James Glanz - Saving our soil: solutions for sustaining earths vital resource
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Saving our soil: solutions for sustaining earths vital resource
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Copyright 1995 by James Glanz All rights reserved.
987654321
Cover design by Margaret Donharl
Excerpt from "The Waste Land" in Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1936 by Harcourt Brace & Company, copyright 1964, 1963 by T. S. Eliot, reprinted by permission of publisher. Also reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Glanz, James. Saving our soil : solutions for sustaining earth's vital resource / James Glanz. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1-55566-136-X 1. Soil conservationUnited States. 2. Agricultural conservationUnited States. 3. Soil conservation. 4. Agricultural conservation. I. Title.
S624.A1G58 1995
95-10257
333.73'16'0973dc20
CIP
Note: Parts of Chapter 8 previously appeared in Science magazine.
Printed in the United States by Johnson Printing 1880 South 57th Court Boulder, Colorado 80301
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
v
CHAPTER ONE
Wasteland
1
CHAPTER TWO
The Furrows of History
9
CHAPTER THREE
Fear in a Handful of Dust
26
CHAPTER FOUR
The Prairie According to Beck
47
CHAPTER FIVE
Chemicals
65
CHAPTER SIX
Earthworms, Charles Darwin, and Soil Evolution Theory
83
CHAPTER SEVEN
"Ever since, I've hated cultivators"
104
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Erosion Wars
115
CHAPTER NINE
Doctor Doran's Black Bag
131
Endnotes
151
Additional Reading
169
Acknowledgments
173
Index
174
Page v
INTRODUCTION
Ask a child to draw a picture of the outdoors and you are likely to get a yellow sun, blue water, green plants sprouting from dark soil, and air so clear that its presence is suggested only by the clouds it is holding up. Whether by chance or because some things are so obvious even a child can figure them out, we find most of these same basic elements at the heart of the world's most intense environmental concerns. Our air, water, and energy resources (the last of which we can take to be symbolized by the sun) are increasingly protected by legislation and monitored by environmental groups. Public insistence on improving air and water quality could hardly be greater. But what about our soil?
Soil is the forgotten part of the picture, the substance whose dynamics and activity, though far more complex than those of air or water, are relegated by environmentalists to a comfortable, disregarded rustication. The oversight is both unaccountable and dangerous. Researchers have concluded that the degradation of our soil resource can have devastating effects on air and water quality, not to mention the impact of this degradation on our future food supply, which is less secure than once believed as flaws in previous studies of the soil-crop system become apparent. The decline of our soil comes not only in the form of erosionthe sole focus of traditional soil-conservation effortsbut also concerns the chemical and physical structure of soil and its ability to retain water, to sustain microbial and macroscopic animal life (such as beneficial worms), to filter out and degrade humanity's pollutants, to provide
Page vi
easy passage for roots, and to bind nutrients until they are needed by crops and other plants.
Many of these essential functions of soil have been so neglected in the past that we do not even have nationwide or worldwide measures of how far they have declined, and we are still left with extrapolating from individual research studies in localized areas. Several studies of this kind have recently shown, for example, that losses of "soil organic matter"one measure of a soil's natural fertility, resilience, and general healthcan occur much more rapidly than indicated by earlier estimates, which assumed the organic matter was simply carried off with eroded soil. New work, described in detail in Chapter 6 of this book, shows that the common practice of tilling crop residues into the soil after harvest can lead to a microbial feeding frenzy in the ground, resulting in the rapid breakdown or "mineralization" of soil organic matter. One side-effect of this breakdown is the release of huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and a possible aggravation of the greenhouse effect. Such phenomena find no place in traditional environmental discussions.
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