My fellow worshipers, I say unto you today: The plow that broke the prairie has created a disaster that threatens to swallow us all. The labor that buried the tall buffalo grass that had been here for thousands of years has released the earth, and the earth has departed. We have turned tens of millions of acres of God’s land wrong side up, now his wrath is upon us. The land that has been our comfort and our sustenance is in our food and in our hair and between our sheets and in the lungs of our little ones. We have sinned against the land, and the land is repaying us with dust and drought. We must pray for forgiveness for the sins we have committed, but we must also change our ways. We Americans are the most self-reliant people on this earth. Now we have to figure out a way to treat this land so we can seed it for the long haul, same as life is a long haul leading to the gates of paradise. We have to mix some common sense with our trust in ourselves. The earth belongs to the Lord, and we have mistreated that earth something awful.

We have been lucky in Wyoming, because it could have been so much worse. If you take a drive down to Kansas or Oklahoma or Texas or a good bit of Nebraska, you will see places where the land is simply gone, where thousands of sections of good earth have blown away. It is not as bad here, but it’s hot and dry and dusty, and we can’t expect the good Lord to fix it all without our help. We have to find a different way. Plant trees for windbreaks. Plant grass that will hold the sod. Stop plowing up fields and leaving them fallow. Men made this mess, and men are going to have to find a way to clean it up. My father has had to face that truth on our farm in Kansas, but he learned too late and the farm is gone. My folks are on their way to California right now. They hope to find another way to make a living, but they spent thirty years trying to farm that land and their hearts are broken. That is why I speak to you with such urgency today, why I beg you to listen. That is the message I have for you this morning, at a time when drought and heat consume the snow waters, when the greed of the bankers has cast us into the maw of this terrible depression, when our nation lies broken as a tree, suffering for our wickedness, for the wicked way in which we have treated one of the greatest of God’s many gifts, the soil beneath our feet. God bless you all.