DOMINION WARNED

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 June 1938, Page 9

DOMINION WARNED

DISASTROUS SOIL EROSION IN NEW ZEALAND NATIONAL SECURITY BEING UNDERMINED MAN’S CRIMINAL STUPIDITY The dangers that confronted New Zealand through the loss of soil-fertil-ity and absence of a national policy of soil conservation and reforestation were stressed by Professor R. P. Worley, M.A., D.Sc., whose illustrated lecture entitled “The Poor Earth” interested a large attendance of members of the Auckland Institution in the library of the War Memorial Museum. The subject of this lucid address had a pronounced bearing on economic conditions and was of great public interest. MAN’S DESTRUCTION It was common knowledge, Professor Worley said, that the whole of the vegetable and animal terrestrial life was directly dependent on the soil and that_ the whole of our sustenance and clothing came from animal and vegetable life. Few people, apart from geologists and agricultural chemists and biologists, had paused to consider what the soil was, or how it had been formed. It had generally been regarded as something particularly stable and lasting, something bountifully supplied by Nature to be exploited by man for personal gain. However, during recent years it had been revealed that the deserts covering the sites of some ancient civilisations were actually created from fertile lands by those ancient civilisations The manmade deserts had spread like festering sores, stricken down the civilisations that created them and buried their cities under sterile land. The discovery, furthermore, had been made that deserts and sterile wastes of land were today being created at an alarming rate in various parts of the world by man’s destruction of the soil. The professor gave instances such as the relentless encroachment of the Sahara on fertile soil and the erosion proceeding apace from Abyssinia to the Cape; the terrible dust bowl in the State of Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado and Texas. In such places where the rainfall was low or droughts occurred, erosion, when once started, spread like a plague over the land. LACK OF FORESIGHT

“I shall attempt to show you that we have already partly destroyed, and are continuing to destroy, much of the fertile soil of the country by our ignorance, our greed for wealth and our lack of foresight,” continued the lecturer. When New Zealand was first colonised it was almost entirely covered with rich vegetation, chiefly forest, which covered the hills and extended up the mountain sides to a height of 4000 ft. The floor of the forest was a porous layer of priceless humus, the product of thousands of years. In this humus were the mineral salts extracted from the sub-soil and the rocks by the roots of the plants and trees. In our unthinking exploitation of the land the forests over ’the major portion of the country had been destroyed. Not only the flat land and the lower hills which could be legitimately brought into cultivation, but the steep places—the mountain sides —had been denuded to provide more and more sheep country. The damage that had been done was beyond computation. Heavy rain was no longer absorbed, but ran off into the valleys, gullying the hillsides and causing innumerable slips. Erosion proceeded on the hills whilst the valleys were subject to disastrous floods.

“This is no imaginary picture,” Professor Worley said. “Its truth is revealed in the all too frequent accounts in the newspapers of disastrous floods all over the country. A few farms may be destroyed, a labour camp washed away and innocent workers drowned. It has been called an ‘act of God. It may indeed be truly an act of God, for it is undoubtedly God’s just retribution for man’s criminal stupidity.” “RECLOTHE OUR NAKED HILLS” How was the serious state of affairs to be remedied? asked the professor. The answer, he said, was plain. The public must be aroused to the dangers ahead until they insisted that Governments no longer' neglected the vital questions, which called aloud for the co-ordinated action of the Departments of Forestry, Agriculture and Health. Our inheritance was being destroyed and national security undermined. He was not referring to any particular Government. A previous Government had abolished the two schools of forestry in order to save a few thousand pounds, while millions of pounds' worth of soil fertility was sliding into the sea through deforestation. “We must lose no time in re-establishing the efficient school of forestry to supervise a national policy of soil conservation,” said Professor Worley. We must reclothe our naked hills. The millions proposed to be spent on the somewhat speculative utilisation of iron deposits would be immensely more profitably spent in reforestation.

“A fraction of the money spent on political expeditions abroad, however desirable they may be, if spent in acquiring the frequent services of such great agriculturists as Sir John Russell. Sir Albert "Howard and Professor Stapledon would yield immeasurably greater returns."

The speaker gave credit to the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research for soil survey and study of soil erosion. This work needed public demand for rapid extension. Legislation of a radical nature was also urgently required. No land owner should be allowed to cut or burn the bush or scrub on land above a specified altitude or beyond a specified slope without authority. The land belonged to the country, and no form of tenure should carry with it the right to destory or impair the fertility of the soil or further despoil the "poor earth.”