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@ArrowbearMoore My mohter was a child in OK during the dust Bowl and depression. they had to put damp sheets over the wondows to keep dust out but at least a little fresh air in for the family of 8.The dust Bowl, too, was manmade.

@ArrowbearMoore
#Climate #DustBowl #Agriculture #Myths #AustraliaHistory

watched the whole of The Dust Bowl yesterday. thanks for the recommendation.
horrific, some of the stories of children. i should imagine people who lived through it were too traumatised to talk about it later.
i don’t know why i was a bit shocked about california closing the border — displacement has been the norm in the west since forever

something similar to the dust bowl and canadian prairies happened in south australia, though on a smaller scale. (south australia is the driest inhabited state in the world).
an early surveyor named Goyder drew a line on the state map showing the limits of arable areas, based on rainfall. after a few wet years, in 1874 the govt allowed settlement north of the line - there were some boom years, a railway line built from the stage capital to a town named confidently named *Farina* - and the post hoc euro myth “rain follows the plow”. by 1884 it was all over.

the north of the state is now littered with ghost towns and the remains of a railway line. i guess the scale of settlement didn’t warrant govt intervention, cos there has been no effort to rehabilitate the area.

my generation grew up with pictures of men delivering goods and mail in the outback, and believed them to be modern (white) heroes conquering an impossibly inhospitable land. no one told us we had destroyed the ecosystems.
documentary trailer; back of beyond - https://youtu.be/NSa4esN3CHM?feature=shared

goyder’s line is moving south. and mega corporations buying water rights to grow cotton and rice have all but destroyed australia’s river sytems, which were fragile to begin with.

fig 2 of the research article provides a snapshot of just how little of the mainland is suited to western style agriculture.
our indifference to global miles travelled by the food we import will eventually bite us on the bum, but not soon enough. i guess we still won’t care about what our fossil fuel exports are already doing to millions of people in countries already affected by climate change.

#crapitalism

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Study-area-depicting-Goyders-Line-10-km-buffers-on-either-side-of-the-line-and-cropping_fig1_255983911