NEW BOOKS

Evening Star, Issue 25813, 8 June 1946, Page 10

NEW BOOKS

AFFINITY WITH THE SOIL "If 'the fundamental history of civilisation is the history of the soil,' we have reached a time now when civilisation as we know it—art and literature, music, poetry, and philosophy, cathedrae, houses, farms, universities, and tneatres —wi.l go towards a rapid dust-ruction unless we ourselves awaken to retrieve the land." Tnia is the arresting introductory paragraph to hlyne 'Miieuell's 'Soil and Civilisation.' a study that, while stressing the menace (if soil erosion, revea'.s How civilisations have perished because man has not lived in- affinity with the soil. Nations have died and climates have changed because man abused the soil and its wealth, allowing it to deteriorate into desert, and waste land The Babylonians, the Persians, the I'hieneciaus, the Romans, the Mayas of South America are among the nations that passed because of man's Failure to find true affinity with the soil that provided him with the food he needed to live. The warnings of history have not been heeded. "Some of the greatest watersheds of the .world have been devastated by the cutting of timber for fuel or building material, by agricultural aiid pastoral misuse, by the demands of mines or factories, by wanton fire. Not only the .water-J sheds of the Yaugtse-kiang and the! Hwang-ho, the Tigris, the Euphrates, J and the Tiber have been ruined by the J ' withering blight ' of civilisation! but the catchment areas of the great rivers of North America, of Australia, and of South Africa. Many of these rivers flood huge areas, some of them drowning millions of people and animals, ruining or carrying away homes, threatening cities, doing immeasurable damage to land, fencing, crops; filling harbours and covering rich soil with rocks and debris from the deforested hill's." The denudation of the mountain slopes has meant fluctuating streams, " with excessive floods at the time of heavy rains and the melting of the snows and a very small flow during the dry periods of the year." The authoress views gravely the threat of soil erosion from the Australian angle, the contributions of the rabbit, the sheep, and the wrong type of cultivation as well as other factors, all being duly weighed. In Australia there is steadily being reproduced the conditions that resulted in the downfall of past empires. There are remedies, and Miss Mitchell outlines how they may be applied with benefit to all, so that the soil may produce in abundance without loss of energy. This work, published by Angus and Robertson, Sydney, is a particularly valuable addition to the growing literature on soil erosjon. the real menace of which is too slowly being appreciated.