The Shelterbelt - America's Most Focused and Largest Environmental Project

After the winds passed and the dust settled, President Franklin Roosevelt initiated a huge project to plant hundreds of millions of trees across the Great Plains to create a giant windbreak. Known as a shelterbelt, it consisted of 220 million trees stretching in a 100-mile wide zone from Canada to northern Texas, to protect the land from wind erosion. The shelterbelt wasn’t a continuous wall of trees, but rather short stretches protecting individual farmlands. By 1942, there was more than thirty thousand shelterbelts across the Plains. To this day it remains the largest and most-focused effort of the US government to address an environmental problem.

Now many of the shelterbelts are either gone or no longer provide the benefits that they used to. The trees that were once essential have now become a burden to the farmers whose focus is now to put more land into production. Some fear that the loss of these trees might lead to another crippling dust storm in the future

Seems like we can never learn-

More photos and info at:
http://www.orrazz.com/2017/11/the-dust-bowl-of-1930s.html