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Airdate: The Dust Bowl

SBS screens a new series about the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history.

2013-02-28_0917SBS screens a new series from Ken Burns about the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history.

The Dust Bowl is a four-part series by Ken Burns that chronicles the environmental catastrophe that, throughout the 1930s, destroyed the farmlands of the Great Plains, turned prairies into deserts, and unleashed a pattern of massive, deadly dust storms that for many seemed to herald the end of the world.

It was the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history.

The Dust Bowl is also a story of heroic perseverance against enormous odds: families finding ways to survive and hold on to their land, New Deal programs that kept hungry families afloat, and a partnership between government agencies and farmers to develop new farming and conservation methods.

The series details this critical moment in American history in all its complexities and profound human drama. It is part oral history, using compelling interviews of 26 survivors of those hard times – in what will probably be the last recorded testimony of the generation that lived through the Dust Bowl.

Filled with seldom seen film footage, previously unpublished photographs, the songs of Woody Guthrie, and the observations of two remarkable women who left behind eloquent written accounts, the film is also a historical accounting of what happened and why during the 1930s on the southern plains.

Friday, 1 March at 8.35pm SBS ONE.

7 Responses

  1. Yes McCullough was great. Coyote isn’t bad though.

    The primary cause was an estimated 1 in 200 year drought that lasted nearly a decade. Agricultural practices that had supported a massive increase in population in the Midwest turned out to be disastrous.

    There were lots of factors, the drought, the shift from an agrarian to industrial economy, introduction of mechanised broad acre farming and canned and processed foods reducing rural wages, the asset booms caused by the shift to consumption as a driver of economic growth, its collapse, protectionist policies, large shifts in tax and fiscal policy that all combine to produce the Great Depression. The US didn’t recover till the massive stimulus provided from war bonds.

  2. I do too Earthquake…his Baseball and The Civil War especially..was kinda disappointed with Prohibition.Wish David Mccullough was still narrating for him though…regardless ,I’ll be watching.

  3. “in what will probably be the last recorded testimony of the generation that lived through the Dust Bowl.”
    That’s not a sentence u’d want to read if you were part of that generation.

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