Does Dust Bowl top the list of the nation's worst environmental disasters?

As oil continues to leak into the Gulf of Mexico, environmental historians are debating where the spill ranks on the list of the country’s most devastating environmental disasters. Commenting in the New York Times this week, Ted Steinberg, a historian at Case Western Reserve University, argued the Dust Bowl was “one of the worst ecological blunders in world history”.

There are a host of sites that feature primary sources pertaining to the Dust Bowl. Through images, personal narratives and government documents, those sites detail the decade-long devastation visited on the Great Plains. Some of those sites are: the Dust Bowl Migration Digital Archives at California State University, Bakersfield; Voices from the Dust Bowl, part of the Library of Congress American Memory Project, Surviving the Dust Bowl, the companion website to the PBS American Experience program by the same name and NASA’s website, which provides a collection of Dust Bowl images.

The image above comes from the Federal National Resources Conservation Service.