Excerpt
HUMAN-induced soil erosion has long been considered a threat to the ability of the world's people to feed themselves. Warnings of the danger came from Plato more than 2,000 years ago and from many other writers more recently. One of the frequently cited reports of erosion's damage globally was W. C. Lowdermilk's Conquest of the Land Through Seven Thousand Years (21). Eric Eckholm's eloquently written book Losing Ground also generated wide attention (10).
Hugh Hammond Bennett, founding father of the Soil Conservation Service, used the knowledge he had gained of severe soil erosion in the southeastern United States to marshal political support for national conservation programs. Bennett ushered in the modern era of soil conservation in the United States and in a host of other countries around the world (14).
Underlying virtually all efforts to reduce soil erosion by water and wind has been the implication that erosion threatens land productivity …
Footnotes
H. E. Dregne is a Horn Professor, International Center for Arid and Semiarid Land Studies, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, 79409-1036.
- Copyright 1990 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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