Evening Post. TUESDAY, APRIL 23, 1935. THE MAKING OF A DESERT

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 95, 23 April 1935, Page 8

Evening Post. TUESDAY, APRIL 23, 1935. THE MAKING OF A DESERT

The breaking of the drought in the western prairie country of the United States, reported in a cable message, is so far comparatively local, being confined to the "panhandle" country of Texas and parts of New Mexico and Oklahoma. There is ,no news of rain in Colorado, Kansas, and northward to the Canadian border. Indeed, in Montana it is stated that a large party of North Dakota farmers and their families passed through in a so-called "motorcade," the modern version of the "covered wagon," going further West to seek homes in Western Montana and Idaho, where incidentally there are large irrigation schemes and less dependence on the vagaries of the weather. The decision to make the trek is said to have come "after three continuous and particularly virulent days of gale-driven grime in'which life was both unsafe and unbearable." A competent observer, who has just returned from a 1000-mile journey through the dust-desolated areas, says that • residents of the sector are moving out by scores, and hundreds of others are expected to follow in the next two months.'. ../Another rainless and windy summer will depopulate the dust country. Millions on millions of acres are drifted with sand. What <# saw was utter desolation from horizon to horizon.

What is even more ominous is the single sentence: "People pray for rain and grass, yet heavy rains would make bad lands out of •the plains." These "bad lands" are the result of erosion on a soil unprotected by vegetation. They were to be found in South Dakota when the white man first chased the red man across the prairies. Today there are similar areas of "bad lands" in other parts of the United States, where reckless deforestation and the equally reckless kind of farming, known as "mining" the soil, have let the elements, do their worst—the wind and the rain sweep the fertile humus away, leaving nothing but bare clay and rock behind. It seems abundantly clear that the world may be witnessing in America the terrible phenomenon of. the making of a desert. In historical times the same thing has occurred in Africa and Asia. In the days of ancient Rome Northern Africa was the granary of the Empire and the ruins of Roman cities are to be found amid the sands of the fringe of the Sahara. Palestine is an even more typical example. At the beginning of the Christian era cultivation extended eastward of the Jordan over areas now largely desert, and large populations lived"1 in fine Greco-Roman cities where today only the Bedouin nomad ekes out a miserable existence. Petra and Palmyra are the wrecks left by the retrogression of mankind before the tidal advance of the sand. Further east is Mesopotamia, the conjectured cradle of humanity, once the home of teeming millions, but now mostly a wilderness of swamp and barren plain. Eastward still the plateau of Central Asia has its many buried cities, where- civilisati6n once reigned. -- There is, however, one great difference between the encroachment of the desert in the Old World and that which threatens in the New. It was the withdrawal of ancient civilisations before the attack of barbarism that mainly led to the devastation of Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Northern Africa. What Tacitus said of the Romans, "They make a solitude and call, it peace," would apply far better to the Turks ; Now that the Turks have been expelled from the countries they held so long there is a prospect of a reclamation of the desert. This is already occurring under the Italians in Tripolitana, and under British guidance in Palestine and Irak. In America civilisation is armed for the conflict with Nature and is not likely to submit without a struggle. Though it is said that "few people have faith in the Government's attempt to control dust," the same Government has carried out gigantic irrigation schemes with success, and energetic action may save the danger zone in the prairies from spreading, though it may take many years and much money.