, influencing conservation and development policy around the world. Colonial administrators outside the United States, confronting their own ecological crises, found themselves mesmerized first by dramatic images of the plains dust storms they saw in the international press and then by the work of Bennett’s SCS to tackle the problem.90

Bennett may have been popular among colonial officials because he represented just their kind of man, and his version of environmentalism soothed their anxieties at a time when the soil erosion crisis called into question white territorial control. However, in historian David Anderson’s view, Bennett and his U.S. cohorts did not deserve the acclaim they received. Though the know-how was available to do so, they did not avert the catastrophe. They only responded to it under duress. He writes,

The Dust Bowl, at its height in 1935, and its cost spectacularly measured in pounds of soil lost per person and square feet of topsoil blown hundreds of miles across country, had made conservation of the environment an international issue. This impact did much to push the [British] Colonial Office to tackle the issue on an equally grand scale. Administrators from the colonies and bureaucrats from Whitehall traveled to America to see the devastation at first hand and, more importantly, to view the anti-erosion measures being applied by the United States Soil Conservation Service. But the Americans, for all their efforts to deal with the problem, were barely worth their acknowledged status of ‘experts’ on soil conservation. Having created one of the most serious single environmental disasters known to man they simply had to set about trying to solve it. In a sense, there were no ‘experts’; only those who were doing something. More of necessity was being done in North America than elsewhere, and so it was primarily from this pool of experience that the Colonial Office drew its ideas.91

In the long run, by failing to challenge the social status quo, the environmentalism of Hugh H. Bennett and the other probusiness environmentalists that dominated policy did not prevent or resolve any ecological problems. This truth is evident in today’s global, ongoing, and intensifying problems with climate change, soil erosion, desertification, and general land degradation. As Worster concludes:

Agricultural conservation at the New Deal era was, on balance, a failure in the Great Plains. Neither the federal land-use planners nor the ecologists made a lasting impact on the region. The agronomists and soil technicians, although they were more successful in getting their version of conservation translated into action, were ultimately ineffectual, too. Give them credit for this: the region would not have come back so spectacularly without their assistance. Farmers did learn from these advisors a few tips that stayed with them, making them more of an “expert profession,” as Hugh Bennett had hoped.

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