Ruination Day Revisited
Writing last week's letter, I couldn't shake being reminded of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl of the 1930s. I've written about it before, but Ruination Day was once my favorite made-up holiday, made somewhat famous by Gillian Welch. Since suffering a personal tragedy around that day, I've had a hard time pretending to celebrate a day that seems to be the focal point of such misery. But it nevertheless remains a subject embedded in my mind, and I find it is still a worthwhile lens through which we can get a fresh look at our own times.
When imagining our contemporary addition to the ruin of Ruination Day, the first time, I hadn't really considered adding fascism to the mix. I had also mostly been thinking of a contemporary Great Depression as being part of an inevitable decline rather than self-sabotage with a heady mix of mutually-assured economic destruction. But today, fascism can't be discounted, and of course every day we see a tit-for-tat exchange of tariffs with real stakes for real people–the kind of people who will suffer a bitter ruination if we remain on this course.
The Climate Side
While I wonder about the possibility of another Dust Bowl, it's not necessary for history to repeat itself for a great deal of misery to be wrought against people in the Midwest and across the United States. Our supply of freshwater is becoming increasingly erratic, with boom or bust rainfall more and more common as the planet heats up. The United States' breadbasket has most of its water stored in the Ogallala Aquifer. This massive amount of underground water extends from South Dakota to Texas, and has been much of the reason why the Midwest became such an agricultural powerhouse. But we've drained the aquifer much, much faster than it refills, and it's already running dry in some places.
The thing about boom and bust rainfall is that it isn't half good; there is no upside here. Droughts are droughts and the math with that is simple; when it doesn't rain, we don't get water. But when it does rain, and we get floods, less of that water than you might think actually gets used or reaches the aquifer–most of it gets swept downstream, along with topsoil, fertilizer, and pesticides. This runoff has the knock-on effect of poisoning life downstream, and wreaking havoc on aquatic wildlife.
Troubling as all that is, a lack of proper rainfall is something of a vicious cycle. When plants die, their root systems are no longer capable of absorbing, and thereby halting, the water. So a lack of rain leads to a lack of the ability to properly utilize rain. The land dries, and the air dries, and maybe you do wind up with another Dust Bowl*. The hardpan that ensues is then difficult to work with and spare in nutrients.
It gets talked about a bit less, but the Dust Bowl was also a really fucking hot period of time. Just for unnecessary symmetry, we're still averaging above 1.5ºC, with the past couple months in particular as showing up extra-hot. We're at a record low for sea ice, which probably wasn't the case during the 1930s, but to bring us back around we are about to take our forecasting abilities about a hundred years back in time with the departure of so many NOAA employees. I'm grasping for a metaphorical precedent here when we are living in unprecedented times, and the only applicable era is one synonymous with some of the worst miseries the nation has faced.
*It's not as simple as described here, but all the ways in which it's more complex are also bad.
The Economic Side
Something that has always stuck with me was the immediate wrongheaded response of the US government to the Black Friday crash. We went protectionist, as they called it, and in a bid to ensure American farm goods weren't being underbid by other countries in US markets, tariffs were levied against foreign food products–and thousands of other imports. These tariffs, like today's, were met with retaliatory tariffs, such that the market crash–initially so far from the Midwest, came home. The price of a bushel of wheat plummeted until it was barely worth harvesting, and then it became more and more difficult to harvest at all.
The idea of securing US goods and jobs by being "protectionist" today could have the same results. As more and more countries become hostile to the United States, the more goods will get caught up in this economic warfare, until prices at home begin to bottom out. If this sounds like a good thing for you at the market, I urge you to read The Grapes of Wrath. It's bad, and we won't have the luck of a Hoover being followed by an FDR (considerable caveats aside). No Dem alive has the gumption to do a quarter of what FDR did for the development of the American worker– so our only chance out of this spiral is ourselves.
I am not necessarily inclined to ascribe malice where stupidity fits when it comes to our economy, but I would be remiss to not mention it: an economic emergency provides cover for an increase in authoritarian measures. I'm of the opinion that this administration doesn't require pretext–they will simply do what they want. To that point–the utter chaos of our leadership has no allegory. Repeated calls for the annexation of Canada and Greenland--and maybe he's thrown in Panama again, as well, and I simply haven't heard it--are more divisive and more disruptive in some ways than the more tangible effects of tariffs and retaliatory tariffs. The rest of the world looks on in disbelief. Meanwhile, the guardrails put in place during the last administration to suffer a Great Depression are being ripped out to the studs by an unelected billionaire and his unelected team of unfuckable boys. This is the point that should bring it home for you: their economy doesn't have to be in turmoil for ours to be a wreck. The price of groceries doesn't affect a billionaire, or a millionaire, and while big swings from the Trump administration may make line go down, it's not the same sort of loss as what a typical Trump voter might be feeling.
Historical Takeaways
We got out of the Great Depression with immense government intervention. It's not coming this time around. And while a 2008-style heavy recession may be what we wind up instead of a full-on depression, it is not likely to be something that gets ameliorated with any speed. The way people survived is how we always survive: by banding together, providing for one another, and sticking it to the powers that be when it came time to do so.
Something I didn't bring up in the previous round of Ruination Day posts was a pretty radical implementation of community support. When farmers inevitably lost their homes and their land for lack of payment, the banks would then auction off that land to the highest bidder. This practice became so regular that people quickly found out they could let that farmer buy their land back for two cents with this One Neat Trick: get the whole town to show up to the auction, armed, and offer to buy the land for one cent. Anyone who offered more than that was kindly escorted out of town so that the auction could continue. This might not be 1:1 applicable for us, but it's good food for thought, yes?