The United States - Comparing Environmental Policies in 16 Countries - page 23

was known, also built dams on the Columbia River at Bonneville and
Grand Coulee, on the Missouri at Fort Peck, and on the Mississippi in
Minnesota. Construction employed thousands of workers at high wages.
At the worst of the Depression, unemployment was 25 percent. By today's
standards, these dams did a lot of damage by flooding valleys, destroy-
ing habitat, and displacing people, but in the 1930s, they were applauded.
Observers sometimes refer to the dams as an example of “gigantism.”
Roosevelt personally inherited many of the tenets of the Conservation
Movement, although the term had fallen out of favor. His New Deal
established the Civilian Conservation Corps, which recruited thou-
sands of unemployed young men from the cities, and sent them to rural
areas to plant trees, build trails, and restore the land. In the Great Plains
drought had created the Dust Bowl. Centered in Colorado, Kansas, and
Oklahoma, lack of rain for many years dried up the soil. Farmers could
not grow wheat, grazing was impossible, and the dry land literally blew
away in terrible storms lasting days, depositing the dust hundreds of
miles away. The New Deal bought the abandoned farms so the farmers
would at least have a grub stake to move on. The land was given to the
Department of Agriculture as National Grasslands. Elsewhere the govern-
ment fought against soil erosion by encouraging contour plowing and by
paying farmers to take vulnerable land out of production. In Pennsylvania
and West Virginia, New Deal workers sealed up abandoned coal mines
that were leaking acid. Roosevelt created a number of new national parks
and recreation areas like the Shenandoah and Olympic parks and Jackson
Hole Monument, later to become Grand Teton Park. His administration
expanded the Bird Treaty to cover mammals and signed the Convention
on Nature Protection in the Western Hemisphere.
Aldo Leopold captured the desolation of eroded land during the Great
Depression in A Sand County Almanac . Written in the 1930s but not pub-
lished for another decade, his topic recounted his eforts to rehabilitate
an abandoned farm in Wisconsin. His description moves through the
seasons from the snow-covered fields in January to the flowers of June and
back to the snow of December. Leopold also told of his young manhood in
New Mexico as a forest ranger, where he realized the futility of interfering
with the natural cycles of prey and predator. He led in establishing the first
wilderness area in the Gila National Forest, and later was a founder of the
Wilderness Society. he topic sets out his philosophy of the “land ethic,”
in which humans see themselves as part of a natural community.