Thread by @DekeArndt

Dear #ClimateTwitter - I've seen your recent tweets about mental wear-and-tear from the staggering amount of work before you, often draped in a blanket of hateful resentment about your work. I have felt it too, for 15 years. Let me tell you a true story about why you matter. 1/n

I'm from Oklahoma. You know about a big part of our climate history. They've written novels about it. Woody wrote songs about it. We lost a fifth of our population to it. 2/n

The girl standing on your left / her right is Idris Grubis. That's probably her little sister Gladys on the lap. That's probably their birth mother, Lutie. This was during good times, near Crowder, OK, in the 1920s. My grandmother, Vivian, told me about these girls. 3/n

As was the case with hundreds of thousands of families in the Plains, the circumstances of the time were too much for Lutie and she disappeared from the picture, leaving teenager Idris and little-sister Gladys to largely fend for themselves in a desperate time and place. 4/n

The girls bounced from house to house, sometimes relatives, sometimes strangers, sometimes kind, sometimes not. As my grandma Vivian relayed, the only thing Idris wanted was for her sister to survive and make it to and through her teenage years intact. 5/n

It went about as well as you'd imagine for a powerless teenage girl and her little sister, vagabonds in a desperate time and place. This chapter is rough: there were some bad men in Idris's life. 6/n

It seemed like the end of the world, not just for Idris, but for hundreds of thousands of families, fractured families and former families in the Plains. 7/n

According to my grandma, Vivian, Gladys made it through the era, and became the cocky girl in this picture. Her big sister, Idris, delivered on her one promise to herself, but Idris did not make it through the Dust Bowl era ... 8/n

... at least not as Idris. The trauma of the period was heavy. She left it behind, with a new name: Vivian. The events weighed on her entire adulthood: I saw it with my own eyes.

Here's the part of the story where you come in. 9/n

If you asked any of my climate colleagues to forget what they know about OK history, and pick out the drought that wrecked a generation, left girls traumatized to changing their name, left a mark on the state's politics that remains to this day, they'd easily identify it. 10/n

And they would all pick the drought of the 1950s as "The Big One" 11/n

This is where People Like You come in. What changed between the 1930s and the 1950s that helped most of a region absorb an even bigger punch from Mother Nature with less calamity? The 1950s were hard, droughty times, but not the End of the World. Here's what changed: 12/n

People Like You worked for a generation to:
improve soil science
improve water management
improve crop selection
establish home economics (make a pound of flour last longer; balance a checkbook)
Resolve egregious haves-and-have-nots issues
13/n

Vivian never stopped being pretty poor. But she raised a family of four, including my mom, in a farm town, in a farm economy, in a worse natural drought than The Big One. And they stayed intact. They didn't fall out of the bottom of the economy like a generation before 14/n

People Like You worked - for a *generation* - to fix what seemed like the end of the world. People Like You saved my family from a trajectory of ruin. People Like You saved *hundreds of thousands* of families from a trajectory of ruin. 15/n

People ask me why I stay in this role. How I put up with the threats, implied and explicit. It's because I wake up Every Single Morning Thanking God for People Like You. Without a generation of work from People Like You, my life, if it's a life at all, is bleak. 16/n

The work you do touches people you'll never meet. It touches people who aren't even born. If you went back and told Idris in 1934 that some of her grandkids would graduate from college - college! - she'd be amazed. People like you. 17/n

If you ever doubt for a second the value of your work, call me. I will thank you on behalf of all the kids born 40 years from now who look back at you as heroes, just like I look back at People Like You. /fin