From Wundery, I'm Lindsay Graham, and this is American scandal. In the 1930s, dust storms raged across the southern Great Plains, a region spanning from

Texas to Kansas to Colorado. These storms towered into the sky and blew across state lines, carrying black clouds of

dirt that made the air unbreatheable and turned the former grasslands into a barren desert.

Thousands of Americans lost their lives to the Dust Bowl,

and hundreds of thousands were forced to flee their homes.

When experts studied the crisis, they traced the cause back to decades of unsustainable farming in a region they said was never meant for agriculture.

The Dust Bowl, therefore, was a man-made disaster, and experts ultimately pinned much of the blame on government

policy which encouraged Americans to move out to the southern plains and plow up the land

setting the entire crisis in motion.

In the mid-1930s President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his administration launched into

an ambitious program to combat the Dust Bowl.

They encouraged farmers to adopt conservation techniques

and converted large portions of the southern plains to grasslands, and eight decades later,

the worst of the dust storms are now a relic of American history.

But today the country is grappling with a new set of environmental crises, and with elected officials

divided over the proper response, government action appears to be stalled.

But according to today's guest, Attorney Scott Anton, even without action by state or federal

legislators, Americans can still have a large impact on the environment using the power of the courts.

Anton is a partner at the public interest law firm, Minor Barnhill and Galland.

And over the course of his career, he and his firm have taken on everyone from industrial

polluters to companies that defraud the public.

In our conversation today, we'll look at his law firm's fight against a corn processing plant

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