Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns clears the air on "The Dust Bowl"

Documentary FIlm maker Ken Burns says that while his goal with "The Dust Bowl" is to tell a good story, working on the film makes it difficult to ignore recent weather events that also might have human causes behind their creation or severity. less Documentary FIlm maker Ken Burns says that while his goal with "The Dust Bowl" is to tell a good story, working on the film makes it difficult to ignore recent weather events that also might have human causes ... more Photo: Mike Kepka, Chronicle Staff Photographer Photo: Mike Kepka, Chronicle Staff Photographer Image 1 of / 14 Caption Close Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns clears the air on "The Dust Bowl" 1 / 14 Back to Gallery

Filmmaker Ken Burns' two-part documentary "The Dust Bowl," on the catastrophic dust storms that affected the Texas Panhandle and the Great Plains during the 1930s, airs Sunday and Monday on PBS.

He discussed the film, the Dust Bowl and his observations on Texas and Middle America with Houston Chronicle staff writer David Barron.

Q. The story of the Dust Bowl gets mixed in with the Depression in general. But how bad was it on its own merits?

A. This was a manmade ecological disaster, the worst manmade ecological disaster in all of American history and perhaps the world so far. It was a 10-year apocalypse that visited almost biblical plagues on people and rearranged the landscape.

It wasn't a handful of storms. It was hundreds of storms that moved earth through Chicago and Detroit and Cleveland and New York, where it blackened the skies in broad daylight to the point they had to turn the streetlights on.

It was a place where, even if you sealed your house tight as a drum, the storms came through and everything was covered. The only place clean was where your head touched the pillow. You could clean off the table, but by lunch you could draw pictures in the accumulated dirt. It not only killed your crops but your cattle and your children.

Q. To what degree is "The Dust Bowl" a cautionary tale about global warming or environmental damage to come?

A. I'm not a filmmaker who is interested in polemics. I am interested in telling good stories. But you know that the collision of complicated narrative produces free electrons that are necessarily going to engage the present as well as the past.

The fact that we have huge climate change, the fact that we just in New York had a hurricane that intensified unexpectedly because of the warmth of the Atlantic, the fact that this was the second hundred-year storm in two years … all these things, the fragility of our environment, we ignore the heavy hand that we have placed toward that environment at our peril. … We can see it happening again. There is a drought going on, and farm families are suffering. We see isolated dust storms, although certainly not the size or caliber of the devastating storms in the Dust Bowl, but enough to make us think it can happen again.

Q. You spent a lot of time in the Plains states, talking to Dust Bowl survivors who are now elderly. How were you struck by their memories?

A. They were beyond heroically perseverant. You realize that while you're talking to people in their 80s and 90s, you're looking at children and teens, and their memories are accurate and in some ways more so because they can more fully record the sadness or the horror of losing a little sister (to dust pneumonia) or losing a farm.

Q. Texas has become such an urban state that we sometimes don't pay any attention to anything west of Interstate 35. What did you think of the Panhandle and the Plains states that you visited?

A. It's a really beautiful place. As someone told me, it lays a hold on your affections. … You're driving between towns separated by distances that are two or three Manhattan Islands. But what you realize is that space does not signal absence of human activity, thought, genius, quality of character.

The real Texans live in an area where you have to go 120 miles to find a doctor or a real shopping center. I love that.