NATURE—AND MAN

Grey River Argus, 7 August 1937, Page 12

NATURE—AND MAN

“RICH LAND, POOR LAND.” BIG WORK OF STUART CHASE. [Edited by Leo Fanning! ■ Ministers of the Crown and experts who may be associated with them in the projected survey of the natural resources of New Zealand should read very closely Stuart Chase’s new book “Rich Land, Poor Land,” which will help soil-savers in many countries to rouse the public into taking action to safeguard the basic capital of Natuie on which they live. Here are some passages which make a stirring lesson for New Zealanders who are losing much ol their productive soil, ravaged by erosion due to unpatriotic selfish exploitation and blunders. WATCHING THE FARMS GO BY. Right from the beginning of the first chapter the author makes his readers take notice. Here are the opening paragrapns: “The story goes that an old Nebraska farmer was sitting on his porch during a dust storm. Asked what lie was watching so intently he replied: ‘l’m counting the Kansas farms as they go by.’ “The people of America have been sitting on their porches watching their continent go by. Kansas farms are good farms, and the North American continent is a good continent. Its, beauty, its prodigality in natural resources, its great north and south wedge laid broadside on the temperate zone, make it perhaps the best continent on earth. II is not a little tragic that we should sit on our porches while this great, good continent goes out from under us. It is our homeland. It is where out children must. stay. When it is gone—in the sense of a hospitable environment —where shall we live? Many Kansas farms have gone; the whole Dust Bowl is going. Other areas, as we shall see, involving millions of people have lost their resource base of land, water or mineral deposit. We have been called the richest nation ever known, and probably we are—now. But how rich is the most lavish of prodigal sons when the last of his father’s bonds lias been sold and the proceeds spent?”

STUPENDOUS LOSSES OF FERTILE LAND. “The three thousand million tons of solid material washed out of me fields and pastures of the United States of America every year by water erosion,’ continues Mr Chase, “contain forty million tons of phosphorus potassium and nitrogen. This of course is in addition to losses through cropping. To load and haul away this incomprehensible bulk of rich farm soil would require a train of freight cars 475,000 miles long, enough to girdle the planet nineteen times nt the equator. Approximately 400 million tons of solid earth is dumped into the Gull ol Mexico by the Mississippi alone—the greater part of it supersoil, richer than that of the Nile. Plant food can be restored to soil that has been worn lean by cropping, but when water takes the soil itself—minerals, humus, microscopic organisms, everything—only nature can restore fertility to that land, and her rate under primeval conditions, as we have seen, is one inch in 500 years. One hundred million acres of formerly cultivated land has been essenuallj ruined by water erosion—an area equal to Illinois, Ohio, North Carolina and Maryland combined—the equivalent of 1,250,000 eightvacre farms. In addition, this wash-

ing of sloping fields has stripped the greater part of the productive top soil from another' 125 million acres now being cultivated. Erosion by wind and water is getting under way on another 100 million acres. More than 300 million acres—one-sixth of the country—is gone, go.ng or beginning to go. This, we no + e, is on land originally the r. cst fertile. ‘ Kansas farms are blowing through Nebraska at n ia(r >n the spring of 1934, the farms of the Dust Bowl —which includes western Oklahoma, western Kansas, eastern Colorado, the panhandle of Texas and parts of Wyoming—blew clear out to the Atlantic Ocean, 2000 miles away. On a single day 300 million tons' of rich top soil was lifted from the Great Plains, never to return, and planted in places where it wouli. spread the maximum of damage and discomfort. Authentic desert sand dunes were laid down. People began to die of dust pneumonia. More'dha nine million acres of good land has been virtually destroyed by wind erosion, and serious damage is reported on nearly 80 million acres.

“Taking the continent as a whole, it is reliably estimated that half of its original fertility has been dissipated by these various agents. The rate of loss tends to follow the laws of compound interest. The stricken areas grow cumulatively larger.” NATURE AS DICTATOR. Salvation of a country demands sane planning. “Resource planning involves a dictator,” declares Mr Chase. “Gentlemen in club windows nob savagely. They see parades of bureaucrats, waving, blueprints and, like Moses, laying down the laws of Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not. But they are wrong. The dictator is nature. In considering the Great Wheel of inter-related processes, we have discovered the terms on which she will keep a continent viable, healt and permanent.. The task of resource or capital planning is to meet those terms. The gentlemen, in club win dows says that planning subverts the ‘natural order,’ by which they mean the free market. This is an exceedingly superficial deduction. Laissez faire is a man-made institution, impermanent and passing. Nature has been here a long time. Her order, and her’s alone, is natural. “If constitutions, statutes, laws of property, boundary lines and individual rights and duties require readjustments, nature provides the bench mark. Fortunately she is flexible, am not given to blueprints. The first job of any agency proposing to co-operate with her, however, is to map the rr gion over which planning is proposed, showing such relevant facts as topography, slope, soils, rainfall and stream flow. Only thus may the planners learn nature’s terms." NATURE’S REVENGE. “Western Europe plans with nature so far as national boundaries and bisecting watersheds permit. But. in other parts of Europe, in large areas in Africa, in India, in China and now in Australia, the opposite has been true. Soils have been ravaged at a rate beyond the capacity of nature to repair. Civilisation after civilisation in the past has been reared on borrowed capital, and the security was the good earth, not banker’s paper. Mesopotamia, Egypt, North Africa,! Greece, Rome and Mexico under the Maya worked through their resource assets and passed into limbo. “The lone and level sands stretch far away.... “The Great Wheels turns. A continent is situs, a place to live, and so

far more I han a bread factory. People do not make continents; continents make a people, 'rhe age-long strength of Russia is due to her latitude, -climate, resources and sweep. The strength of England is due to her position in the sea. The strength of our nation is due to the continent of North America. It has moulded us, nourished us. fed its abundant vitality into our veins. We are its children, lost and homeless without it strong arms about us. Shan we destroy it?” New Zealanders, ask yourselves that question about your own country; “Shall we destroy it?” If your answer is “no” you will have to do very much more than you are doing now to prevent the disastrous wasting of natural resources.