Socioecological Costs of Adaptation and the Limitations of Reflexivity: Lessons from the Global Dust Bowl

• In Event: 382 - Section on Comparative-Historical Sociology Paper Session. Can Comparative Historical Sociology Save the World? (5) Climate Change

Abstract

As popular and scholarly interest in the Dust Bowl grows, this paper seeks to broaden our understanding of its sociological significance today. The research presented here places the Dust Bowl within an historical, world-system context, explaining how the global, rather than regional, problem of soil erosion in the 1930s constituted what one historian referred to as the “first global environmental problem,” seen by writers at the time in racial terms, as another “white man’s burden” on a world scale. This makes the period a particularly important moment through which to understand the development of racially restricted approaches to land use and conservation, which contributed to the historical deepening of the socio-ecological rift of modern capitalism and continue to shape mainstream approaches to issues like ‘sustainable development,’ desertification, and environmental planning. Lessons regarding the socio-ecological costs of adaption and the historical features of modernity limiting its capacity for reflexivity, ecological restoration, and justice, are underscored in this analysis. The implications for more transcendent approaches to addressing contemporary, interconnected issues such as global inequality, climate change, global water crises, and desertification are also discussed.

Author

• Hannah A. Holleman, Amherst College