Intensive farming and poor land management in the US Great Plains during the 1930s led to massive dust storms, soil loss, and agricultural collapse amid drought. Hundreds of thousands migrated, reshaping demographics and economies.

Inspired Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads and John Steinbeck's prose, which influenced American environmental poetry. Poets like Muriel Rukeyser documented human costs, shaping 20th-century ecopoetics on land stewardship and migration.