The urgency of conserving soil and water to address 21st century issues including global warming

Excerpt

The importance of conserving soil and water resources has been recognized ever since the dawn of settled agriculture about 10 to 13 millennia ago, when agriculturalists became less mobile than hunters and gatherers. Soil management was important to the agrarian culture of the Harappan civilization of South Asia ~3200 BC (Kenoyer 2003). Subsequent to the fall of the Harappan civilization, the Vedic literature in Sanskrit, dating back to 1000-2500 BC, contains several references to methods of tilling soil, collecting water, predicting rainfall, and urging farmers to observe good land husbandry (Wasson 2006). The importance of soil conservation in the rise of the Mayan culture (the Mayans cultivated crops like corn, beans, and squash in Central America for millennia) cannot be overemphasized (Piperno and Pearsall 1998). Mayan agriculture recognized the usefulness of terracing to conserve soil and water (Beach et al. 2002) centuries prior to European settlement (Hard et al. 1999; Hard and Roney 1998). Terracing of sloping lands for conserving soil and managing water has also been a cultural tradition in Asia for millennia. In addition to agricultural terracing in uplands, ancient agriculture in Central America and the Caribbean also flourished by managing wetlands based on their knowledge of the …