#i don't think 'make me stop missing oklahoma' is quite the outcome here. mostly i just feel grief i think for what was done there

[quixoticanarchy]

my dad gave me a book to read about the Dust Bowl so that, in his words, i would stop missing oklahoma, and jfc is it grim. like i did know it was an environmental catastrophe of almost unimaginable magnitude but all the policies that led up to it are so strikingly and blatantly stupid and also just a blisteringly clear indictment of imperialist and capitalist views of land coming home to roost in spectacularly awful fashion. the way that grasslands were framed as empty desert needing to be civilized through farming - the last gasp of the frontier, and a "make the desert bloom" narrative par excellence - and the urgency of the federal government to get settlers into every conceivable area, and the eagerness of the railroads and land speculators to invent promises to lure people out there, and the delight in the wholesale destruction of an ecosystem and the absolute confidence that people could conquer and remake a landscape as they wished, and that land would forever be an inexhaustible resource... i remember watching the ken burns documentary and being struck by the horror of the dust bowl back then too, but it really needs to be put into context as fallout specifically generated by imperialism and by capitalist & extractivist & white supremacist views of land that were not at all unique to this one catastrophe, and while it was a perfect storm of several terrible courses colliding, it can't be seen as a one-off fluke horror. it's just the extreme end result of the same kinds of reckless rolls of the dice that we're still doing ecologically on a massive scale, with industrial agriculture and with extractivism as a whole