MOTHER EARTH

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 June 1940, Page 6

MOTHER EARTH

HER WAYWARD CHILD WAR ON FOREST AND SOIL. NECESSITY FOR CONSERVATION MEASURES. It takes many years to impress public opinion with the fact that, over a huge portion of the globe, the destruction of the forest or natural plantcovering of the earth has amounted to destruction of the soil itself. Men burn or destroy trees and plant life by hundreds of acres and by thousands of acres and think that they have done nothing to the soil. They think that the soil of the steep lands they burn over will remain for ever where it is. Yet all human experience proves that, unless conservation measures have been adequate, the soil will go. In some situations no conservation can prevent it from going, once the vegetation coyer is removed. Yet people go on cutting and burning in the belief that they can destroy Nature’s mantle without prejudice to the soil and to the character and production of the region. MESOPOTAMIAN DESOLATION. The mountain, the valley, the plain, and the river running through valley and plain are all inter-dependent. Deforestation of the mountain will alter the waterflow, and increase the rate of discharge of water and silt upon valley and plain. On the Mesopotamian plains the river waters were at one time carried far and wide by irrigation ditches, maintaining fertility and a well-fed and cultured population. But far away in the river watershed people overgrazed the steep slopes, and soil and earth were washed from the naked land surfaces and carried into the irrigation ditches. The plain-dwellers removed the silt for many years, and piled it up; but in time this unwanted material proved too much for their labours and for their over-burdened lands. Today travellers “find Mesopotamia literally covered with miniature mountain ranges of silt —10, 20 up to 50 feet in height—piled beside the ancient irrigation ditches. This silt, the offspring of erosion in overgrazed watersheds. tells a story of the ceaseless struggles of millions of nameless toilers, before the potentially rich irrigated lands were allowed to revert again to desert, when, due to war or political decadence, the clearing of silt from the canals was no longer continued.”

Silt-choked and shingle-choked riverbeds in New Zealand are not evidence of wars. Whether- they are evidence of political decadence is an open question. But they are evidence, in scores of cases, or errors under the heading of deforestation and destruction of plant cover (by steel, by flame, and by grazing animals, tame or wild, imported into a country where such animals did not exist in pre-pakeha times) and they are evidence of sins against all principles of conservation, even the primary ones.

SLUICING IN THE WRONG PLACE. Nothing is more elementary in human experience than the sluicing effect of water on land. In this country a great technique has been developed around sluicing for gold. Yet to take pains not to do those things which promote sluicing of the non-auriferous soil (New Zealand’s real gold) is far beyond New Zealand’s imagination. The above passage marked by inverted commas is taken from an article in “American Forests” by Walter C. Lowdermilk, who sumarries mankind’s war against Mother Earth over thousands of years, from pre-historic times down to modern America and the Rooseveltian conservation effort. Various forms of exploitation, resulting in denudation, “have already destroyed or seriously impoverished 282 million acres of American lands and have impaired the productivity of 775 million acres more.” Touring the world's man-made deserts in several continents, Lowdermilk in North Africa found "huge olive presses littering areas where today not an olive tree grows within the circle of the horizon.” Why? “Man-induced erosion” destroyed the productivity of the soil and put out of action the olive presses and the stone wine presses.

OBJECT LESSONS FROM CHINA. In China—the Good Earth of Pearl Buck —incredible folly and skilful gardening are found almost side by side. “The staggering soil wastage of North China is unbelievable.” Mountains once heavily forested are bare and arid. Lowdermilk writes: “During five expeditions into North China prior to 1927 my experimental studies determined for the first time comparative rates and amounts of innoff and soil erosion from land within temple forests and adjoining like areas which had been cultivated and denuded. We found that often sixty times as much water, in the form of liquid mud. flowed from cultivated and barrel) areas as from the forest. The run-off from the latter was scarcely discoloured, showing little or no erosion, while the storm run-off on denuded areas tore away the soil, causing permanent loss to the land. On the basis of these measurements of wide-spread soil loss by erosion, my estimate is that soil has been removed to an average depth of from twelve to eighteen inches from hundreds of millions of acres of slipping lands in north-west China by man-induced erosion. By such diabolic processes areas, formerly capable of supporting great populations in prosperity, now provide meagre existence for lesser numbers.” Is it with this model of soil-treatment and of economic policy that wo in New Zealand are endeavouring to conform?