LAST week my wife and I were in Texas experiencing the price of poor environmental controls by others. Texas is covered with
a blanket of smokeThe state has been under an unbelievably extensive blanket of smoke blown up from fires in Mexico and Central America that have been out of control for several months.
Health authorities warned Texans the smoke blanket can be hazardous to those with heart and asthmatic conditions. For the worst days, they suggested keeping small pets inside along with people with health problems. My wife had a bad enough reaction that we cut our Texas visit short by a day.
In five days there we never saw the sun or blue skies that prevail most of the time. Texans went about business as usual, even jammed the beaches at Galveston on Memorial Day. But they truly were living in and under a cloud with small particles of burned plants from Mexico and Central America. It filled the air around them and created a general haze.
Short term relief comes from wind changes. Longer term help must come from controlling the fires. The blazes started when farmers undertook routine burning to clear fields for planting. Under drought conditions, the flames spread out of control. U.S. personnel and aircraft have joined the fire fight, which may be long.
On Tuesday, I wrote about the ability of Earth to accommodate two or three times the six billion people we soon will have. Yet the Central America fires could seem to show we may even now be destroying the balances of nature on which our lives depend. Indonesia, too, has had fires. Forests in Southeast Asia have been leveled for cheap lumber, even to furnish the homes of Hawaii. There are resulting bad climate changes.
Hope remains. Even the usually pessimistic monitor, World Watch, has seen a few signs we are waking up to our environmental problems.
I am old enough to recall the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s, ranked as one of the worst environmental disasters in world history. Major portions of the Great Plains of America were stripped of top soil in a seven-year drought. Winds tearing across dry fields lifted soil off 100 million acres in nine states. Some gigantic dust clouds, kin to the current smoke clouds from Mexico, blew as far east as Pennsylvania, where I lived.
Years of bad farming practices created conditions that made the the Dust Bowl possible. The U.S. responded in 1935 by creating its Soil Conservation Service. Farmers were taught to slow erosion, rotate crops and protect the soil. In addition, more than 18,500 miles of trees were planted in small belts to break the force of the winds.
There since have been slip-backs to lesser dust storms involving acres where farmers failed to follow the new practices, but the overall gain for America has been stunning.
Today, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, agriculture follows aerospace, computers and entertainment as one of the four industries where America still is No. 1 in the world.
So many farmers have migrated away from their lands that agriculture now employs only 3 percent of the American work force. That number, however, is sufficient to feed more than 250 million Americans and create a positive overseas trade balance for food for the U.S. A big customer is Japan. By itself, California outproduces any country in the world.
MEXICO showed strength in responding to its financial crisis of a few years ago. It is being held up as an example for Asia.We can hope -- even expect -- it will show similar strength is responding to the fire crisis. If it follows some lessons learned from the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, it, too, may have a bright agricultural future.
Too often we humans need a crisis to wake us up. But there are more ways than ever today to respond positively when we do wake up. The smoke clouds over Texas could have a silver lining.
A.A. Smyser is the contributing editor
and former editor of the the Star-Bulletin
His column runs Tuesday and Thursday.