As Tim Walz pointed out at the debate, the climate crisis is causing a land crisis

And there’s one thing he didn’t mention: Loss of topsoil is also helping to thwart one of the most promising solutions to the climate crisis. Healthy soil eats carbon. It loves carbon. Carbon makes it strong. Carbon creates a vital ecosystem in the soil. It is estimated that 75 percent of terrestrial carbon is stored in the soil. When you plow it up, you release this carbon – and methane, for that matter – into the atmosphere, which no one needs. In addition, according to scientists studying this issue, healthy soil can store eight times more water than the sum of all the world’s rivers. Not healthy soil. No water storage. Hence the flood-drought cycle that Walz referred to.

There are an estimated 67,000 farms in Minnesota, producing everything from soybeans to sugar beets, pork to poultry. And the climate crisis threatens all of that…yes…from the ground up. Out of AgWeek:

Heavy rainfall caused by climate change increases soil erosion, which affects the productivity of topsoil in fields. Rising temperatures are encouraging invasive species, plant diseases and pests new to Minnesota. Weather sources have delayed or even prevented planting for many Minnesota farmers in recent years. And extreme weather events such as large hail, heavy rains, strong winds and prolonged droughts can devastate a crop season.

It’s not just our crops that are struggling. The health, growth and reproduction of animals are also very sensitive to temperature fluctuations. Higher summer temperatures can lead to increased livestock deaths due to heat stress and reduced production of milk in dairy cows and eggs in poultry. Heat-stressed pigs eat less and heat can affect reproduction, pregnancy and lactation. According to the USDA, increasing summer heat is costing the American swine industry more than $300 million annually.

And like so many other dangers of the climate crisis, it’s not as if we don’t have historical precedent to show what can happen if we don’t heed the warnings that overwhelm us. And that brings me back to a battered old photo that a battered old basketball once showed me to explain to me what his life was about.

In the early winter of 1990, while working for The national sports newspapera short-lived but popular national sports newspaper, I went to Oklahoma and spent a week with Abe Lemons, the basketball coach at Oklahoma City University. He was quite simply the funniest person I have ever met. While coaching at the University of Texas, he once said to an unruly freshman, “Ah, damn. Somewhere on this campus there has to be a drug that slows you down.” He once summarized basketball training as follows: “There are only two plays: Romeo and Juliet and ‘Put the damn ball in the basket.'” When Abe first visited his future wife’s parents and went to church with them, he sat down with them for Sunday dinner. The father, who also happened to be the pastor of the church they had attended, asked Abe what he thought of the service.

“I liked it, sir,” Abe told him. “But I think you guys could have used some music.”

The Bible, the priest replied sternly, says nothing about music.

“Damn, sir,” Abe said. “It doesn’t say anything about chairs, and you all had plenty of them.”

Abe grew up in a place called Ryan, Oklahoma. One day, as we drove three hours to one of OCU’s away games—”out here in UFO land,” as Abe put it—he took a photo from his wallet. It showed the main current in Ryan, and above it was a huge cloud, black as night, parts of Kansas and Nebraska and, heck, the Dakotas and southern Manitoba, to name it. The battered old photo was dated 1936. Abe Lemons was a child of the Dust Bowl.

“The Dust Bowl” is a cautionary tale about what happens when people stop caring about the state of the land beneath their feet. According to the Earth Institute at Columbia University

The Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s was one of the world’s worst environmental disasters of the 20th century. Three million people left their farms in the Great Plains during the drought and half a million emigrated to other states, almost all to the West. But by 19th and 20th century standards, the Dust Bowl drought was not meteorologically extreme. In fact, the drought of 1856–65 may have resulted in a greater decline in rainfall. It was the combination of drought and poor land use that caused the environmental disaster.

Much of the plain was plowed in the decades before the 1930s as wheat cultivation expanded westward. Unfortunately, while natural prairie grasses can survive a drought, cultivated wheat could not, and when rainfall fell it shrank and died, leaving the bare earth exposed to the winds. This was the main cause of wind erosion and the terrible dust storms that hit the plains in the 1930s. Dust storms like this had never occurred during previous droughts. During the worst years of the 1930s, dust reduced visibility to less than a mile on up to a quarter of days. More soil was lost to wind erosion than the Mississippi carried into the sea. Although the numbers are not known, hundreds if not thousands of Plains residents died from “dust pneumonia,” a euphemism for blockage of the lungs by dirt.

In the midst of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl left 500,000 Americans homeless. In the decade of the 1930s, over three million people left the Great Plains regions, 86,000 of whom went to California. Yes, the Dust Bowl also gave us the art of John Steinbeck, Woody Guthrie, and Dorothea Lange, among others, but even that doesn’t make up for the magnitude of the devastation.

It wasn’t until Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal that an emphasis was placed on soil conservation and teaching farmers techniques to better protect the land. These included soil erosion and terrace farming. And the CCC created what was known as the Great Plains Shelterbelt: 200 million trees were planted from Canada to Texas to serve as both a windbreak and a measure to combat soil erosion by retaining water in the soil. However, it was not until nearly a decade later that the region experienced regular rainfall again.

When Tim Walz tells J. Divan Vance — who, by the way, represents Ohio, where a state university scientist called topsoil loss “the silent crisis” — what the climate looks like on the ground, he’s really talking about the climate crisis Location.

This article originally appeared in the October 5, 2025 Last Call With Charles P. Pierce newsletter.