The erosion of civilisations
John Seymour
From notes prepared by John Seymour (author of 'The Ultimate Heresy' and books on self-sufficient farming), for an Academic Inn speech in London.
The philosophy of agriculture that I was taught at agricultural college in the early nineteen thirties, that Bigger is Better (the Economy of Scale) and that we must all become monoculturalists (the Economy of Specialisation), has led us to the brink of global disaster.
'The soil of our planet cannot bear the weight of over-large cities'
Travels and observations in over forty countries have convinced me that the soil of our planet cannot bear the weight of over-large cities. Soil may seem of little importance to city people but remember - without that twelve or so inches of brown powder round the earth this planet would be as barren as the moon.
Pre-city civilisation followed the law of return. The fertility which was taken from the soil in the form of food was returned to it in the form of dung. Huge cities cannot follow this law. We are at present mining the last remnants of rock phosphates and of potassium on this planet to dump on our soil - harvest and eat - and then dump into the ocean from which they can never be recovered. A little child could realise, if she thought about it, that this is not sustainable.
I shall speak only of the phenomena that I have myself witnessed:
Firstly, the Cradle of Civilisation. The country, often called by archaeologists the 'Garden of Eden', where agriculture, and therefore civilisation, first began. This is the stretch of perhaps a quarter of a million square miles of country to the north of Mesopotamia, once wonderfully fertile, still with a good climate for agriculture, but which is now a howling wilderness.
Secondly, I went south from there to the Cradle of City Civilisation. The first cities in the world were built by the Sumerians in the flat alluvial plain of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the south of what is now Iraq. That vast area - once the greatest irrigation scheme that has ever existed - is a salt desert. As for the cities themselves - their ruins are clearly that - not only did those cities ruin the land around them, but they also caused the destruction of the 'Garden of Eden', the rain-fed agricultural village culture of the north.
'That Cradle of City Civilisation once the greatest irrigation scheme that has ever existed - is a salt desert'
Thirdly, I went and looked at the sites of other large city civilisations. The Minoan culture in Crete, starting about two and half thousand years before Christ, fell into ruin and totally disappeared after less than two thousand years for the simple reason that the soil went. Cretan farmers now farm their subsoil, with the olive and grape. Mainland Greece built its cities much later - and suffered the same fate. The reason why the Greeks had to turn to trade and industry was because their topsoil failed. Rome followed: the topsoil of Italy went into the sea because of the latifundia the huge slave-worked estates - the agribusiness of their day. After this, the Romans provided the panem part of their panem et circenses from North Africa. If you want to see the huge granaries that they built to contain the grain mountains that they produced there you have to dig them out of the sand dunes.
Fourthly, Africa. The topsoil of Africa is being washed down into the sea. I saw sheet erosion and gulley erosion there such as I had never imagined could possibly have happened in such a short space of time. It is cash crop farming for the city people of the developed world that has destroyed the soil.
'In the Soviet Union, each year between 500,000 and 1,500,000 hectares of cropland are abandoned, so severely eroded by wind as to be no longer worth farming'
Fifthly, I decided to go and look at the Sumeria of today. The Great Plains of North America are the modern bread-basket of the world. The Black Soils of Russia , once the largest unbroken wheat-growing area on the planet, have been virtually destroyed by bad farming, and Russia is now dependent - the CIA, in its 'USSR Agricultural Atlas', noted that in the then Soviet Union 'each year between 500,000 and 1,500,000 hectares of cropland are abandoned, so severely eroded by wind as to be no longer worth farming'. India, China and Indonesia all have to import North American grain in times of shortage. We in Europe are heavily dependent upon North American soya for the protein part of our stock rations. So the soil of the American Great Plains is probably the most important thing in this world.
'By 2020 most of the topsoil of the eastern Great Plains of North America will have gone'
I went to Kansas. To put it briefly, the topsoil of the eastern Great Plains of North America is eroding down the great rivers so fast that nobody knows what to do about it. In the western Great Plains the topsoil all blew away in the dust-bowl period in the early nineteen thirties. But it is now in the East, with its better rainfall, that there is most concern. The high price of maize, wheat and soya, and also cotton, led to continuous cropping, with no legumes grown to provide nitrate, because the nitrate all comes out of the bag, with no animals because the animals have all gone to the dry West, and so no manure to stabilise the soil. And the soil is just going. Most experts I spoke to agreed that by 2020 most of the topsoil of the eastern Great Plains would have gone.
What can we do about it? The Chief Officer of the Soil Conservation Service of Kansas said to me: 'There is no soil erosion on organically rich soils.' There is no soil erosion, for example, on the farms of the Amish community who use neither heavy machinery nor chemical fertilisers. There was no soil erosion on one farm I visited where the farmer had not got rid of his cattle and so a third of his land was always down to alfalfa.
'There is no soil erosion on the farms of the Amish community'
The vast conurbations - I dare not use this beautiful word city to describe them - have got to go. The people have got to move out into the country again. And we have got to split up the huge agribusinesses and vast estates and estancias all over the world. We have got to get people back on the land again.
'The magic of ownership turns sand into gold'
And people will not return to their birthright - the land - as landless labourers or hinds again. They will have to get their fair share of it themselves. Arthur Young wrote: 'The magic of ownership turns sand into gold.'
The people who will leave the conurbations in the future, either because they want to or because they are forced, will demand their fair share of the Earth's surface.
And we must see that they get it.
John Seymour, Killowen, New Ross, Co. Wexford, Ireland (tel 353 51 88156).
Previous / Next / Table of Contents