NATURE’S REVENGE

Taranaki Daily News, 17 August 1935, Page 18 (Supplement)

NATURE’S REVENGE

THE MIGHTY MISSISSIPPI. SMILING LAND MADE DESOLATE, The first great nations were based on great rivers. The' Nile nourished the wonderful Egyptian dynasties and was worshipped as the sacred source of their prosperity and power. The ancient Egyptians had not the means to trace its source, but they knew what the annual flooding meant to them. Older even than Egypt, Babylon rose, some 8000 or 9000 years ago, on the banks of the Euphrates, to perish, after ages of glory, for lack of the science wielded by modern men. In our own days we have before us a thing more remarkable and mournful than the decay of Babylon. The United States has many natural gifts, but none greater than the Mississippi. Fed' by glorious tributaries, themselves mighty rivers, it travels 4200 miles from Little Elk Lake in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. A dozen great towns line its banks, and at the point where the Missouri joins it the mighty stream is 5000 feet wide. What a possession! The valley of the Mississippi and its tributaries supports some 50 million Americans. To natural fertility and great forests were added coal and iron, copper and oil. No pther part of the earth could show such abundance of treasure, and nowhere has there been such wanton waste of magnificent gifts. Despite grave warnings the Americans treated the great basin as an illimitable source of easily-raised crop?. The forests were turned into lumber. The first President Roosevelt, uncle of the present head of the American State, was urgent in his representations, of the danger ahead, but he failed to secure attention and his Conservation Commission failed.

Now, under Franklin Roosevelt, there is to be action, backed by the great fund for Public Works which Congress has granted him. A Mississippi Valley Committee has presented a report so striking, so condemnatory of past neglect, so suggestive in its recommendations, that there is good hope that the Great Valley will smile again as once before. ’ There are over 1,206,000 square miles of Mississippi land to conserve, an area as great as that of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, and Scandinavia combined. The report says that a large portion of the agricultural land in the basin has lost from three to six inches of topsoil, and 25 per cent, of the tilled lands have been stripped to the subsoil; £80,000,000 a year is a conservative estimate of the tangible loss to the whole United States. So a smiling land became desolate. The erosion of the scratch farming caused flooding and wind erosion on a gigantic scale, and last year millions of tons of soil were blown east for 1500 miles.

Thus the great river has taken its revenge upon those who wasted its gifts. A great bill has now to be paid to make good some part of the wastage. There must be afforestation, reservoirs, iirigation, and new methods of farming. Fortunately America is now headed by a man who has been entrusted with means to do the work on a proper scale. Let us not suppose that this report has no lesson for us in the British Isles. We, top have neglected the land. We, too, have wasted power. We, too, here and in the Britains overseas, have gigantic resources running to wsurfa-