The “dust bowl,” words coined by an Associated Press reporter in 1935 to describe the southern plains that rain had forsaken, was the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history – in which the heedless actions of thousands of individual farmers, encouraged by their government and influenced by global markets, resulted in a collective tragedy that nearly swept away the breadbasket of the nation.

It was a decade-long natural catastrophe of Biblical proportions encompassing 100 million acres in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico  – when the skies withheld their rains, when plagues of grasshoppers descended on parched fields, when bewildered families huddled in dark rooms while angry winds shook their homes and pillars of dust choked out the mid-day sun.

It was an epic of human pain and suffering – young children struck down by “dust pneumonia,” self-reliant fathers suddenly unable to provide for their families and mothers unable to feed them, followed by the largest exodus in the nation’s history, as 2.5 million desperate Americans left their homes and faced an unknown and often cruel future.

And it is also the story of heroic perseverance; a study of the roles and limits of government; and a morality tale about our relationship to the land that sustains us – a lesson we ignore at our peril.

The Dust Bowl will be broadcast nationally in prime time on PBS in 2012.