Table Of ContentYALE AGRARIAN STUDIES SERIES
JAMES C. SCOTT, SERIES EDITOR
The Agrarian Studies Series at Yale University Press seeks to publish outstanding and original
interdisciplinary work on agriculture and rural society—for any period, in any location. Works of
daring that question existing paradigms and fill abstract categories with the lived experience of rural
people are especially encouraged.
—James C. Scott, Series Editor
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have
Failed
Steve Striffler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food
James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia
Edwin C. Hagenstein, Sara M. Gregg, and Brian Donahue, eds., American Georgics: Writings on
Farming, Culture, and the Land
Timothy Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight
Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and Gopa Samanta, Dancing with the River: People and Life on the Chars of
South Asia
Alon Tal, All the Trees of the Forest: Israel’s Woodlands from the Bible to the Present
Felix Wemheuer, Famine Politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union
Jenny Leigh Smith, Works in Progress: Plans and Realities on Soviet Farms, 1930–1963
Graeme Auld, Constructing Private Governance: The Rise and Evolution of Forest, Coffee, and
Fisheries Certification
Jess Gilbert, Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal
Jessica Barnes and Michael R. Dove, eds., Climate Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives on
Climate Change
Shafqat Hussain, Remoteness and Modernity: Transformation and Continuity in Northern Pakistan
Edward Dallam Melillo, Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the Chile-California Connection
Devra I. Jarvis, Toby Hodgkin, Anthony H. D. Brown, John Tuxill, Isabel López Noriega, Melinda
Smale, and Bhuwon Sthapit, Crop Genetic Diversity in the Field and on the Farm: Principles and
Applications in Research Practices
Nancy J. Jacobs, Birders of Africa: History of a Network
Catherine A. Corson, Corridors of Power: The Politics of U.S. Environmental Aid to Madagascar
Kathryn M. de Luna, Collecting Food, Cultivating People: Subsistence and Society in Central Africa
through the Seventeenth Century
Carl Death, The Green State in Africa
James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the First Civilizations
Loka Ashwood, For-Profit Democracy: Why the Government Is Losing the Trust of Rural America
Jonah Steinberg, A Garland of Bones: Child Runaways in India
Hannah Holleman, Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of
“Green” Capitalism
For a complete list of titles in the Yale Agrarian Studies Series, visit yalebooks.com/agrarian.
Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund.
Copyright © 2018 by Hannah Holleman.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Lou Ella and Betty Joe
At the end of the Civil War the US Army hardly
missed a beat before the war “to win the West” began in
full force. As a far more advanced killing machine and with
seasoned troops, the army began the slaughter of people,
buffalo, and the land itself, destroying natural tall grasses of
the Plains and planting short grasses for cattle, eventually
leading to the loss of topsoil four decades later.
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s
History of the United States, 2014
The attitude of capitalism—industrial and pre-industrial—
toward the earth was imperial and commercial; none of its
ruling values taught environmental humility, reverence, or
restraint. This was the cultural impetus that drove Americans
into the grassland and determined the way they would use it.
—Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains
in the 1930s, 1979
Man-induced soil erosion is taking place today
in almost every country inhabited by civilized man,
except northwestern Europe. It is a disease to which any
civilization founded on the European model seems liable
when it attempts to grow outside Europe. . . .
The white man’s burden in the future will
be to come to terms with the soil and plant world, and
for many reasons it promises to be a heavier burden
than coming to terms with the natives.
—G. V. Jacks and R. O. Whyte, The Rape of the Earth:
A World Survey of Soil Erosion, 1939
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
one Dust to Dust: An Age Beyond Extremes
two The First Global Environmental Problem
three Imperialism, White Settler Colonialism, and the Ecological Rift
four The White Man’s Burden, Soil Erosion, and the Origins of Green
Capitalism
five Ecological Rifts and Shifts: The Accumulation of Catastrophe
six “We’re Not Stakeholders”: Beyond the Langue de Coton of Capitalist
Environmental Management
seven No Empires, No Dust Bowls: Toward a Deeper Ecological Solidarity
Notes
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank Jean Thomson Black, my superb editor at Yale University Press, for
all her work and insight that helped improve my manuscript. Working with
Jean made me feel confident at every step of the way that YUP was the
exact right choice of press for me and this book. Also at the press, I thank
Michael Deneen, Mary Pasti, Harry Haskell, Jeffrey Schier, and the very
helpful reviewers, whose comments in response to my original proposal
guided me in important ways as I completed the project. Finally, I thank
James C. Scott, faculty editor of the Yale Agrarian Studies Series, for
inviting me to include my work in this important scholarly series.
Many, many thanks go to the wonderful members of the Department of
Anthropology and Sociology at Amherst College for feedback on earlier
versions of this work, as well as encouragement, advice, and friendship
throughout the research and writing process. Deborah Gewertz and
Frederick Errington deserve special thanks for their friendship, example,
and support of my project. They read my work and offered critical
feedback, came to my events and talks based on the research presented in
this book, invited me into their warm home, introduced me to other
scholars, and shared with me their work on a closely related subject. This
exchange over the past few years has meant the world to me and
contributed to my experiencing a vibrant intellectual life in western
Massachusetts. Likewise, my friendship and conversations with Ron Lembo
regarding the broader theoretical contours of our work, as well as the major
political and social developments in society the past few years and what
these mean for us in sociology, have sustained me since my arrival in
Massachusetts in ways too numerous to recount. Ron’s remarkable capacity
for maintaining a deep humanity and care for the work we do in the face of
the social distancing that occurs in academic institutions encouraged me in
those moments the academy felt perhaps too sterile and removed from the
