THE GOOD EARTH

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 11, Issue 43, 20 June 1947, Page 5

THE GOOD EARTH

SOURCE OF ALL WEALTH REMINDER TO TOWNSMEN Businessmen might easily forget the fundamental fact that the source of all wealth is in the land, said Mr E. R. Marryatt in a short talk to members of the Whakatane Chamber of Commerce at Tuesday’s meeting.

Mi’ Marryatt, who is well known as fields instructor of the Department of Agriculture in the Bay of Plenty, said he desired the businessmen who had invited him to be present to consider how utterly dependent we were on the land, and what it contained and what it nourished.

It was an opportunity for him to ask townspeople to consider their true relationship to Mother Earth. If hitherto they had regarded the earth as a potential reservoir of wealth from which they could draw he hoped to be able to show them that the earth was a storehouse on which mankind was utterly dependent.

Men are land animals, and may leave earth only-for brief intervals for journeys on the sea and in the air. They can stay away from the earth only as long as supplies of food and fuel last. Men are also surface dwellers. They are dependent, when mining for minerals, on food'from the surface. So it seems that men are an integral part of the surface of the earth.

Life Depends on the Soil

The thin superficial layer of the earth’s surface called the soil maintains our bodies in life. Our bodies return to the soil after death. In the ancient world there was a feeling of kinship with the soil running through all the “bread and corn” religions. The ancient Egyptians called themselves “Sons of the Black Earth.” The Greeks also symbolised their reverence for the earth in their worship of their divinities. The dying of vegetation in the winter and its resurrection in the spring was symbolised in some of the religious of Western Asia. All ancient relions had symbolised this genetic cycle of the soil.

Man extracts food, wood, stone, metal, ores and fibres for clothing from the soil. However complex industry becomes it is all based on taking things from the soil. Agriculture is of prime importance to mankind. Man can exist without minerals or without fibres or skins for clothing, but he cannot exist without food. Reverence For The Earth “I do hope,” added Mr Marryatt, “that what I have said may have given you some cause to have a greater reverence for the earth and its resources.”

To conclude, he quoted a sentence which embodied a great truth, namely that the highest of all sciences and arts was not military science, the science of killing, not commerce, the art of accumulating wealth, but highest of all was agriculture, the mother of all industries and the maintainer of human life.

In thanking Mr Marryatt for his address, the president, Mr R. T. Morpeth, said that such obvious truths as Mr Marryatt had emphasised were little thought about in the rush of everyday life. The talk had done good by bringing the thoughts of business men back to earth.