Tag: The Dust Bowl

Wind: It’s Past & Future

Credit: Harper

The Force of Wind (start time: 7:10)  For those living here on Colorado’s Front Range, you’ve likely had close encounters with wind — whether you’ve witnessed in fear branches snapping off trees in a windstorm, or simply looked up to marvel at the UFO-like lenticular cloud formations created by fast westerly winds. Love it or hate it, wind is one of the most powerful, yet overlooked, forces that shape our world. In this week’s show, host Susan Moran, along with cohost Joel Parker, interview Simon Winchester about his just-published, book,   The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind. Mr. Winchester has written many books, including the New York Times best-seller The Professor and the Madman, as well as Knowing What We Know, and The Perfectionists. His new book explores how wind has influenced everything from the outcomes of war battles, to the advancement of renewable electricity, to the disappearance of several inches of precious top soil across the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl.

Hosts: Susan Moran, Joel Parker
Show Producer: Susan Moran
Engineer: Joel Parker
Contributors: Beth Bennett, Shelley Schlender
Executive Producer: Beth Bennett

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The Dust Bowl / Population Growth

Feature #1: The Dust Bowl (start time 6:53)

Dust Bowl, courtesy Creative Commons

As bad as the drought has been recently in Colorado and other states, it pales in comparison to the nearly 10-year-long drought of the 1930s. Its unrelenting and gargantuan dust storms inspired the name “The Dust Bowl.” In southeast Colorado and other Great Plains states, children died of dust pneumonia. Thousands of cattle died or were slaughtered. Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to flee their homes. It came to be called “the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history.” On November 18th and 19th PBS will air a four-hour documentary called “The Dust Bowl.” It was directed by Ken Burns and written and co-produced by author Dayton Duncan. How On Earth co-host Susan Moran talks with Duncan about the film and the lessons learned –or not learned — from The Dust Bowl.

Feature #2: Zero Population (start time 15:58)  John Seager, CEO of the nonprofit Population Connection, discusses with How On Earth co-host Ted Burnham about the organization’s efforts to help American citizens and politicians understand the environmental and other implications of the ever-expanding global human population. John will speak this Friday at the CU campus in Boulder. His presentation is titled, “Soaring Past 7 Billion: Population Challenges for a Crowded World.”

Hosts: Ted Burnham and Susan Moran
Producer: Susan Moran
Engineer: Maeve Conran
Executive Producer: Jim Pullen

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