Page:Tree Crops; A Permanent Agriculture (1929).pdf/29

 resource wastes. It removes the basis of civilization and of life itself. It is far worse than burning a city. A burned city can be rebuilt. A field that is washed away is gone for ages. Hence the Old World saying, "After man the desert."

Can anything be done about it? Yes, something can be done. Therefore, this book is written to persons of imagination who love trees and love their country, and to those who are interested in the problem of saving natural resources—the basis for civilization.

from the Ohio to the Gulf, is a kind of thin veneer lying on top of coastal plain sands. It is extremly rich and erodes very easily.

E. W. Hilgard, the great pioneer writer on soils (Soils, p. 218), says:

"The washing away of the surface soil . . . diminished the production of the higher lands, which were then (at the time of the Civil War) commonly 'turned out' and left without cultivation or care of any kind. The crusted surface shed the rain water into the old furrows, and the latter were quickly deepened and widened into gullies—'red washes. ..

"As the evil progressed, large areas of uplands were denuded completely of their loam or culture stratum, leaving nothing but bare, arid sand, wholly useless for cultivation; while the valleys were little better, the native vegetation having been destroyed and only hardy weeds finding nourishment on the sandy surface.

"In this manner whole sections, and in some portions of the state (Mississippi) whole townships of the best class of uplands, have been transformed into sandy wastes, hardly reclaimable by ordinary means, and wholly changing the industrial conditions of entire counties, whose county-seats even in some instances had to be changed, the old town and site having, by the same destructive agencies, literally 'gone downhill.'

"Specific names have been given to the erosional features of this district; a 'break' is the head of a small retrogressive ravine; a 'gulf is a large break with precipitous walls of great depth and breadth, commonly being one hundred or one hundred and fifty deep; a 'gut' is merely a road-cut deepened by storm-wash and the effects of passing travel."

In this way we have already destroyed the homelands fit for the sustenance of millions. We need an enlarged definition for treason. Some people should not be allowed to sing "My Country." They are destroying it too rapidly.