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Surface Dirt

Some environmental emergencies during the 1930s were visible, none more so than the untethering of topsoil from America’s great plains. Following unprecendented drought and extreme temperatures—Nebraska reaching 118 degrees in 1934—there was virtually no moisture left in the top three feet of soil. Beginning on 9 May 1934, one of the largest dust storms evacuated some 350 million tons before eventually blowing out to sea, where it deposited dust on ships’ decks 300 miles offshore (Worcester 10-14). Over most of the decade only Vermont and Maine escaped drought years, although for New Yorkers Dust Bowl history likewise may have appeared remote, albeit spectacular.

“Clad in a mantle of vegetation,” wrote Glenn K. Rule of the Soil Conservation Service, “the innumerable pleasant landscapes in America’s Northeast seem to deny any present or past wastage of soil resources.” This was an illusion. The greatest damage here was, instead, “the comparatively imperceptible effect of widespread sheet erosion” leading to what he called a “wounded soil” hiding under pasture or overgrowth. Interestingly, symptoms and their underlying causes can be discerned in many of the New Deal Gallery landscapes, however stylized.