I just finished reading an amazing and powerful book called "The Worst Hard Time" by Timothy Egan. It's a book about the dust bowl and the Great Depression. I'm sure the title and the meager description I just gave sound rather boring and dry, but don't be fooled!  This is a non-fiction book that reads like fiction. Once I started reading it, I couldn't put it down.

If you're like me, probably the only thing you know about the dust bowl is "Grapes of Wrath" and a couple Woody Guthrie songs. You probably heard that overfarming caused the dust bowl. That is true, but it's only a small part of the story.

For example, did you know that our government put out pamphlets extolling the virtues of "dry farming" and stating that the very act of tilling the soil would create atmospheric disturbances that would change weather patterns and cause it to rain? This was meant to encourage settlers to move to the Southern plains and farm the dry grassland.

Did you know that the dust storms during the 1930s were so thick and strong that they would darken the sky in the middle of the day, and that they gave off such an electrical charge that people could be knocked over just from shaking hands?

Did you know that 1/3 of the population of the southern plains/dust bowl area sickened and died - not of starvation, but of "dust pneumonia" (i.e. lungs and body just filled up with dirt)?

Did you know that tumbleweeds ("russian thistle") were brought to the U.S. by German immigrants from Russia?

Bear with me, because this DOES tie in to Quinn/Ishmael/Takers and Leavers/Civilization vs. Tribalism!

The book follows the lives of several real people and their families who lived in the heart of the dust bowl (or what started out as the Southern Plains/High Plains) in 4 places: Dalhart, Texas (panhandle); Boise City, Oklahoma; NE New Mexico, and Southern Colorado.

The author also goes into a lot of detail about the whole history of the area and the various people, events and actions that led to the ecological and economic disaster.

IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WERE LEAVERS.
For example, he explains how the southern plains were inhabited by Native Americans (Comanche) and buffalo. There was little rainfall there, no lakes, and high winds. Over the millenia, an ecosystem had evolved there that consisted of several grasses perfectly adapted to growing there. The buffalo ate the grass, and the Indians hunted the buffalo, using all parts of it.

LEAVERS VS TAKERS VS EVEN WORSE TAKERS:
Then our government kicked the Indians off the land, and then slaughtered all the buffalo, and it became grazing land for cattle. Cowboys had ranches there. When the era of cattle ended, the land became part of the last big land-grab. Encouraged by investors and our government, hordes of settlers ("nesters") moved in during the early 20th century, lured by promises of fertile land that would grow lots of crops.

TAKER PROPAGANDA IN ACTION:
The federal government had scientists who wrote pamphlets claiming that "dry farming" was the new big thing, and that this land was great for growing wheat and corn, and so what if there were only 20 inches of annual rainfall?  There were even scientists who told the farmers that the very act of plowing the land would create an atmospheric disturbance that would increase rainfall and change the weather patterns!

SUSTAINABILITY? WHAT'S THAT?
Greed and "civilization's" push for more-more-more led to millions of acres of grassland being turned over and ripped up so that corn and wheat could be planted. The few cowboys and ranchers who remained went around and warned the nesters that the topsoil where the grass grew was the best part of the land here and not to turn it over, but no one listened.

THE TAKER WAY: IF SOMETHING ISN'T WORKING, KEEP DOING MORE OF THE SAME THING:
Then during World War I, Russia (Europe's main wheat producer) stopped producing wheat due to the war. America stepped in to fill the void, and the wheat farmers of the Southern plains were making shitloads of money. The price kept going up and there was a corresponding boom in production - and in population for that area.

Then the war ended and Russia went back to growing wheat for Europe, so there was a glut of wheat. So what did the nesters do?  Exactly what Quinn says takers do: when something isn't working, just keep doing more of it! And that's exactly what they did. They tore up more and more grassland to plant more and more wheat - and took out more and more bank loans - thinking that if they grew twice as much wheat, they could make as much money as they did the year before.

Well, then the stock market crashed in 1929. The farmers thought, "Oh, that's just affecting rich city folk back East. It has nothing to do with us." It took a few years for the effect to be felt in the southern plains, but within a few years, the banks there went belly up and took people's savings with them. Many farmers had taken out bank loans to buy more land and they couldn't pay their loans off, so they lost their farms.

OVER-PRODUCTION OF FOOD AND "LOCKING UP" THE FOOD:
Meanwhile, for the first couple years of the depression, there was no market to buy wheat, so there was so much surplus wheat lying around in the southern plains that it sat in huge piles and started rotting. Rabbits and bugs got into it.

The irony of piles of food going to waste while people were starving in other parts of the country was not lost on many people. They begged President Hoover to buy the grain and distribute it to starving people, but he refused.

THE TAKER WAY: EXTERMINATE ALL ENEMIES!
Then the people in the plains started taking out their anger on the rabbits! They started having rabbit roundups, where the whole town would get together and form a circle and close in on the rabbits and just club them and shoot them to death!  Even with all the starvation, most of the rabbits (just like the buffalo 20 years earlier) didn't even get used for food. They were left outside to rot.

Well, I think I've written a whole book here. Hope I have intrigued you enough to want to read the book now! The parallels to today (global warming and the mortgage crisis) are striking.