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I grew up in western Kansas and my parents were from that area, my
grandparents that area. My parents had left Kansas in the 1930's because of
the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. So I was born in Needles, California
on the banks of the Colorado River, which features in that famous film, the
Grapes of Wrath. So my family certainly was very familiar with all those
events. In the 1950's, when I was living in Western Kansas as a young boy, we
had a recurrence of dust bowl conditions, pretty severe for a couple of years.
And then in the 1970's, mid-70's, I was at the Aspen Institute in Aspen,
Colorado in the summer of '74, right after a spring on the Great Plains an
intensive dust storm, and meanwhile in Aspen we were studying the great
Sahellian disaster of North Africa and talking about droughts and erosion and
world food problems. I was finishing a book on the study of history, the
ecology, and my next project would become this one on the Dust Bowl. So in
1977, '78, I spent a year in the Great Plains touring, visiting old familiar
sites and gathering material for my book, which appeared in 1979.
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