We may live in a post-truth era, but nature does not

A farm with huge dust cloud approaching
 in Boise City, Oklahoma on April 15, 1935. 

In the 1870s, spectacular rains began to fall on the Western Plains, turning a dry region then named “the Great American Desert” to gorgeous green. 

Thousands of young homesteaders rushed west to raise crops and families, convinced by a humdinger alternative fact: “Rain Follows the Plow.” The more people moved to the Plains, the widely reported theory went, the more it would rain.

Federal scientist and explorer John Wesley Powell, head of the U.S. Geological Survey, told Congress otherwise in his 1878 “Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States.” 

Not nearly enough rain fell in the region to quench the yeoman farmers over the long haul. Development should occur around watersheds; farmers would have to come together to share a scarce resource.

Read The Los Angeles Times story - “We may live in a post-truth era, but nature does not.”