NATURE—AND MAN

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 80, Issue 253, 25 October 1937, Page 6

NATURE—AND MAN

FRIGHT OF THE U.S.A. Appalling Loss Of Top Soil (Edited by Leo. Fanning.) “Vengeance is mine” is Nature’s decree to the people of the United States of America for maltreatment of forests and other natural assets. A vivid portrayal of “America’s Distressed Areas” is given by Elspeth Huxley in The Geographical Magazine. “The mist striking modern examples of soil erosion are to be found in America,” the writer states. “Before settlers came, half the present area of the United States was forest and one-third was buffalo range. Soil formation kept pace evenly with soil loss, and only 2.5 per cent, of the total area was classed as desert. In the space of two or three generations, nearly onehalf of all the forest has been cleared, and a large part of the great plain lying between the Rockies and the eastern chain of hills, once an unbroken sea of grass, is under the plough. Retribution has been astonishingly swift. A survey conducted recently states that 10 per cent, of the total land area of the United States has lost more than three-quarters of its top soil, that an additional 30 per cent, (nearly 570,000,000 acres) can be classed as moderately eroded, and that about 4 per cent, has had most of its top soil blown away by dust storms. “Erision caused by rain water is most acute where land is cultivated on slopes. In America it has been found that cultivation on a slope with anything over an 8 to 10 per cent, gradient usually results in serious loss of top soil, and it is recommended that such land should be kept permanently under grass. In experiments carried out in Oklahoma, Bermuda grass sod reduced the loss of soil to the negligible amount of .038 tons to the acre in five years: under cotton the same field lost 39.23 tons to the acre—67o times as much.

“The amount of top soil washed away every year In the United States can only be described as staggering. It is estimated, for example, that 400,000,000 tons of good, rich topsoil from the Mississippi valley are swept annually into the Gulf of Mexico. “The reorientation of farming so as to control erosion is likely to bring about certain fundamental changes in the economic life of America, and eventually of the world. One might almost say that since the discovery of the principles of soil conservation, agriculture in the newer countries will never again be quite the same. It cannot, for instanc?, be so completely individualistic. The idea that land Is held in trust by the individual for future generations, is bound to find wider acceptance, and ‘robber agriculture,’ the treatment of land as a mine to the exploited until it is exhausted, *vill have to go. As a corollary, systems of land tenure which encourage the exploitation of the soil will have to □e altered so as to penalise it.” A Wiry Bird. Was ever a nesting bird in more pathetic plight than the one mentioned in this story told by Elspeth Huxley:— “Three years ago a man was driving along what h; d once been a farm road in Nebraska. It was spring, but the level landscape had no green cloak of young wheat or corn for cover. It stretched, brown and bare, to a lifeless horizon, and the traveller’s eye could see only the authentic contours of a desert. “As he drove on through the soft sand he saw the remnants of a solitary tree. It was leafless, for its roots had withered, but it still stood. Prompted.

perhaps, by respect for such obdurate endurance, he stopped the car and plodded through the sand to look at it. A bird flew out as he approached, and on inspection he observed a bird’s nest in the fork of two blackened branches. It was a strange nest, for it shone like a pool of water in the sunlight. Then he saw that it was made out of bits of wire. In all that desolate land the bird had found no twigs, no leaves, no feathers, no moss, with which to express its nesting instinct: only bits of broken fence-wire from some deserted farmstead. "Sixty years ago this stretch of land, the Nebraska panhandle, was a green sea of tall grass, chequered with dark patches of woodland, the home of wild birds and beasts.” The desolation seen to-day is due to men's blunders in working the land. "Charlie Chaplins of the Antarctic.” A pleasant chronicle of penguins in the Bounties, told by H. GuthrieSmith in "Sorrows and Joys ol a New Zealand Naturalist”:— "They hop doggedly, conscientiously, as if in performance of a duty but always without hilarity and glee.There is no glad buoyant bound in the poor penguin’s earthly pilgrimage; it is laboured, low, flat-footed, stiffkneed. Sloping forward as if about to fall he pauses after each effort gathering himself for the next. His bent back, his rounded shoulders, his anxious expression, his arms hung dejectedly by his side, give him the air of an old, old wearied little man. Ashore his single posture that can inspire any kind of deference is that of absolute repose, though indeed even then the anthropoid image obtrudes itself of a small swag-bellied mortal in huge expanse of white waistcoat and shirt. “Penguins in truth can never be seen without in some sort suggesting ludicrous human analogies. They are not altogether men nor yet quite birds—Sir James Clark Ross has compared them to batallions of solemn little men in dress suits; Dr. Murray Levick has described them rolling about and splashing, making sounds exactly like a lot of schoolboys calling out and challing each other, ‘so extraordinary was the whole scene that on first witnessing it we were overcome with astonishment. It seemed to us almost impossible that the little creatures whose antics we were watching were actually birds and not human beings.’ A later expedition has dubbed them the Charlie Chaplins of the Antarctic. By penguins in their gait as by apes in their physiognomy the great race of man is in some sort caricatured. “They take on the similitude of every kind of human gathering, they are crowds on the thronged beach of some fashionable watering place, they pass and repass each other like busy men in a city street, they are sober folk scaling from Kirk and Conventicle, they are dispersing members of a committee still reiterating each his own especial view—they are Sunday school children in clean, white, shining pinafores. As corporate bodies or individually there is no limit to their likenesses to men.

“Accepting us with more of annoyance than fear these strange creatures stood plantigrade in every attitude, bowing and bending, stretching their necks, twisting their heads and always irefuliy prepared for instant strife. Their expressions varied as greatly as their attitudes, coy, dignified, despondent, sleepy, even—in modern phrase—bored to tears.”