Page 14 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • November 28, 2012 around the world, notably in coastal Asia, a huge zone of rice production. Those people are not going to take a manmade famine lying down. Right after the show on Sandy came the excellent Ken Burns documentary, “The Dust Bowl,” which lasted four hours over two nights. Once upon a time, as color footage showed, the tree-bare southern plains were covered with buffalo grass dotted with flowers. The buffalo grass had evolved over millions of years as climate changed ever so gradually, and the buffalo grass roots went down five feet and kept the moisture and nutrients in the soil even during periodic droughts. Progress arrived as the Indians left -- not always voluntarily -- and the buffalo were wiped out by white hide hunters at a dollar a buffalo hide. Cattle were widely ranched on the southern plains, but a viciously cold winter in 1886 wiped out most of the herds and Easterners decided that they preferred feed-lot beef to range-fed beef. The next step in getting rich quick was to promote the southern plains as ideal wheat country. “Rain follows the plow,” investors were told. Advertisements promoted Boise City in Texas County, Oklahoma as a cultured place with grand hotels, theaters, and department stores on the scale of Chicago. People who went there discovered a collection of clapboard buildings about four blocks square, but the land was affordable, so some of them bought. Some of them were “suitcase farmers” who bought land, showed up with suitcases full of red turkey wheat, and hired a plowman to break up the soil. The “suitcase farmers” scattered the wheat and then hired somebody to harvest it. World War I drove the price of wheat up from $1 a bushel to $2 and a lot of speculators got temporarily rich. “We were just too selfish and were trying to make money and it didn’t work out,” one old farmer named Wayne Lewis said bluntly. “We made so much money in the 1920s raising wheat that we broke everything up, and then the climate changed and the Depression came…We were selfish and we paid for it.” The old-timers had used a “lifter” plow that split the soil and turned up a furrow on each side, like the wave from a ship’s bow, leaving some of the grass roots in place. The new “one-way” plows -- flat iron beds full of multiple blades, pulled by tractors because mules or horses were not hefty enough -- tore the grass to tufts and left the soil exposed in regions that got 20 inches of rain in a good year. Bam White, a former cowboy whose mother was Apache, tried to explain that the south plains turf was now wrong side up. Most people refused to listen. Tractors were going all night headlights on to get that land plowed. The came the bad years. Planting frantically to cover their mortgages as the price of wheat fell to 70 cents a bushel after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the south plains farmers were hit by almost a decade when the rainfall all but ceased. Meanwhile, back in Chicago, commodity prices tumbled to 25 cents a bushel in 1931, and later to 17 cents. There was no market for the wheat, and almost no wheat for the market. The south plains farmers held on as best they could: One man broke his daughter’s heart when he killed his cow’s new heifer because the half-starved mother cow could only give enough milk for the human children, but not for the hapless heifer. Dust clouds roiled up over the south plains and many people died of “dust pneumonia” -- choking on the fine dust particles no longer kept in place by the rain and the roots of the buffalo grass. The New Deal worked out for these people once Franklin Delano Roosevelt overcame their stubborn self-reliance. A dust storm that reached Washington, D.C. and New York City in 1934 convinced lawmakers and investors that the problem was of national proportions. The farmers had too many cattle for whatever grass remained. The government bought all cattle healthy enough to ship to Chicago at $16 a head and slaughtered them there for “surplus commodities” to relieve hunger. Cattle deemed “contaminated” or not worth shipping were bought for $1 and shot by hired riflemen. Farmers wept at the sight. To small farmers, cows were family pets. Some of the farmers were too proud to accept relief in the former of surplus commodities food until their children were at risk of outright starvation. More to the point, they had to be coaxed into accepting the federal programs designed to prevent future disasters once the rain returned. Younger men joined the federal Civilian Construction Corps at $30 a month plus food and uniforms, sent $25 home to their families and planted 217 million trees as windbreaks. The rain started to come back in 1939, and a new war in Europe and Asia boosted the price of wheat. After World War II, however, technology developed to allow bigger farmers to tap into the Ogallala Aquifer, an underground lake that runs from South Dakota into the south plains. The seemingly inexhaustible supply of irrigation water has encouraged some farmers to switch from wheat, which generally survives on rain, to corn and other vegetable crops that require extensive ground water in dry climates. The Ogallala Aquifer is threatened and could be used up by the end of the century. What is the lesson? When wise men speak, fools choose not to listen. Even Washington does not have enough money to replace the Ogallala Aquifer, and as historian Donald Worster, son of Dust Bowl fugitives, observed at the end of the program, even the Sahara Desert was a savannah until a few thousand years ago. We need to plant natural trees and forget big lawns and Astroturf and endless stretches of asphalt. We also need to object to fracking, which can contaminate the fresh water we have left. PBS viewers recently encountered two back-to-back American catastrophes, one of them still threatening, the other potentially recurrent. There is no silver lining in a dust cloud, but the fact that some manmade solutions helped to palliate a partially manmade problem could be seen as hopeful in dealing with matters like Hurricane Sandy. The first show, NOVA, dealt with some of the reasons Hurricane Sandy was so drastic, and some of the reasons there were not more fatalities. Ample warnings had come in, first from the European Weather Center in the United Kingdom, then from a number of American experts, and people had ample time to evacuate low-lying homesteads in places like Far Rockaway and Staten Island. Some of them chose to stay in their homes and protect their property or help protect their friends and pets. Some people paid with their lives. The specific disaster came at the culmination of several days of warnings, but because Hurricane Irene had been less catastrophic than the experts predicted, some people chose to ride it out in threatened areas like Lower Manhattan. They paid for it. The experts are equivocal about whether global warming is the primary cause of the intense hurricanes that New York City and New Jersey have experienced since Tropical Storm Floyd drowned out the Ridgewood Police Headquarters in 1999 and left a foot of water in basements that usually take an inch or less. The NOVA experts explained that Sandy fed off the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, and that parts of the North Atlantic were five degrees warmer than usual at this time of year. There are dozens of hurricanes generated in the Caribbean each autumn. Most are absorbed when they crash into the colder and higher Jet Stream, and usually leads to the hurricane rains falling into the Atlantic. This year, however, the jet stream was not in its usual position. The jet stream was lower than usual and hovered over the Atlantic. Instead of absorbing Sandy and dissipating most of the force, the jet stream bumped Sandy back toward the East Coast. We all know what happened then. The images of compact cars driving through a foot of water in sight of the raging ocean, or of people walking their dogs as the boardwalks started to break up under their feet were not impressive monuments to human foresight. We have all heard that the science is not all in yet, and NOVA stopped short of endorsing global warming as the root cause of hurricane violence in the 21st century. What NOVA endorsed is that the reduction of the polar caps and the increase of water in the world’s oceans raised the odds of serious destruction when hurricanes arrive. Much of Lower Manhattan is 10 feet above sea level even when the ocean is calm, and the sea level is a foot higher than it used to be. If Lower Manhattan is subjected to serious flooding, the subways and the Hudson River tunnels go under. You take it from there. An unrelated source, the World Bank, reported just the other day that rising levels of the world’s oceans are expected to continue through the century and threaten crop failures A dust cloud has no silver lining Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: I want to register my objection to the upcoming Midland Park School referendum. I am not against education or school improvements. I do believe that our children deserve a safe, clean, and functional facility in which to study and learn. The school board and administration have presented a proposal to bond more than $15 millions on top of the $8 million bond of just a few years ago. Our economy is in a recession. Many people are either out of work or living on reduced incomes. It does not make any financial sense for our school board or school administrators to further burden the taxpayers with 20 or more years of additional debt at this time. Some of the enumerated items to be bonded are not necessities. The financial well is running dry, and we don’t have the means to pay the future bills. I urge Midland Park voters to vote “no” on Dec. 11. The same school board should be looking at cost efficiencies and improving the educational horizon for our high school students. What would it cost to send our high school students to another district that has a larger population and more academic offerings? Not long ago, Midland Park was willing to charge $8,500 to receive students from North Haledon, while it cost $12,000 to educate our own students, according to Louis Roehr, the school administrator at the time. We should now be looking for a similar deal. Keep grades K-8 here in town, and send the older children to a larger school district. Robert Perry Midland Park Financial well is running dry Dear Editor: The recent double whammy of storms has proved an enormous challenge to residents, businesses, and particularly to municipal governments and public employees. I commend Wyckoff’s governing body, administrators, police, fire, ambulance, and public works departments for extraordinary performance under trying conditions. Exemplifying the community spirit of teamwork were township committeemen (and former mayors) Kevin Rooney and Rudy Boonstra laboring away at the Getty station in town so residents could obtain badly needed fuel for home generators and first responders’ vehicles. Douglas A. Dial Wyckoff Dear Editor: The Wyckoff Office of Emergency Management would like to give thanks to all of our emergency service workers, the township committee, township employees, and the many volunteers who so generously gave their time, energy, and spirit for approximately two weeks to effectively carry out our mission of providing safety as well as relief to the victims of the Hurricane Sandy disaster. We have been trained to help people prevent, prepare for, and respond to all types of emergencies, but this one put all of us to the test. Hundreds of volunteers and members of our community have given their energy, talent, and generosity over the past (continued on page 15) Teamwork was exemplary Wyckoff OEM gives thanks