Erosion Work Goes Forward

IT STILL seems, to many of our citizenry and to most of the world in general, as evinced by statements in newspapers and periodicals, that the federal government is employing men on emergency conservation work mostly to give relief and to avoid a dole. This is even said and thought of the C.C.C. and its brother organization in this state, the Indian E. C. W. One assumes that engineers, at least, are better informed, and it is fitting that an engineering publication should set forth facts and statistics for the benefit of its lay readers.

The principal and most important work of the C. C. C. and its kindred "emergency conservation" organizations is soil erosion control. And the government never carried on any work anywhere more important or more timely. A few figures, statistics in the broad sense, since they are based on the estimates of scientists, should get to the crux of the matter.

The bulk of our erosion has seemingly taken place in the past three or four decades. In Arizona, in the past two decades. The rate of erosion over the whole United States is increasing rapidly.

A century ago, we owned the world's bread basket, as our editors put it. A century hence, unless we work desperately and scientifically to stop and control erosion, we shall be more impoverished than China.

Resorting to figures, our Department of Agriculture estimates that at least a half billion tons of our best soil is washed into the ocean each year at present. Or, considering actual plant food, such as we buy when we buy fertilizer, about 125,000,000,000 pounds of plant food material is washed into

By L. C. BOLLES

in round figures, at current fertilizer prices, of at least two billion dollars per year.

At least fifteen million acres of once fertile American farm lands have become absolutely worthless, solely through erosion. And there are very few farms in this country that have not been harmed by erosion to some extent already. Just how great the total harm is today no one can really visualize. After decades of study our experts announce that in a virgin country, where no agriculture goes on, Nature maintains almost a balance. Some erosion goes on; the hills through the ages are wearing down, but also soil is being built, by breaking down of rock, by decomposition of vegetable mould, and so on. Nature has her balance, left alone. But in America today the wastage of soil is roughly one hundred times as fast as the creation of soil. This is not a guess but the pondered decision of scientists.

We have been a prodigal nation, using up our immense natural treasures as rapidly as we could, forests, coal mines, oil pools, minerals, anything we could deplete. But the rest of our prodigal waste is insignificant compared with our waste of soil, done unconsciously, almost unwittingly, though for the past quarter of a century protests from scientists have been increasing.

And so the work of the C. C. C., far from being "made work" for the sake of relief, is as much a battle for our future welfare as anything the soldiers did in the World War. Nor may it stop. We need not bother to pick a war with some other nation; we have a war on our hands already with the most implacable of enemies.

The problem of soil waste is a terrific one. The sooner the whole people become awake to its different phases the better. In the first place, what has made our state start unravelling beneath our feet in the past fifteen years? The students assign three main causes: or perhaps I should say, one, the thinning and loss of vegetative cover; caused by fire, overgrazing, and logging of forests, mostly. Of the three, overgrazing is overwhelmingly the preponderant cause of destruction. So, we must not only try to stop the washing of soil down the slopes-and this is almost like trying to sweep back the tide with a broom-but we must take steps to restore vegetative cover. And this is going to be as big a problem as the other.

the ocean each year, having a value The Conservation Corps is carrying on experiments, or helping carry on experiments and tests, as well as their routine work. Their main activities are, in the order named: erosion checks, roads to make forested areas more accessible, and actual fire fighting. But they are doing planting, thinning, animal and plant pest eradication. They are building water tanks and developing springs and wells, so that the stock on the ranges can scatter out over the whole area and thereby not overgraze areas near present water.

I spoke of what we as a people must learn. The vastness of the problem. The absolute necessity of prosecuting erosion in every possible manner. The necessity of controlling grazing, or even stopping it altogther in many districts. Farmers will have to learn quickly that worn out farms are almost never caused by exhaustion of plant food in the soil, but by erosion of the precious top soil. Every time a farmer plants his rows up and down the slope instead of on contours he is causing dangerous loss to his land, whether he realizes it or not. Every time he cultivates up and down the slope he is causing more erosion. It is his duty to plant trees, and it is his business to keep every possible acre in sod or meadow or orchard or grove, or something that does not wash. When gullies start we must stop them up some way.

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