Topsoil Loss: Civilization Rests on Topsoil

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Actor and amateur ecologist Eddie Albert warned the country about the dire consequences of topsoil loss. PHOTO: EDDIE ALBERT

Every morsel of food we eat . . . our clothes . . . our houses and most everything that's in them . . . each scrap of paper, from birth certificates to books to dollars . . . our fuel . . . even the very oxygen we breath: All of it comes from plants, trees . . . and topsoil.

When our European ancestors arrived on this continent, our topsoil averaged around 18 inches in depth. With our intensive agricultural practices, we've eroded it to around eight inches . . . that's all that's left between us and world disaster. When that eight inches goes, you and I go.

A Disaster Called Man

There are innumerable examples of civilizations which have already traveled this route. Trees were always the first to go. As the local populations grew, timber was needed for warmth, cooking, housing, and lime burning. Solomon cut the famous cedars of Lebanon for his great temples. Rome deforested southern Europe from Spain to Palestine. The whole of North Africa was cleared to plant more wheat for the expanding Roman population . . . and replanting was unheard of.

When the trees were gone, topsoil loss inevitably followed. Exposed to rain, wind, and sun, it lost its organic matter, its humus, its soil life . . . the spongy quality that gives the earth its ability to hold water through droughts. . The soil dried out and became dead dust. The next wind blew it away, or the next rain washed it down the river . . . and the earth died. The climate changed as the rain cycle slowed down as a result of deforestation. The wild grass that came up was soon demolished by hungry goats, roots and all . . . and the once glorious lands of trees, lakes, rivers, cities, palaces, universities, families, artists — millions upon millions of healthy, creating, achieving people — quietly blew away. Splendid civilizations collapsed and are now visible only as footnotes in the history books or a few fragments of pots on a museum shelf.

The cycle is always the same: Man comes . . . the trees go . . . the topsoil goes . . . the desert comes. We are following that path.

Centuries Lost in an Hour

It takes centuries of the weathering of rocks to grow an inch of topsoil, and thousands — even millions — of years to create a deep, fertile layer. But on shallow, sloping hillsides one great rainstorm can gash and gully a slope down to bare rock in an hour. When nature's protecting cover of plants and trees is cut down, or the carpet of grass with its interlocking roots is sliced open by the plow, the destroying power of rain or wind is multiplied a thousand times.

We Americans are destroying our earth many times faster than any people who ever lived. Man, deforestation, soil erosion, abandonment . . . that's the cycle. Another word inevitably follows: famine.

Our population explosion is at the heart of the problem. We can't increase food production as fast as the world population increases. There are three new mouths to feed each second . . . 230,000 new mouths to feed each day. But with each passing day we have less land to work with. To meet this growing demand, farmers are forced to put unbearable pressure on the soil . . . pressure it's unable to sustain.

In the past 30 or 40 years, the heavy use of synthetic fertilizers, anhydrous ammonia, nitrates, pesticides and herbicides, DDT, etc. have doubled and tripled the yield of grain per acre . . . but at the expense of the organic matter in the soil.

Rotation of crops has been replaced with monoculture: corn, corn, corn, or wheat, wheat, wheat. Everyone knows this method exhausts the soil and increases pest infestation, but people are hungry and the cash register is jingling. Yet for every bushel of corn we harvest, we lose two bushels of topsoil.

The practice of allowing the fields to lie fallow for a season, to rest, to restore the erosion-slowing organic matter, is also disappearing. Terracing and contour plowing, both of which are water-holding and erosion-preventing practices, are being dropped. The big new machines, you see, are too wide for terracing.