Outside the entrance of the glorious Hall of Western History
are the marble lions, colorful banners, and huge stone columns. Step inside, and the popular exhibits include
ancient Egypt, classical Greece, the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, Gutenberg,
Magellan, Columbus, Galileo, and so on.
If we cut a hole in the fence, and sneak around to the rear of the
building, we find the dumpsters, derelicts, mangy dogs, and environmental
history.
The Darwin of environmental history was George Perkins Marsh,
who published Man and
Nature in 1864 (free download). Few educated people today have ever heard of
this visionary. Inspired by Marsh,
Walter Lowdermilk, of the Soil Conservation Service, grabbed his camera and
visited the sites of old civilizations in 1938 and 1939. He created a provocative 44-page report, Conquest of the Land Through
Seven Thousand Years (free download). The government distributed over a million
copies of it.
Lowdermilk helped inspire Tom Dale of the Soil Conservation
Service, and Vernon Gill Carter of the National Wildlife Federation, to write Topsoil and Civilization,
published in 1955 (free download). Both organizations cooperated in the
production of this book. Following the
horror show of the Dust Bowl, they were on a mission from God to promote soil
conservation.
Dust Bowl photo gallery: Washington
D.C. dust storm 1935. Approaching
dust storm. Dust
Bowl farm yard. The
aftermath.
The book’s introduction gets directly to the point, “The very
achievements of civilized man have been the most important factors in the
downfall of civilizations.” Civilized
man had the tools and intelligence needed “to domesticate or destroy a great
part of the plant and animal life around him.”
He excelled at exploiting nature.
“His chief troubles came from his delusions that his temporary
mastership was permanent. He thought of
himself as ‘master of the world,’ while failing to understand fully the laws of
nature.”
Readers are taken on a thrilling tour of the civilizations of
antiquity. We learn how they developed
new and innovative strategies for self-destruction. Stops include Egypt, Mesopotamia, the
Mediterranean basin, Greece, China, India, and others. No society collapses because of a single
reason, but declining soil health is always prominent among the usual suspects
— no food, no civ.
The civilization of Egypt was the oddball. It thrived longest because of the unique
characteristics of the Nile Valley. Then,
in the twentieth century, they strangled the golden goose by building dams,
which ended the annual applications of fertile silt, led to soil destruction,
and shifted the system into self-destruct mode.
Mesopotamia (Iraq) was home to a series of civilizations that
depended on irrigation. Creating and
maintaining irrigation canals required an immense amount of manual labor, which
legions of slaves were unhappy to provide.
At the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, deforestation and
overgrazing led to growing soil erosion, which flowed downstream, regularly
clogging the canals. Eroded soils have
filled in 130 miles (209 km) of the Persian Gulf. Today, the population in this region is only
a quarter of what it was 4,000 years ago.
Over the centuries, the region of Mesopotamia was conquered
and lost many, many times. For the most
part, replenishing soil fertility with manure and other fertilizers was a
fairly recent invention. In the old
days, an effective solution to soil depletion was to expand into less spoiled
lands, and kill anyone who objected.
Throughout the book, the number of wars is stunning. The tradition of farming is a bloody one. It always damages the soil, sooner or later,
which makes long-term stability impossible, and guarantees conflict.
Rome, Greece, and other Mediterranean civilizations were all
burnouts, trashed by a combination of heavy winter rains, sloping lands, overgrazing,
deforestation, soil depletion, and malaria.
The legendary cedars of Lebanon once covered more than a million acres
(404,000 ha). Today, just four tiny
groves survive. “Deforestation and the
scavenger goats brought on most of the erosion which turned Lebanon into a
well-rained-on desert.” Much of
once-lush Palestine, “land of milk and honey,” has been reduced to a rocky
desert.
Adria was an island in the Adriatic Sea, near the mouth of
the Po River in Italy. Eroding soils
from upstream eventually connected the island to the mainland. Today, Adria is a farm town, 15 miles (24 km)
from the sea, and its ancient streets are buried under 15 feet (4.5 m) of
eroded soil. In Syria, the palaces of
Antioch were buried under 28 feet (8.5 m) of silt. In North Africa, the ruins of Utica were 30
feet (9 m) below.
Even now, in the twenty-first century, there are dreamers who
purport that China provides a glowing example of sustainable agriculture — 4,000
years of farmers living in perfect harmony with the land. Chapter 11 provides a silver bullet cure for these
fantastic illusions. “Erosion continues
to ruin much of the land, reducing China, as a whole, to the status of a poor
country with poor and undernourished people, mainly because the land has been
misused for so long.”
The authors aim floodlights on the fundamental defects of
civilization, and then heroically reveal the brilliant solution, soil
conservation. Their kinky fantasy was permanent agriculture,
which could feed a gradually growing crowd for the next 10,000 years — a
billion well-fed Americans enjoying a continuously improving standard of
living. Their vision went far beyond
conservation, which merely slowed the destruction. Their vision was about harmless perpetual
growth, fully developing all resources, bringing prosperity to one and all,
forever. Oy!
At the same time, they were excruciatingly aware that
humankind was ravaging the land. “The
fact is that there has probably been more man-induced erosion over the world as
a whole during the past century than during any preceding thousand-year
period. There are many reasons for the
recent rapid acceleration of erosion, but the principal reasons are that the
world has more people and the people are more civilized and hence are capable
of destroying the land faster.” The book
is more than a little bit bipolar.
For readers who enjoy the delights of mind-altering
experiences, I recommend reading Topsoil
and Civilization, a discourse on soil mining. Also read its shadow, a discourse on forest
mining, A
Forest Journey, by John Perlin. Your
belief system will go into convulsions, and then a beautiful healing process
begins.
You will suddenly understand that the stuff you were taught
about the wonders of civilization was an incredibly delusional fairy tale. The real story is one of thousands of years
of accelerating population growth, ruthless greed, countless wars, enormous
suffering, and catastrophic ecocide. Suddenly,
the pain of baffling contradictions is cured, the world snaps into sharp focus,
and the pain of being fully present in reality begins — useful pain that can
inspire learning and change. Live well.
Soil erosion photo gallery: Gulley erosion. Alabama cotton
field. Iowa sheepwreck. Iowa sheet
erosion.
Carter, Vernon Gill and Dale, Tom, Topsoil and Civilization,
University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1974.
[First ed. 1955]
Other reviews of books on soil and agriculture: Dirt:
The Erosion of Civilizations, Against the
Grain, Farmers
of Forty Centuries, and Pillar of
Sand.
