The Dust Bowl by Ken Burns | PBS America

The Dust Bowl - 10.15pm, Monday 19 - Thursday 22 August
PBS America | Virgin Media 243 | Sky 534 | pbsamerica.co.uk

Ken Burns's four-part documentary recalls the worst ecological disaster in American history, the drought of the 1930s that lasted a decade and almost swept away the breadbasket of the nation.

The Dust Bowl was a natural catastrophe of biblical proportions, affecting an area of 100 million acres across Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico. The skies withheld their rains, plagues of grasshoppers descended on parched fields and pillars of dust choked out the midday sun. The seeds for catastrophe were sown in the wheat boom of the preceding years, which saw thousands of individual farmers ploughing up the fields and destroying much of the native grass that effectively held the soil in place and helped to retain moisture. Their ill-considered actions created a landscape offering perfect storm conditions for calamity. When disaster struck, the result was an epic tale of human suffering across a land already blighted by economic depression. But the history of the Dust Bowl is also a story of heroic perseverance, of a resilient people who managed to endure one unimaginable hardship after another. The film also serves as a morality tale, a parable about our dependence on the land that sustains us and a salutary warning of the dangers of ignoring our relationship with the environment.