A new day in the 'Neighborhood'
'Inventing' an American Master, David Geffen

PBS' Ken Burns leads us into 'The Dust Bowl'

By Robert Bianco, USA TODAY

There was a time when the land turned against us - and Ken Burns is set to tell us about it.

His latest film, The Dust Bowl, is an oral history of the ecological horror that struck the Southwest in the 1930s, created by a deadly combination of over-farming and drought. A two-part, nearly four-hour film, it will air on PBS Nov. 18 and 19.

"This is a cautionary tale rather than the inspirational story we tried to tell in our National Park series," says Burns. "This is the story of the greatest man-made ecological disaster in American history, a 10-year apocalypse."

And just to make the impact of the drought and dust even more severe, it came at the height of the Great Depression. Combined, says Burns, you were left with "an epic of human pain and suffering." And, he says, it's an epic story that needs to be told while there are still survivors left to tell it -- and one that deserves to be remembered as more than just a footnote to The Grapes of Wrath.

Hitting their peak in the early 30s, the storms swept across Oklahoma, Colorado and the rest of the Southwest, places where there could be miles between houses. The residents had never seen anything like it, and there was no one around to explain it to them.

"The isolation was so complete that you can imagine what it would be like for one of these mountain ranges coming toward you, and not knowing what it was," says Burns. Understandably, many of them thought it was the end of the world.

"I don't know how they survived. I don't know how they did it. I don't know how they understood what was going on."

One of the things most of them didn't understand, at least while the dust was flying, was that they had caused the problem. Droughts and high winds were nothing new in the Southwest, but when they had come before, the land was held in place by grass. By plowing up thousands of acres of grass, the farmers had set the land free to fly.

Eventually, rain returned. Farmers followed new rules for rotating crops. We replanted some of the grasslands. And then, says Burns, we forgot what had happened and once again began depleting the land and the water.

"We are definitely making a lot of the same mistakes," he says. "We never learn those lessons."

A new day in the 'Neighborhood'
'Inventing' an American Master, David Geffen


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