Customer Reviews

Topsoil and Civilization

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This book should be called "A Brief History of Soil". The authors have put together a fascinating history of how one civilization after another has raped the land of its topsoil, which was a key factor in the fall of every ancient civilization. However, the real scary part is the fact that so few civilizations ever recognized the impact of erosion and loss of soil fertility on the well-being of their populations before it was too late. Even the United States in its colonial period made all of the same mistakes and to some extent is still making them. The message is that it takes so much arable land to produce food to feed each person on the face of the Earth. Once all arable land is under production, there are no more new lands to move to when you destroy the fertility of the soil or allow the topsoil to erode away. With current technology, experts estimate that the available arable land can support about 7.5 billion people. We are presently over 6 billion and there are numerous cases of starvation already occuring each year. Most of this is due to distribution and political problems rather than production. But the fact remains that if we don't stop paving over arable land to make more strip malls and housing developments, and minimize the erosion of lands under cultivation, we are headed for a catastrophe of Worldwide-epidemic proportions. Readers of this book will also enjoy a more recent book titled "Dirt: the Erosion of Civilization."