Flawed 'Dust Bowl' tells a harrowing, relevant story

It was the worst manmade environmental disaster in the nation's history, but unlike other calamities of nature, this one took only 40 or 50 years to create.

[...] once it started, it lasted a decade, claimed many lives, either through "dust pneumonia" or suicide, and taught us very little about taking the long view of our land over the opportunity for quick financial gain.

Ken Burns' "The Dust Bowl," a four-hour documentary airing in two parts Sunday and Monday, is not one of his better films by any means, but it makes its basic points and, more important, gives us an oral history from members of the aging generation who lived through the "dirty '30s."

Over the decade, the overall area of greatest devastation shifted like an amoeba on the map, but the hardest-hit areas remained the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, the southwestern corner of Kansas, northeastern corner of New Mexico and the southeastern corner of Colorado.

[...] almost as a feast-before-famine harbinger, the bottom fell out of the wheat market when the Great Depression hit, forcing farmers to dump their grain on the streets.

Crops dried up or didn't grow at all, and winds sweeping down from the north and west were able to carry the topsoil away in huge "black blizzards," until what was left was earth likened to a floor of concrete by the Dust Bowl survivors interviewed in the film.

[...] the interviews with people who were mere children when the drought and dust hit are convincing and eloquent in their simplicity, as opposed to the windy script by Dayton and Coyote's usual funereal intonation.

In the long run, the end of the Dust Bowl came only when it started to rain again, but in the meantime, the federal government did what it could to help, first by teaching farmers how to minimize their land's vulnerability to the winds by employing contour...