The Green New Deal: From Annual Crops to Perennial Agriculture

Summary, in English

In the 1920s, drought and unregulated policies created the Dust Bowl in the US Midwest. In the early1930s, rains failed in this notoriously drought prone region resulting in crop failures and soil erosion at an unprecedented scale. Hundreds of thousands of people starved and by 1940, around 2.5 million people had left the area. However, the swift and forceful New Deal response to the Dust Bowl still represents an exemplary political initiative to an environmental and humanitarian tragedy. What made the response successful was its three-pronged strategy to combine immediate short-term actions to alleviate human suffering and medium term reforms of the economic conditions for farmers and youth with long-term initiatives to strengthen research and innovation. The short-term responses reconciled political polarization and created confidence in the state, which paved the way for long-term institutional reforms.

• Author: Lennart Olsson
• Department/s: LUCSUS (Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies)
• Publishing year: 2019-09-01
• Language: English
• Publication/Series: Public Administration Review
• Links: https://www.publicadministrationreview.com/the-green-new-deal-pathways-to-a-low-carbon-economy/
• Document type: Journal article
• Publisher: Wiley
• Topic: Social Sciences; Political Science
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 1540-6210