The conservation movement lost momentum in the first half of the twentieth century as a result of two world wars and a severe economic depression. During the 1920s many artists, inspired by the modern European art exhibitedat the 1913 Armory Show in New York, turned away from nature and landscapes as subjects and looked instead to machines, industry, and the urban environment.
In the 1930s artists were encouraged to again represent identifiably American subjects as the result of the Works Project Administration's Federal Art Project (WPA-FAP). Begun in 1935, this series of federally funded art programs employed artists in communities throughout the United States at modest wages. Much of the art produced through the program was made for specific public sites or later placed in public collections. Artists participating in the program depicted their own local environments and often produced landscapes.
Some of the most poignant images from the depression years were produced by young photographers hired by other New Deal agencies, such as the Resettlement Administration (RA) and the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which were formed in the 1930s to address the plight of United States farmers. These photographers, who included Walker Evans (1903-1975), Dorothea Lange (1895-1965), and Arthur Rothstein (1915-1985), documented the situation of sharecroppers and tenant farmers who had been supplanted by mechanized farm equipment, such as the tractor, or forced off the land by the government's new policy of paying landowning farmers not to grow crops. Their photographs were also used to help justify the government's support of these unemployed workers. Some of the most famous images resulting from the project were of the Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas dust bowl, one of the country's greatest man-made environmental disasters. Beginning in 1934 (and in subsequent years), between December and May strong winds blew the soil of these regions, which had been overgrazed and improperly farmed, into huge clouds of dust. According to Hans Huth this event "suddenly and forcefully taught the nation that nature could not be relied upon to produce and yield crops as an assembly line produced automobiles. Terrifying photographs and realistic paintings of abandoned farms and rotting carcasses brought the calamity to the attention not only of persons concerned with economic matters, but also of those more interested in aesthetic and spiritual values."11 As a consequence of the dust bowl, the Soil Conservation Service was established in 1934 to assist farmers and ranchers with both soil and water conservation. The photographs produced under the government programs tended to focus on the heroism of men and women in their struggles against nature rather than on the environmental problems themselves. Were it not for the images of the dust bowl, however, the event might have been largely forgotten by the public.