It is 12:13 in the morning, and I can’t sleep. I’m up thinking about Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. I’ll admit it. I’ve heard about this book for a long time but never had any interest in reading it. It seemed boring. The dust bowl was a topic of very little interest to me, and that part of the 20th century was my least favorite to learn about. I’d much rather learn about the chaos of World War I, or the psychedelic 60’s. However, as soon as I started reading this book, I changed my opinion. See, Grapes of Wrath is about the Joad family, forced to leave their family home and travel across the country in hopes of finding jobs, all the while dealing with struggles of poverty and traveling as a poor, mid-western family at the time. They face sickness, hunger, intense weariness, hatred from the people around them, and death. This book, suffice to say, is depressing. But I love depressing literature. It’s some of the best. I found myself wondering “how is this relevant today?”
The environmental destruction brought on by poor agricultural practices led to a man-made natural disaster, the dust bowl. After World War I, many people obtained land on the Great Plains. They were encouraged by the Government to plow the land grow crops like wheat and corn. However, the overproduction of wheat and the Great Depression caused the price of wheat to drop, so these farmers plowed even more land to make more wheat in hopes of profit. By doing this, they uprooted natural drought-resistant plants and left acres of unused land bare. Next came a drought. Pair that with heavy winds and you’ve got large, intense dust storms, that kill plants and make the already-struggling-farmers even poorer.
That’s essentially what happened to the Joads that made them have to travel across the country to California. Luckily, we learned to plant trees around fields to act as wind barriers, and to rotate our crops.
Don’t let the fact that we are in the 21st century fool you into thinking that the Dust Bowl was the end of American migration due to climate change. Rolling Stone’s journalist compares a modern family he meets on Route 66 to the Joad family. How can he not? They lost their home as a result of Hurricane Harvey and had nowhere to go, so they loaded up their van with only the things they could carry and (at the time the article was written) are planning on going to San Diego. But that’s it. Once they get there, they have nowhere to go. One member of the family suggests that he will play the guitar to earn a little bit of cash.
Of course, this hasn’t happened on the same scale as the Dust Bowl Migration, but evidence suggests that we’re going to start facing bigger disasters brought on by climate change. This past summer California saw its biggest wildfire in history, the Mendocino Wildfire, which displaced tens of thousands of citizens from their homes. I recently read an article about Hurricane Florence, which is currently starting its slow descent on North and South Carolina. People have been evacuating for the past few days. If we don’t stop using fossil fuels, these disasters will only become more frequent and possibly worse.
