Future numerical consiliences

Abstract The contemporary fictional descriptions of harsh landscape and human consequences from the coal dust of surface mining in south Wales by A.J. Cronin in 1937 may have been more benign than the reality of dealing with more dust from extant results of other terrestrial ecosystem modifications in the 1930s. The Midwestern US top-soil losses and dust clouds over ~400,000 km 2 of Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska during 1935–40, which at times expanded 2500–2600 km to Washington, D.C., and New York City as downstream dust storms in May 1934 and March 1935, were not really a natural catastrophe but the result of prior land mismanagement— miles to water, miles to wood, and only 6 inches to hell . In an unwise attempt to convert a steady-state evolved climax community of prior arid-adapted plants to agricultural crops, US farmers had imprudently deep-plowed native soils. They then no longer trapped deep-rooted moisture, preserving short buffalo grasses Buchloe dactyloides , which used to be dominant members of those drought-resistant plant communities of the Western prairies.