So Long to the Dusty Trail

Why couldn't we have had the EPA in the Great Depression? If they had issued their proposed "no dust" regs in 1930, we would have been spared the decade of human suffering from sustained drought and agricultural devastation in the Dust Bowl. Of course, then John Steinbeck wouldn't have had a reason to write The Grapes of Wrath. What a wonderful notion: federal regulators, by simple rule-making fiat, saving us from the natural world. Farm and road dust -- largely minerals comprising silicon, aluminum, iron, calcium, magnesium and sodium, with a variety of organic compounds thrown in -- has always been with us, especially in the modern era. But now the EPA, living in a dust-free but not idiot-free zone inside the Beltway, insists that the rest of us live in a biosphere bubble, inoculated from anything that might fail the Good Housekeeping test...more