During the 1930s, drought and intensive ploughing produced the Dust Bowl across the southern Plains of the United States and parts of Canada. Topsoil blew away in black storms, farms failed, and families migrated west. It became a classic case of land-use change amplifying natural drought.

The Dust Bowl gave poetry and song some of the twentieth century's strongest images of ecological displacement. Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads, later poems, and Karen Hesse's verse novel Out of the Dust made blowing soil a voice of poverty, endurance, and protest.