THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES Tuesday, May 27, 1947. MANKIND AND THE SOIL

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26471, 27 May 1947, Page 4

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES Tuesday, May 27, 1947. MANKIND AND THE SOIL

A great many of the leading scientists and statesmen of the world are to-day earnestly applying themselves to the task of evolving a formula for saving mankind from the threat of war and possible extinction by atomic bombing or other horrible devices of mass destruction: a smaller number of equally brilliant thinkers are attempting to create a universal awareness that humanity is confronted with an even more ominous threat than that of the atom bomb — that of self destruction through abuse of the soil on which all life depends. One of these thinkers is Sir Stanton Hicks, whose efforts to develop a public appreciation of the relationship between health and the soil have received considerable and well-merited publicity during his present visit to New Zealand. History is strewn with the wreckage of great civilisations which have foundered on the exhaustion of the fertility of their soil. Tire great cultures of the Middle East, Rome, and Central America were destroyed because their peoples squandered their soil resources, and part of the North African desert over which New Zealand soldiers raced in pursuit of Rommel, was once the rich and fertile plain of Carthage, on which Hannibal was defeated. Erosion, deforestation, and soil exhaustion were the agents of this decay, and these will most assuredly bring about the decline of even greater civilisations, and of mankind itself, unless the relentless war against nature is halted and the maladjustment between human society and its environment is. corrected by a return to the fundamental methods of land utilisation. In such works as King’s “ Farmers of Forty Centuries,” Jacks and Whyte’s “The Rape of the Earth.” and Wrench’s “Reconstruction by Way of the Soil” (to mention but a few) the story is told of the continued ravishment of the fertile covering of the earth’s surface on which humanity is dependent'for its food. The deserts of Africa, the “ dust bowl ” of the United States, and even the scarred and eroded hill country of our own New Zealand are all the results of man’s mismanagement. Ignorance or economic circumstances have been Tesponsible for methods of cultivation which took no heed of the necessity for preserving the structure of the soil or restoring to it the vital elements removed when crops were cut or stock was raised. Even in some rural areas in the United States, where intensive cultivation is practised with the liberal use of fertilisers and other aids to good farming, science has proved that the products of the soil are deficient in certain minerals essential to the good health of the consumers. Can this decline of the earth’s fertility be arrested? The problem is a tremendous one. It would require planning on an international scale in a manner incorppatible with a free competitive economy, and a complete reorientation of many of the accepted principles of production on a national basis. Politicians cannot solve it. The remedy, if remedy there is, lies in the hands of the men who till the soil—the farmers of the world. For the first time in history the representatives of the world’s primary producers have met to form an international organisation, and in this organisation lies not only the greatest hope for peace, but the only possibility of convincing governments that food foi/ the peoples of the world can be produced only while the soil remains sufficiently fertile to grow it.