Coupled with the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression of the 1930s was the horrific Dust Bowl, brought on by a serious extended drought in the Great Plains states and worsened by constant high winds.
Airborne soil in vast clouds ended the dreams of many prairie farm families, drifting right up to doorsteps. Immense clouds of dust blackened the sky above Eastern states. Economic disaster became magnified by Mother Nature’s fury. Underlying human activities led to both. John Steinbeck’s prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath tells this sad story brilliantly.
Fortunately, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with cooperation from Congress, enacted ingenious conservation programs to help alleviate the economic and natural resource disasters. One major initiative authorized USDA funding annually for the Agricultural Conservation Program (ACP), which was administered by locally elected farmer committees in counties across the country.
The program offered federal cost-share agreements with farmers and non-industrial forest owners toward solving a variety of conservation problems through long-term sustainable practices. It was flexible, taking into account wide variations in agricultural operations prevalent in differing geographic locations.
Technical expertise was provided by a USDA agency, then known as the Soil Conservation Service, as well as assistance from state cooperative extension agents relative to farm and forest matters.
The ACP continued nonstop from year to year with one upheaval. President Nixon, with a stroke of his pen while Congress was on Christmas break in 1972, terminated the program. Bipartisan congressional action later ruled that Nixon had abused his authority and reinstated the 1973 program concurrently with 1974’s program.
Voluntary cost-share and technical assistance to private landowners has continued and evolved to this day under programs having different titles. Emphasis has remained centered on soil erosion, water and energy conservation, pollution abatement, sound forest management, wildlife considerations, and protection of rare and endangered plant species. Vibrant natural resource stewardship for the well-being of present and future generations remains the key purpose in counties throughout our country.
Official designation of Earth Day didn’t take place until April 22, 1970. But thanks to the conservation program initiated by FDR in the 1930s, continuous sustainability efforts have been carried forward.
With the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, we should all celebrate the wide-ranging resources that Mother Nature has bestowed on our nation, and we must do all we can to protect them every day.
The health and economic-related tragedies we’re experiencing since the COVID-19 pandemic struck are in ways different from the problems of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl days. But in ways they are similar.
Climate change over time is threatening the existence of all life as we know it, just as our economy has been pummeled nearly to a standstill.
With good fortune and attentive far-sighted efforts, sustainable prosperity will prevail.
(Paul Nichols lives in Loudon.)