Health and the Soil

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 417, 20 June 1947, Page 5

Health and the Soil

week is devoted to a subject on which nearly everybody has strong opinions and hardly anybody firm knowledge. We all agree that if the soil does not remain healthy we ourselves shall not, but conflict. arises when we carry our questions a little further. : Are we as healthy to-day as nage were a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago? Are men as healthy in Australia and New Zealand as in China and Japan? Even if they are, can we go on being healthy with our present methods of treating and working the soil? If these were scientific questions only we could leave it to science to supply the answer and to politics to apply the remedy. Sooner or later, if everybody knew what was wrong, the self-interest of the many would prevail over the vested interests of the few who were robbing or poisoning or starving or otherwise ill-using us. But the soil is one of the earth’s new religions. It is beginning to be as difficult to discuss it without heat as it has always been to discuss other miracles calmly--even among men of science. We could inject about three adjectives into this article that would bring the moon down on our heads. Even Sir Stanton Hicks found it easier to raise questions than to settle them when he twisted the tails of the chemists at the Congress. He made us all think, which he set out to do, but he did not say finally what. he thought himself: whether the Japanese are healthier than the people of New Zealand, whether he would change our economy for theirs, whether they would use artificial fertilisers if they could get them (or ever did use them), whether they do now return to the earth everything that they take out, and whether when that is done health follows as a matter of course. He said that our way of life is wrong, largely because our way of thinking about the soil is wrong, and in support of that gave some rather picturesque facts. But the questions raised by Sir Theodore Rigg call for answers too, and he is a bold bio-chemist who would argue that nature never fails, A GOOD deal of our space this