Bryan McDonald

As an undergraduate, reading Donald Worster’s Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s‎ introduced me to the field of environmental history. Reading about the ways that human interactions with nature led to one of the greatest environmental catastrophes in history brought home to me the importance of not only understanding human relationships with nature but also the critical role of historians in rethinking what we know of the past. Worster’s descriptions of the ecological and human dimensions of the events during the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s highlighted to me the importance of sustainability and encouraged my development as an environmental historian.