
Image credit: Glenbow Archives NA-2496-1
By George Colpitts, Shannon Stunden Bower and Bill Waiser
[Editors note: this post was prepared for both our website and NiCHE-Canada.org where it was published on Monday, November 28, 2016].
The dustbowl years on the Canadian prairies live on in the imaginations and landscapes of Western Canadians.
Elderly survivors might still leave teacups upside down on saucers, as they did in the 1930s when dust settled everywhere in a household. Treebelts hastily planted on farms to reduce wind erosion have now become mature stands. In southern Saskatchewan, when a dry spell stretches over two seasons, farmers begin to scour again their holdings. Well aware of what happened in the 1930s, they look for the “hardpan” emerging from soils starting to shift and blow on their land.
The dustbowl of the 1930s might have ended over eighty years ago, but many western Canadians still watch for its return.
The multi-media website, Climate and Change: Making Sense of the Dustbowl Years on the Canadian Prairies was launched in September 2016 to provide a more robust explanation for one of the most significant episodes in the environmental history of Canada in the twentieth century. Environmental history examines the ongoing relationships between humans and their environments. The 1930s dustbowl years can be viewed as both a relatively short-term event, as well as a part of the longue-durée climate history of the Great Plains. Normal and abnormal at once, the drought can be studied for dustbowl social and economic outcomes; the ways western science hastily adapted itself to solve perceived problems; or how humans responded emotionally — rationally and irrationally — to an environmental crisis. Continue reading