Why when so many talk about the Great Depression do they forget to talk about...

[Angel Heart]

The Dust Bowl? And one of the largest migration of Americans due to it.

 

[editec]

Because, while they happened at the same time, they weren't really related events?

The collapse of the credit driven investment economy would have happened anyway

Of course the dust bowl made life unbearable for many people, but it was not the cause of the great depression.

Much like the middle class has been in trouble long before Wall street noticed, so too were farmers going broke long before our recent credit crises.

In fact, the fact that the price of commodities was declining is largely why we had that dust bowl.

Farmers keep planting more and more marginal land to compensate for the declining prices of their crops, thus opening new lands (very marginal lands), thus destroying wind breaks between fields, too.

Then, when the unusual wet period that happened in the high plains ended, and the weather went back to its normal draught condition, the winds just picked up the earth and carried it off.

It was a ecological disaster only because we attempted to turn the high plains into farmland when that land was never really suitable for crops.