From Orion The Hunters Institute
Eric Nuse  for The Sierra Club

We have done this before - laid the marginal lands bare so that some quick crop could be thrown at a crisis.  We did it in the 1930s to grow wheat to satisfy manipulated global markets.  The result was dramatic, it included a few fat years followed by drought. 

Then:  "…a storm in May 1934 carried the windblown shards of the Great Plains over much of a nation.  In Chicago, twelve million tons of dust fell.  New York, Washington - even ships at sea, three hundred miles off the Atlantic Coast - were blanketed in brown." The dust bowl was rated the number one weather event of the 20th century.  The federal government had promoted busting up the most fragile lands and encouraged dry land farming.  Hugh Bennett, a soil scientist working for the Franklin Roosevelt administration observed: "Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized." He went on to say it was all a symptom of "our stupendous ignorance."

In two generations we learned how to heal the land, but seem to remember nothing.  The federal government proposes to once again lay the most fragile lands on our continent bare.  To do it, at a time when scientific consensus concludes the planet has become hotter and droughts more probable, defies logic.  Ripping the hide off the Great Plains a second time would certainly confirm soil scientist Bennett's original analysis.

NOTE:  Quotes taken from: The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston & New York, 2006.