the.com/dust bowl
America plowed up the prairie, and the sky came down to collect the debt.
means A region, especially the central U.S. plains in the 1930s, stripped of topsoil by drought and wind after its grasslands were plowed under for farming, turning the land into a source of massive, suffocating dust storms.
from The phrase was coined by journalists in the 1930s to describe the stricken plains states — Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico — where settlers had plowed up millions of acres of deep-rooted native grass to plant wheat. When drought hit, there was nothing left to hold the soil, and winds lifted it into massive 'black blizzards' that buried homes and darkened skies as far as the East Coast. The term combines 'dust,' for the airborne topsoil, with 'bowl,' describing the shape of the afflicted region — a geographic basin of suffering that gave the whole catastrophe, and the decade, its lasting name.
- cause
- decades of wheat farming stripped native grass roots
- scale
- black blizzards reached chicago and new york city
- duration
- 1930s drought and dust lasted nearly a decade
- exodus
- pushed 2.5 million people out of the plains