From National Geographic:
"In Boise City, Oklahoma, over the catfish special at the Rockin' A Café, the old-timers in this tiny prairie town grouse about billowing dust clouds so thick they forced traffic off the highways and laid down a suffocating layer of topsoil over fields once green with young wheat.
They talk not of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, but of the duster that rolled through here on April 27, clocked at 62.3 miles per hour.
It was the tenth time this year that Boise City, at the western end of the Oklahoma panhandle, has endured a dust storm with gusts more than 50 miles per hour, part of a breezier weather trend in a region already known for high winds.
"When people ask me if we'll have a Dust Bowl again, I tell them we're having one now," says Millard Fowler, age 101, who lunches most days at the Rockin' A with his 72-year-old son, Gary. Back in 1935, Fowler was a newly married farmer when a blizzard of dirt, known as Black Sunday, swept the High Plains and turned day to night. Some 300,000 tons of dirt blew east on April 14, falling on Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., and, according to writer Timothy Egan in his book The Worst Hard Time, onto ships at sea in the Atlantic.
"It is just as dry now as it was then, maybe even drier," Fowler says. "There are going to be a lot of people out here going broke."
The climatologists who monitor the prairie states say he is right. Four years into a mean, hot drought that shows no sign of relenting, a new Dust Bowl is indeed engulfing the same region that was the geographic heart of the original. The undulating frontier where Kansas, Colorado, and the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma converge is as dry as toast. The National Weather Service, measuring rain over 42 months, reports that parts of all five states have had less rain than what fell during a similar period in the 1930s."
Greensboro has the water, we have hundreds of acres of unused commercial properties and the way has already been shown to thrive rather than simply survive. The only question is: do our leaders have the political will to bring together farmers and local business owners to employ Greensboro workers and save us from the impending diaster?
I can even show you how to add fish and livestock but why should I do what you won't do for yourselves when my family has the means to do for ourselves? All the money in the world won't buy food that isn't available. I'll gladly help but if Greensboro wants it Greensboro has to build it.
And if someone will ask I can show you how to build it from free recycled materials with private funding. But it requires political will.
This is economic development. This is putting the long term unemployed to work. This is feeding starving children. This is feeding the poor and providing quality, local grown organic produce and meats to local restaurants and grocers. This is establishing an export market for Greensboro grown foods. This is meeting the contract to buy 52% of the water from the Randalman Dam-- something Greensboro is a century away from being able to do. This is a no brainer only stupid politicians in someone's pocket would pass up.
Think about it.
