Wednesday, November 14, 2012

"The Dust Bowl" Series on PBS

Katherine Patton, writing on the Walker County Soil and Water Conservation District Blog, mentions the "The Dust Bowl" PBS series.  Sounds like an interesting program:

Mark your calender to watch "The Dust Bowl", a two-part, four-hour documentary series premiering  November 18th and November 19th, 2012, 7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. on PBS. Ken Burns, the film maker says, "Nothing was more important than the Soil Conservation Service, headed by Hugh Hammond Bennett, who came in at the local level to re-educate farmers. More info on the show can be found at http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/dustbowl/. Below is a quote from Hugh Hammond Bennett. "This particular dust storm blotted out the sun over the nations capital, drove grit between the teeth of New Yorkers, and scattered dust on the decks of ships 200 miles out to sea. I suspect that when people along the seaboard of the eastern United States began to taste fresh soil from the plains 2,000 miles away, many of them realized for the first time that somewhere something had gone wrong with the land. It seems to take something like a disaster to awaken people who have been accustomed to great national prosperity, such as ours, to the presence of a national menace. Although we were slowly coming to realize that soil erosion was a major national problem, even before that great dust storm, it took that storm to awaken the nation as a whole to some realization of the menace of erosion."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I grew up during the Dust Bowl. I'm very excited to watch the PBS special on Sunday & Monday.