The meaning of Ken Burns's "The Dust Bowl"

The timing of the new Ken Burns documentary is no mistake.  If you are watching the harrowing two-part series, and I hope you are, I think that you will find that "The Dust Bowl" is not merely a look at the past, but also a lesson about the present and the future.  The many voices in the documentary often remind the viewer that the dust bowl was an ecological disaster that was man made, and that it did not take humans very long to accomplish it.

Many people find it hard to believe that human activity could have such large and long-lasting consequences.  But it took us less than a hundred years to make a mess of the Great Plains, and all we had to do was to get rid of the buffalo grass that was protecting the soil.  We've been working at pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere world-wide for hundreds of years now, and I think that it's time we begin to know our own strength.