Dust Storms Return: Revisiting Roosevelt’s 220-Million Tree Solution
Over the weekend, more than half of Americans found themselves in high-risk weather or wildfire areas. But it was the haboobs in Oklahoma that triggered memories of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s visionary response to the Dust Bowl: The Great Wall of Trees.
Unless you live in Nebraska or near one of the shelterbelts, you’ve likely never heard of this program. Formally known as the Prairie States Forestry Project, it began on March 18, 1935, with the planting of a single Austrian pine in Southwestern Oklahoma. Seven years later, 30,233 shelterbelts had been planted — 220 million new trees — covering 18,600 square miles in a 100-mile-wide zone stretching from Canada to northern Texas.
Perhaps it’s time to relearn the lessons from FDR’s era, when critical national infrastructure was built or restored. The climate crisis then was the severe dust storms of the Dust Bowl, resulting in significant soil erosion and drought.
The Great Wall of Trees
In 1934, planting trees throughout the Midwest as windbreaks became a national goal. FDR championed this program, which established trees on farm perimeters. Members of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) were paid to plant the trees, and farmers received compensation to tend them — simultaneously stimulating local economies, addressing high unemployment, and tackling a climate crisis. These trees reduced wind velocity and lessened soil water evaporation.
Despite all the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to date, including river cleanup projects, the Great Plains Shelterbelt remains the U.S. government’s largest and most focused effort to address an environmental problem.
Native trees, such as red cedar and green ash, were planted along fence rows separating properties, with farmers paid to cultivate them. The project was estimated to cost $75 million. When disputes arose over funding sources (the project being a long-term strategy and therefore ineligible for emergency relief funds), President Roosevelt simply transferred the program to the WPA.
Roosevelt’s Environmental Vision
Roosevelt was passionate about trees. He had planted them to improve his Hyde Park estate and, as both state legislator and New York governor, enacted forestry policies to transition unsuitable farmland out of production. While recognizing private property’s role in social welfare, Roosevelt took a pragmatic approach to the Great Plains environmental crisis, viewing it as both a national security issue and an economic challenge.
“The Nation that destroys its soil, destroys itself” is a quote frequently invoked in permaculture circles as a reminder that living soil literally holds society together. This statement comes from a letter by President Roosevelt, who called the program his “Great Wall of Trees.”
According to Professors Sarah Thomas Karle and David Karle in their book Conserving the Dust Bowl: The New Deal’s Prairie States Forestry Project, Roosevelt was a visionary who saw the 1930s environmental crisis as an opportunity for crucial, comprehensive, and long-term engagement with the underlying conditions causing the problem. He rejected quick-fix solutions.
Fast Forward 85 Years
For years, foresters throughout the Midwest have been reporting these programs have lost their effectiveness. The trees are aging, growing too close together, or being replaced by undesirable, short-lived species.
In 2010, federal grants became available for shelterbelt maintenance and restoration in Kansas, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska through the Central Great Plains Shelterbelt Renovation and the Central Great Plains Forested Riparian Buffer Cooperative Conservation Partnership Initiative (CCPI). The Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service provided funding.
These projects eventually fell victim to budget cuts, but recent sandstorms serve as nature’s reminder to revisit FDR’s Great Wall of Trees and fund tree planting to address today’s climate crisis. Trees provide dozens of ecosystem benefits, notably in water and air quality.
It is not enough to protest for change. Similarly, we cannot expect the government alone to plant all the trees needed to respond to climate change. The lesson from Roosevelt’s era is clear: effective environmental solutions require vision, investment, and shared responsibility.
A New Environmental Crisis Emerges
The deterioration of Roosevelt’s Great Wall of Trees isn’t just a loss of historical infrastructure — it represents a compounding environmental threat. As these shelterbelts age and die, they’re transforming from protective barriers into potential fuel sources. The drying, dead, and decaying trees significantly increase wildfire risk across regions already stressed by climate change.
Wildfires, which are the focus of Athena Intelligence’s risk assessment work, now generate more CO2 than an estimated 20% of all human-related CO2 equivalent emissions globally. Beyond carbon release, these fires produce dangerous airborne particulates with devastating health consequences. Research increasingly links wildfire ash exposure to increased rates of heart disease and dementia, while also aggravating asthma and other respiratory conditions.
Roosevelt understood that environmental challenges require systemic solutions. Today’s overlapping crises of deteriorating shelterbelts and increasing wildfire threats demand the same comprehensive vision he displayed nearly a century ago — a vision that integrates climate adaptation, public health protection, and innovative risk management. The trees that once saved America from dust may now need saving themselves to protect us from fire.
Athena Intelligence is a data vendor with a geospatial, conditional, profiling tool that pulls together vast amounts of disaggregated wildfire and environmental data to generate spatial intelligence, resulting in a digital fingerprint of wildfire risk.
Clients include electric utilities, communities and financial services companies, where Athena’s geospatial intelligence incorporated into multiple products that can be accessed through an online portal. Athena’s data is currently used in wildfire mitigation plans (WMP) and public safety power shutoffs (PSPS), Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPP), property insurance underwriting and portfolio risk optimization.
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