Dust Bowl

I caught Ken Burns’ documentary “Dust Bowl” last night on PBS.  It’s a deeply engaging story, giving us a real sense of the spirit of the Dust Bowl farmers and the grinding misery of a decade of deadly black storms. I watched with an eerie feeling of presentience, like seeing the Sandy coverage, of what we are doing to ourselves again by heedlessly disrupting the natural world that we depend on for our very survival. I was especially touched by their continuous refrain “It will be better next year” in the face of steadily worsening conditions. My fear is that people will be grasping desperately to that hope around the world in the coming decades with the same heart-breaking disillusionment as the weather only gets worse. So, I stayed with this Ken Burns masterpiece, unable to walk away, with growing unease.

Part II, upcoming, appears to tell the story of the Okies who out-migrated, beaten by the dust. Again, parallels to 2012– more humans today are refugees from catastrophic climate changes than from all the wars in the world, and the curve is rising rapidly. Where do they go, how do they survive, what kind of “welcome” do they get? I can only hope the stories of our 21st century refugees are more compassion-filled than the stories from the ’30s.