American Dust Bowl Research Articles

Conservation Agriculture is a Sustainable Approach for Future

Conservation agriculture (CA) embodies a forward-looking and sustainable approach to cultivation. It is characterized by a farming system that prioritizes sustainability through practices such as minimizing soil disturbance, maintaining permanent soil cover, and implementing crop rotations. The overarching goal is to preserve soil health and enhance productivity. This method emphasizes the optimization of natural resources, the reduction of inputs, and the enhancement of nutrient utilization efficiency. The primary focus of this review article around conservation agriculture (CA), characterized by revolutionary practices involving minimal soil disturbance (no-till, NT) and the maintenance of continuous soil cover (mulch). Agriculture heavily relies on cultivation and tillage practices. The review first explores the advantages of conventional cultivation techniques before the introduction of conservation tillage (CT), a method that originated in response to the American dust bowl of the 1930s. Subsequently, the review delves into the benefits of CA, considered an improvement over CT. The incorporation of no-till (NT), mulching, and related innovations significantly enhances soil qualities and various biotic factors within the framework of CA. Nevertheless, the promotion of Conservation Agriculture (CA) technologies encounters several challenges. These include the absence of suitable seeders tailored for small-scale farmers, conflicts between the use of CA and livestock feeding for crop residues, the practice of burning crop residues, a scarcity of skilled manpower, and the challenge of overcoming traditional attitudes towards tillage. Drawbacks of conservation agriculture encompass factors such as limited adoption, insufficient knowledge and skills, reliance on herbicides, and initial investment costs, among others.

Applying the Rumsfeld Matrix: Unknown Unknown Climate Risks in an AMOC Collapse Scenario

This paper investigates scientific research using Rumsfeld’s typology to grasp uncertainties in an era of ‘catastrophic climate change and the risk landscape of a ‘2°C-3°C world’. The study highlights the importance of 'unknown unknowns' and the emergence of 'Black Swan' climate events, such as frequent 500-year droughts and discusses how adaptive strategies can be crafted today, building on the “unknown knowns” of the past, such as the Great American Dust Bowl. It emphasizes the need for a structured approach to uncertainty in water resource management, relevant for understanding climate change’s significant impact on water cycles, evident in phenomena like cloudbursts and prolonged droughts. Additionally, research into abrupt climate change, such as the potential mid-century collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is analyzed using the Rumsfeld matrix to understand research gaps and generate insights for further study.

Dust Bowl Migrants: Environmental Refugees and Economic Adaptation

The 1930s American Dust Bowl created archetypal “Dust Bowl migrants,” refugees from environmental collapse. I examine this archetype, comparing migration from more-eroded and less-eroded counties to distinguish Dust Bowl migrants from other migrants. Dust Bowl migrants were “negatively selected,” in years of education, compared to other migrants who were “positively selected.” Dust Bowl migrants had lower incomes than natives in their destinations, which is reflected in popular impressions. I estimate strikingly modest impacts of the Dust Bowl on average wage incomes in 1939, however, which contrasts with the Dust Bowl’s large and enduring impacts on agricultural land.

No Maize, No Life: Conservation, Maize Production, and African Responses in Colonial Southern Malawi, 1920–1960

This study explores the history of maize production to demonstrate the extent to which colonial conservation interspersed with economic expediency stifled African production from 1920 to 1960. Drawing on archival and oral evidence from southern Malawi, it argues that colonial restriction on maize production to conserve the country’s soil fertility was an excuse by the state to achieve various economic interests. What the colonial state in Malawi wanted was to divert the Africans from the production of maize to other crops whose global market demand and value was high. This was critical during the post-depression era when settler agriculture collapsed, and even worse in the post-war period when Britain desperately required African agriculture for its economic recovery. But since maize had become their life-blood, African producers, with the support of some colonial officials who shared similar fears, could not submit to this restrictive policy. By forefronting maize production, the study sheds new light on the socio-environmental historiography which has generically attributed the implementation of colonial conservation policies in Africa to economic depression, drought, demography, the American dust bowl, colonial land policies, and local farming practices.

Disasters and History: The Vulnerability and Resilience of Past Societies by Bas van Bavel et al.

On May 17, 2021, cyclone Tauktae made landfall in the state of Gujarat on the west coast of India. Classified as an extremely severe cyclonic storm by the Indian Meteorological Department, Tauktae resulted in at least 169 deaths and the displacement of more than 200,000 people. Its destructive force was boosted by India’s struggle with the second global wave of covid-19 at the time. Tauktae made landfall on the day when India recorded its second highest single-day death toll at the time. India had to deal with two disasters simultaneously, one meteorological-hydrological and one biological.Disasters and History helps us to understand such disasters by treating historical disasters as a laboratory “to test theories with relevance beyond particular time-space contexts” (43). The authors show what seemingly diverse events such as earthquakes, droughts, or epidemics have in common. Although varying considerably in both their causes and consequences, these disasters are all triggered by biophysical shocks and hazards. Whether a particular shock, or set of shocks, turns into a disaster depends on the social, economic, political, and cultural setting in which it occurs. Various pre-conditions make a society more or less vulnerable to these hazards. Moreover, the manner in which people react to these shocks, or fail to do so, determines the results. Hence, the two central concepts that this book features, as the subtitle clearly suggests, are vulnerability and resilience.The authors have gained extensive experience in researching historical disasters, both independently and collaboratively. Their combined effort allows them to cover the period from the fourteenth to the twenty-first century. The case studies that illustrate the core arguments of the book may be limited in number, but they aptly represent different types of disaster—The Black Death of 1348, the medieval and early modern North Sea floods, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the 1930s American Dust Bowl, the twentieth-century famines of Sub-Saharan Africa, and the tsunami in Japan that led to the Fukushima disaster.This book is, above all, an excellent guide to research about historical disasters; each entry in the table of contents could apply to the design of a distinct research project. Chapter 3, about materials and methods, is particularly helpful in this respect. When attempting to assess the severity of an initial ecological shock in the period before instrumental recording, scholars often faced difficulties in finding reliable evidence. Whenever direct recordings of hazards by historical contemporaries, such as those in English manorial accounts, are not available, the authors suggest a turn to “indirect recordings of processes and phenomena that were influenced by environmental conditions,” such as harvest accounts or registers of taxes and rents (44). Similarly, a lack of direct evidence about the severity of a disaster, such as mortality statistics, can find some compensation in a range of proxy data like parish registers or burial records.For scholars who approach disasters from an interdisciplinary perspective, the sub-chapter about combining historical data with sources from the natural sciences is highly instructive (53–57). The rapidly developing discipline of paleoclimatology—an obvious boon to scholars of historical disasters—has opened new windows onto climate history and extreme weather events in the past. The authors present both the possibilities and the limitations of paleoclimatic reconstructions. Although these data add an additional layer to the written records mentioned above, they still need to be viewed critically since they vary in their geographical coverage and temporal resolution. The relevance of Disasters and History to every conceivable disaster, whether past, present, or future, makes it an invaluable resource for interdisciplinary scholars of climate and environment.

Environmental Catastrophe and the Direction of Invention: Evidence from the American Dust Bowl

This paper investigates how innovation responded to and shaped the economic impact of the American Dust Bowl, an environmental catastrophe that led to widespread soil erosion on the US Plains during the 1930s. Combining data on county-level erosion, the historical geography of crop production, and crop-specific innovation, I document that the crisis led to a major shift in agricultural technology development toward more Dust Bowl-exposed crops and, within crops, toward bio-chemical and planting technologies that could directly mitigate environmental distress. County-level exposure to Dust Bowl-induced innovation significantly dampened the effect of land erosion on agricultural land values and revenue. These results highlight the role of crises in shaping the direction of innovation and the importance of endogenous technological progress as an adaptive force in the face of disasters.

Dust Bowl Migrants: Identifying an Archetype

The 1930’s American Dust Bowl created archetypal “Dust Bowl migrants,†refugees from environmental collapse and economic upheaval. I examine this archetype, comparing migration from more-eroded counties and less-eroded counties to distinguish Dust Bowl migrants from other migrants in this era. Migrants from more-eroded counties were more “negatively selected,†in years of education, than other migrants who were “positively selected.†These Dust Bowl migrants struggled economically, especially in California. Despite migrants’ struggles, however, I estimate strikingly modest impacts of the Dust Bowl on average incomes that contrast with its enduring impacts on agricultural land.

Land-Cover Change and the “Dust Bowl” Drought in the U.S. Great Plains

The North American Dust Bowl drought during the 1930s had devastating environmental and societal impacts. Comprehending the causes of the drought has been an ongoing effort in order to better predict similar droughts and mitigate their impacts. Among the potential causes of the drought are sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in the tropical Pacific Ocean and strengthened local sinking motion as a feedback to degradation of the land surface condition leading up to and during the drought. Limitations on these causes are the lack of a strong tropical SST anomaly during the drought and lack of local anomaly in moisture supply to undercut the precipitation in the U.S. Great Plains. This study uses high-resolution modeling experiments and quantifies an effect of the particular Great Plains land cover in the 1930s that weakens the southerly moisture flux to the region. This effect lowers the average precipitation, making the Great Plains more susceptible to drought. When drought occurs, the land-cover effect enhances its intensity and prolongs its duration. Results also show that this land-cover effect is comparable in magnitude to the effect of the 1930s large-scale circulation anomaly. Finally, analysis of the relationship of these two effects suggests that while lowering the precipitation must have contributed to the Dust Bowl drought via the 1930s land-cover effect, the initiation of and recovery from that drought would likely result from large-scale circulation changes, either of chaotic origin or resulting from combinations of weak SST anomalies and other forcing.

“The Dust Was Long in Settling”: Human Capital and the Lasting Impact of the American Dust Bowl

I find that childhood exposure to the Dust Bowl, an environmental shock to health and income, adversely impacted later-life human capital—especially when exposure wasin utero—increasing poverty and disability rates, and decreasing fertility and college completion rates. The event's devastation of agriculture, however, had the beneficial effect of increasing high school completion, likely by pushing children who otherwise might have worked on the farm into secondary schooling. Lastly, New Deal spending helped remediate Dust Bowl damage, suggesting that timely and substantial policy interventions can aid in human recovery from natural disasters.

Possums, Quandongs, and Kurrajongs: Wild Harvesting as a Strategy for Farming through Drought in Australia

Possums, Quandongs, and Kurrajongs:Wild Harvesting as a Strategy for Farming through Drought in Australia Rebecca Jones (bio) Introduction Drought is a regular and persistent feature of the Australian climate. Unlike most other environmental events, drought lasts months and years rather than days and weeks. This has, over the years, resulted in great stress for farmers and agricultural communities, bringing economic hardship and even destitution. Underlying the human impact of drought is environmental degradation: vegetation loss, soil erosion, sandstorms, and loss of soil fertility enhanced or ameliorated by agricultural and land-management techniques.1 The regularity and impact of drought mean that it has been a profound shaper of Australian society, but histories of drought in Australia have largely focused on hardship: water shortage has become embedded in the Australian settler narratives as exemplifying the struggle of the settler against an unpredictable natural environment, and the term “rural” has become synonymous with stoicism and endurance against hardships such as drought.2 The Great (or Federation) Drought of 1895–1902, due to its length and severity, has a particularly important role in forging a national identity of stoicism in the face of hardship.3 And the struggle of the settler against a hostile environment is compared to a battle faced by a soldier in war.4 The recurrence of drought in Australia has, however, meant that farmers and agricultural communities have, over the last 150 years, [End Page 358] found ways to survive and adapt. How have they done this? Some historical studies have focused on government and other large-scale responses to drought such as irrigation schemes, town water, and inter-regional distribution of water such as the Wimmera-Mallee stock and domestic water scheme.5 However, the social factors that enable individual farmers, their families, and households to survive drought remains an underresearched area. Insights into the way people cope with drought can be found in studies of recent droughts of the 1990s and 2000s. Significant factors include personal attributes such as optimism, humor, creativity, flexibility, and decision-making ability—similar attributes to those that have been identified by historians of the North American Dust Bowl of the 1930s.6 Immediate family has been found to be the first line of defense, providing solidarity, labor, and practical assistance.7 Social networks, clubs, community events, and institutions provide emotional support, practical assistance, and opportunities for recreation, escape, and solidarity.8 Moving beyond studies of drought to international research into the impact of other recent natural disasters provides insight into the way people cope with severe environmental events in recent times. Four themes emerge as important in facilitating resilience in response to natural disasters: adequate economic and social resources to reduce vulnerability and increase flexibility; diverse strategies to respond to disaster; local knowledge that tailors responses to particular conditions; and experience of, or ability to learn from, previous natural disasters.9 Influenced by the field of positive psychology, many of these psychological, sociological, and socioecological studies have applied the concept of resilience.10 Resilience is a process (rather than an inherent trait) by which individuals, groups, or communities, firstly, survive adversity and, secondly, respond and adapt to change.11 With drought and other natural hazards, resilience has become the new buzzword of the 2000s, just as sustainability was in the 1990s. As a concept, resilience can be problematic. At its most banal, resilience is used as a euphemism for self-reliance and eschewing governmental and institutional assistance. In this form, resilience can be used to deny difficulty and to present a romanticized picture of stoicism. However, while being mindful of these pitfalls, resilience, I argue, can be a useful term in understanding drought in the past. The concept of resilience moves us beyond reiterating hardship and instead focuses attention on response and adaptation [End Page 359] of individuals and communities, drawing attention to the fact that people in the past were active agents in relation to the environment. It takes us beyond the pioneer myths and reminds us that people were neither triumphal conquerors nor passive recipients but that they made decisions and employed deliberate strategies in their interaction with the environment. While still acknowledging drought as a significant stress for...

Coping with food crises: Lessons from the American Dust Bowl on balancing local food, agro technology, social welfare, and government regulation agendas in food and farming systems

This paper examines four broad policy and public responses to the American Dust Bowl in the 1930s as a way of exploring how society today could address our own “food crisis”. More particularly, in the Dust Bowl some argued that solutions would be found by engineers and farmers who would develop new ways of watering dry fields. A second group believed that inappropriate political and economic incentives had led to bad farming practices prior to the drought and this contributed to wide-spread erosion. To this group, the best solutions included governmental regulation of farm practices. A third group focused on the welfare of individuals, arguing that creating a social safety net to protect marginalized families was the highest priority. Finally, there were commentators who advocated for a smaller scale, ecological, and holistic approach to farming. Today, the same four perspectives are present in debates about how to maintain global food security in light of population growth, high energy prices and climate change. Exploring the similarity of the discourses between today's food crisis and the one that hit American society 80 years ago reveals that advocates of the four different camps are motivated by very different principles. Briefly, proponents of technological solutions base many of their arguments on the assumption that human ingenuity is capable of producing extremely productive food systems. The managerial arguments, by contrast, are based on the idea that the natural environment can be rationally and efficiently managed using scientific principles. The social welfare narrative seeks to create a more equitable food system. Finally, the ecological and holistic narrative argues that diverse, small scale and local food systems are a prerequisite for long term sustainability. The primary contribution of this paper, therefore, is to expose these deeply held ontological tensions as a way of arguing that policy makers today must de-politicise arguments and use the principles embedded in all four narratives when designing programmes to ensure that the 21st century does not face a repeat of the crisis of the 1930s.

The Great American Dust Bowl by Don Brown (review)

The Great American Dust Bowl by Don Brown (review)

What was the Dust Bowl? Assessing contemporary popular knowledge

This article reports on an assessment of contemporary popular knowledge and perceptions of the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s. In a region prone to recurrent drought and evolving resource issues such as the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer, it follows that knowledge of the Dust Bowl can contribute to understanding and dealing with contemporary and future challenges to the human–environment dynamic of the region. An age-stratified sample of residents from 93 Great Plains counties provided their understandings of the three Dust Bowl concepts (era, event, and region) via questionnaire. When compared with the academic record on the subject, significant variation between respondent age groups was identified. Successively, older generations of the historic Dust Bowl region maintain higher degrees of knowledge than their younger counterparts, regarding this exceptional chapter of American environmental history. This record of knowledge erosion not only speaks to the necessity of enhancing Dust Bowl educational resources, but can be utilized to underscore the salience of studying and documenting adaptive strategies to drought on the American Great Plains.

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

Surviving the Dust Bowl (review)

Reviewed by: Surviving the Dust Bowl John Shelton Lawrence Surviving the Dust Bowl (1998/2007). Written and produced by Chana Gazit. Distributed by WGBH-PBS; www.pbs.org; 55 minutes. Beginning in 1931 one hundred million acres of the southern Great Plains transformed itself into the Dust Bowl. Its coverage stretched over sections of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado. In longevity, ecological damage, economic loss, human suffering, and displacement of people the Dust Bowl ranks with or perhaps above Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf’s BP oil spill, and the Fukushima Daichi reactor disaster. Ignorant of the Plains drought cycles and driving the steel disk harrows that slashed the Homestead prairie grasses, farmers of the teens and twenties bared their pulverized soil to hot, fierce winds that came in the thirties. In 1935, my childhood home of Amarillo clocked 908 hours of the Black Blizzards. For some survivors the nightmare of dust brought a sense of guilt and collective responsibility that is rare in American history. Like the droughts that keep returning to the Southwest, Surviving the Dust Bowl (STDB) has had several incarnations since first public broadcast in 1998, followed by release on a modest videocassette. Then came Timothy Egan’s National Book Award title The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of [End Page 62] those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (2006); it included interviews with some of the film’s principals, affording a timely opportunity for a 2007 DVD with additional disk-based resources such as a teacher’s guide and a transcript. As of this writing, STDB videostreams from the PBS website, which dispenses the DVD contents as well as additional interviews. It also links to the documentary Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern (1995), which reprises the upper Midwest farm crisis of the 1980s. In sum, STDB has grown into HD quality video with highly instructive supplements in the form of additional interviews and bibliographies. And because humanly caused climate change has become a focus of political differentiation between Democrats (who believe in it) and Republicans (who see it as enviro-fanatic conspiracy), STDB has an even greater relevance now than it did in 1998. The film uses familiar documentary ingredients: trusted commentator for an introduction (here David McCullough), still photographs and movie clips, period posters, interviews with a historian and several surviving participants. The heart and distinctive contribution of STDB is the time it grants to survivor’s voices. They are a needed corrective to the most popular literary and film image of the Dust Bowl from John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939; 20th C Fox film released in 1940), which narrated escape and relocation. This theme was reinforced by Woodie Guthrie’s “Dusty Old Dust” with its refrain “So long, it’s been good to know you/This dusty old dust is a-gettin’ my home/And I’ve got to be drifting along.” Those who stayed experienced years of personal economic destruction (compounded by the Great Depression), hunger, the loss of farm animals, schools, banks, churches, and in some cases entire towns. There were deaths of family members with symptoms of pneumonia, and the saddening vision of parents crying in desperation about their misery in the unrelenting dust that filled houses, yards, and mounded up in dunes along fence rows. One of the film’s bizarre clips records club bearing men and boys of Dalhart, TX in their Sunday suits, herding forage-seeking wild rabbits into pens where they are clubbed to death. A still photo shows a crow’s nest near Amarillo that had been constructed with scraps of barbwire. The landscape had been too denuded for traditional materials. The voices of survivors chosen for this program are superb. They reflect the distinctive regional language patterns and vividly evoke their moments of fear and hope in the Dust Bowl. Melt White of Dalhart, a cowboy, has a cello-resonant voice that would charm an audience in speaking the conditions of the Alternate Minimum Tax code. In terms of film history, Melt provides a living link to Pare Lorentz’s documentary The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) in that his father Bam was hired to plow for a...

The Enduring Impact of the American Dust Bowl: Short- and Long-Run Adjustments to Environmental Catastrophe

The 1930s American Dust Bowl was an environmental catastrophe that greatly eroded sections of the Plains. The Dust Bowl is estimated to have immediately, substantially, and persistently reduced agricultural land values and revenues in more-eroded counties relative to less-eroded counties. During the Depression and through at least the 1950s, there was limited relative adjustment of farmland away from activities that became relatively less productive in more-eroded areas. Agricultural adjustments recovered less than 25 percent of the initial difference in agricultural costs for more-eroded counties. The economy adjusted predominantly through large relative population declines in more-eroded counties, both during the 1930s and through the 1950s. (JEL N32, N52, Q15, Q18, Q54)

Response of the prairie–forest border to climate change: impacts of increasing drought may be mitigated by increasing CO2

Summary 1. Quercus macrocarpa (bur oak) is the dominant tree species along much of the prairie–forest border in the northern‐central United States, and movement of Q. macrocarpa in response to climate change may determine the rate at which the prairie–forest ecotone shifts. To investigate likely controls over Q. macrocarpa performance at the edge of its range, we used tree rings to establish the links between drought, growth‐rate and mortality for three sites spanning the prairie–forest border in Minnesota. 2. Quercus macrocarpa growth during the 20th century correlates strongly with the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) and more weakly with raw temperature and precipitation values for all three sites. However, the sensitivity of annual growth rates to drought has steadily declined over time as evidenced by increasing growth residuals and higher growth rates for a given PDSI value after 1950 compared with the first half of the century. We hypothesize that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration may lead to increased water‐use efficiency, although we cannot rule out other environmental factors. 3. Because growth is an excellent predictor of Q. macrocarpa mortality, growth–climate relationships provide information on whether oak forests will contract, because of individual tree death, when climate changes. For Q. macrocarpa, declining sensitivity of growth to drought translates into lower predicted mortality rates at all sites. At one site, declining moisture sensitivity yields a 49% lower predicted mortality from a severe drought (PDSI = −8, on par with the worst 1930s ‘American Dust Bowl’ droughts in our study region). 4. Unless the changing relationship between growth and climate is incorporated into forest simulation models, the predicted rate of established tree dieback in a warmer, drier climate may be exaggerated. 5. Synthesis. Adult Quercus macrocarpa trees appear to be increasingly insensitive to drought‐induced mortality. Because the species is dominant at the prairie–forest ecotone in the northern‐central United States, movement of the ecotone in response to climate change may be delayed for decades.

No Man's Lands: Refuse and Refuge in Adorno's American Experience

Abstract In “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” Adorno likens his early trips from New York City to a previously abandoned New Jersey brewery, the site of the Princeton Radio Research Project, to Kafka's story about the “Great Natural Theater of Oklahama [sic]” at the end of the novel Amerika (German title: Der Verschollene). It is easy enough to account for this association. The natural theater story tells of Karl Rossmann's hire and transportation by train to a kind of circus in the American dustbowl. Rossmann is a European immigrant in search of refuge. It is, however, a highly…

Katrina in historical context: environment and migration in the U.S.

The massive publicity surrounding the exodus of residents from New Orleans spurred by Hurricane Katrina has encouraged interest in the ways that past migration in the U.S. has been shaped by environmental factors. So has Timothy Egan's exciting book, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of those who survived the Great American Dust Bowl. This paper places those dramatic stories into a much less exciting context, demonstrating that the kinds of environmental factors exemplified by Katrina and the Dust Bowl are dwarfed in importance and frequency by the other ways that environment has both impeded and assisted the forces of migration. We accomplish this goal by enumerating four types of environmental influence on migration in the U.S.: 1) environmental calamities, including floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornadoes, 2) environmental hardships and their obverse, short-term environmental benefits, including both drought and short periods of favorable weather, 3) environmental amenities, including warmth, sun, and proximity to water or mountains, and 4) environmental barriers and their management, including heat, air conditioning, flood control, drainage, and irrigation. In U.S. history, all four of these have driven migration flows in one direction or another. Placing Katrina into this historical context is an important task, both because the environmental calamities of which Katrina is an example are relatively rare and have not had a wide impact, and because focusing on them defers interest from the other kinds of environmental impacts, whose effect on migration may have been stronger and more persistent, though less dramatic.

Publication trends in aeolian research: An analysis of the Bibliography of Aeolian Research

An analysis of the Bibliography of Aeolian Research has provided information regarding publication trends in aeolian research. Results suggest that there has been a significant increase in the number of publications per year since the first aeolian-research publication appeared in 1646. Rates of publication have increased from only three publications in the 17th Century to nearly three publications per day in the 21st Century. The temporal distribution of publications follows a complex pattern that is influenced by many factors. In the 17th and 18th Centuries, publications appear as isolated clusters indicating limited interest in aeolian research and limited opportunities for individuals to contribute to scientific literature. With time, many new scientific societies are formed and many new scientific journals are established, opening new opportunities for scientists to contribute to scientific discourse. Landmark publications open up new research areas and define new directions for aeolian research. General advances in science and technology provide new techniques for sampling blowing sand and dust. In addition, clear signs exist that publication rates respond to major environmental and climatic events, especially large-scale disasters that focus attention on wind erosion and blowing dust. The Sirocco dust events of 1901–1903, the North American Dust Bowl of the1930s, and the recent sand and dust storm problems in China have all led to significant increases in the number of publications in aeolian research. Rates of publication are negatively influenced by major political and social upheavals, especially global conflicts such as World Wars I and II. Sudden shifts in government structure and support can also influence publication rates. A good example is the increased publication rates in China following the end of the Cultural Revolution, a trend that continues today.