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The War at Our Feetby HENRY A. WALLACE
Americans can choose. It is a matter of tremendous significance to the future of the world which ideas we choose. The overwhelming impulse at the moment, I think, is to put our own house in order, to make this land a suitable habitation for freedom, and to stay out of Old World quarrels. What we need first of all is a set of ideas that will command our allegiance over partisan, class and regional consideration, a campaign of peaceful conquest within our own borders. In a genuine and coordinated long time campaign of conservation, one that touches on every phase of life from the enrichment of soil to the enrichment of human opportunities and talents, I feel that we have such a cause. A start has been made, a good start. We see now that the loss of our basic heritage can be stopped. Our agriculture, our civilization, can be made permanent. We begin to understand how. Here in our chosen land, with its rich expanse of gleaming shores, great rivers, mountains,-prairies, plains, we have a country worth defending. What other peoples fight for, we have. There is no better country anywhere. Let us defend it. Let us comprehend, before it is too late, the primary relationships between our country and its people. Let us read our histories—of ancient civilizations that perished as their dying cities found themselves situated in deserts as barren as the moon. Let us face, first of all, the war at our feet! The Vanishing Soil WE USED TO THINK THAT UNLESS RILLS AND GULLIES Appeared on the face of the land, the soil was still there, with no serious damage from accelerated erosion. Early in the present century Hugh Bennett showed that smooth land may become barren. Whole fields and the greater part of a countryside may lose all or nearly all of the topsoil to the streams and the sea, grain by grain, layer by layer, without a single rill or gully breaking forth to cry warning. Bennett detected "sheet erosion" all the way from Virginia to Oklahoma. Bennett and his helpers were in the vanguard of a new defense against an actual enemy. NOW we have seen the refugees from the thinned fields; we have learned the grim fact that when a soil "runs down," not only the soil but the people there are drained of the very essence of life and vitality. We have thought in the past that even if good land fell off in yield it could rather quickly be made rich again with manure and fertilizers. We now know this is not true—not when the "run-down" condition stems not simply from the removal of plant food by crops but also from soil erosion. Erosion removes not only nitrogen, phosphorus, potash and so on; it removes the living soil. Jay A. Bonsteel pointed this out in a farmers' institute talk at Ithaca, N. Y., a quarter of a century ago. He said: "Isn't it time to revise, somewhat, our preconceived notions with regard to plant food, removal by cropping; to look at the wind and the waters as the active agencies causing soil deterioration?" At a number of our experiment stations long term measurements of soil depletion under different methods of cropping have been made meaningless by accelerated erosion. Experimenters have gone on for years noting the pounds of nitrogen, phosphorus, potash, removed by crops, without regard for the fact that on bald knolls especially, and throughout the field in varying measure, the topsoil they were regarding as a fixed resource had literally run out on them. It is off in some other field now, or part of a river bed, or buried in the sea. At the dawn of this century men like Henry Wallace, my grandfather, and "Tame Jim" Wilson, and Seaman A. Knapp, cried out against "soil mining" and prescribed more careful and diversified farming as a stay against ruin. Their cure was, in general, right. In the light of all that we know now, the surest way to save soil is to get away from single crop systems. Now we also know enough to farm with an eye to the natural lay of the land, along its contours, with the steeper lands kept under the binding cover of trees or grass. But when it came to understanding the major cause of a visible and startling decline in productive power over much of our soil, both farmers and scientists were slow to follow the explanations given by Bennett, Bonsteel and others. The "illusion of inexhaustibility," as Bennett calls it, still conditioned to a remarkable degree the thinking not only of business men, and of husbandmen, but of most American scientists, in the years around 1900. Partnership with Nature THE FIRST GREAT CONSERVATION DRIVE IN THIS country dates from 1905 in the administration of the first President Roosevelt, when Gifford Pinchot was brought to the Department of Agriculture as chief of the Forest Service. In 1908, Theodore Roosevelt called a conference of governors at the White House, and Dr. Thomas G. Chamberlin of the University of Chicago made the main address. He said: Soil production is very slow. I should be unwilling to name a mean rate of soil formation greater than one foot in 10,000 years. When our soils are gone, we, too, must go unless we find some way to feed on raw rock or its equivalent. . . . The key lies in due control of the water which falls on each acre. . . . The highest crop values will usually be secured where the soil is made to absorb as much rainfall and snow fall as practicable. . . . This gives a minimum of wash to foul the streams, to spread over the bottom lands, to choke the reservoirs, to waste the water power, and to bar up the navigable rivers. Theodore Roosevelt backed this view, powerfully. "To skin and exhaust the earth," he proclaimed, "will result in undermining the days of our children." The new-born Forest Service labored mightily to make the public erosion conscious. But there was still little understanding of the subtler devastation wrought on open farmland by sheet erosion. It was not generally known at the time that even "flat lands" with long, slight slopes, as on the plains and prairies, were also going out on us at an alarming rate. Chamberlin did great service in emphasizing that when soil runs down, farmers are not the only sufferers. Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, another geologist of the period, was also emphatic in depicting the whole complex of living structures from plants on up to humans, which accelerated soil erosion throws out of joint. That Earth is our common mother is probably a concept as old as man; but it is accepted more generally as a poetic idea, a charming fable, than as a fact. It is a fact; and Shaler drove it home as such. Topsoil, he wrote, is Earth's placenta—a thin, living film by which Earth, the mother, transmits sustenance to all things living. Topsoil is not immovable or static. It is a semi-fluid, forever moving, forever changing its form. The wind whips at the drier parts above and, even in humid parts, moves topsoil. Even more insistently and seriously the push of water drawn downward by gravitation keeps topsoil moving and changing. And once topsoil is drowned, in a stream or lake or river or in shoals under the sea, it is dead soil, lost to farming. It tends to kill fish, to increase the scouring ravages of floods, to impede shipping, and to diminish power sources. Excessive run-off of soil, rubble, have filled and made almost useless in a very few years some of the greatest artificial lakes we have built sources of power, or pleasure; as fonts of dryland irrigation, or as reservoirs for municipal water supply. Unless we move quickly to diminish the run-off from, say, the mountains around Los Angeles, the question of accelerated erosion there may soon be one that concerns not only remotely situated foresters and ranchers. It will most seriously concern every dweller in the irrigated bottoms and, eventually, every city person who trustfully twists spigots and expects automatically to obtain a flowing abundance of clean water. Good Land—Strong People WISE LAND USE IS SIMPLY AN ADAPTATION OF NATURE'S conservation and flood control methods to the conditions of advanced cultivation. Instead of leaving fields smooth and bare, the idea is rather to roughen the surface, turn he earth itself and the plants themselves, into impediments to run-off, protectors of the soil. By the simple device of plowing and cultivating around the hill on the contour, instead of up and down the hill, each furrow, each harrow scratch, becomes in effect a small dam or terrace. The principle is simple: to make running water walk, or creep, to store a far greater part of it in that greatest of all reservoirs—the soil; and to do this by making the soil and its crops provide, as impediments to run-off, millions of natural little dams. Agriculture cannot offer a complete substitute for flood-water fortifications downstream; but it can offer a multitude of reinforcements upstream, where the raindrop falls to earth. Whether we are thinking in terms of floods to be quieted, soil to be held secure, or in the final terms—an end to soil and human displacement, permanent agriculture, national security—we must learn to think our way around and through the imagined partitions behind which scientists, specializing, love to encase and adorn their chosen segments of learning. A specialty, Huxley remarked years ago, should not be a door between the specialist and all the rest of life, but a window through which he may view the spectacle as a whole, and grow in wisdom. To agriculturists—all of them, from soil physicists to anthropologists and field workers for Farm Security—this observation offers challenge. Natural life, outdoors, is all of a part. So again, all of a part with outdoor processes, is the more artificial life in cities. To cover the earth with cement, to strike the foundations of great stone or steel towers down to bedrock does not cut New York City, or Chicago, or Boston, or San Francisco out of the natural cycle. The soil of great cities is mainly sealed from the weather. There is no soil erosion there; erosion takes other forms. There is a real connection between a lapse of faith and spirit in great metropolitan centers and torn, partly wasted lands outside. The torn land provides a diminished sustenance not only for the people who work it, but also for these millions who have removed and sealed themselves apart from and above bare, yielding earth. No less than the farmer, the city man is living on soil and its products. And when the uncovered soil and its products diminish, the cities feel it, too. Damage to the land is important only because it damages human lives. The whole purpose of conservation goes back to that fact. Saving soil is not an end in itself; it is only a means to the end of better living. Displaced I soil leads to human displacement. To the extent that the area of declining land increases under the drain of soil erosion, the problem of stabilizing farm income and reliving rural poverty will be magnified. In the western half of Baca County, Colorado, the heart of the Dust Bowl, for example, 35 percent of the land was tax delinquent at the beginning of 1938, largely as the result of wind erosion which forced abandonment. As more and more land becomes delinquent, the tax burden frequently is shifted to good land and to the cities in order to meet community costs for the maintenance of schools, roads, relief and other social facilities. Community disintegration is the ultimate consequence where land declines to the point at which it will no longer provide a living for individuals or a sound base of community wealth and commerce. We are all affected; and we must all deal with the problem together. Most of all, the scientists and leaders of our national life must coordinate their efforts to keep our country permanent. We have talked about coordination in the Department of Agriculture and in the state colleges and experiment stations a great deal, of late. We have done some coordinating, and we are going to do more. But the more you consider the think the more certain it seems that we must all of us think in terms of a living unity before our paper plans of coordinated organization can amount to much. By thinking in terms of "a living unity" I intend to suggest nothing mystical, but only a foundation fact. Everything is made of our Mother, the Earth. Man is part of the living landscape, made of the same materials, moulded by the same natural processes and laws His body, his thoughts and his spirit are a product of that landscape; that sun, soil, wind and air. We are slowly learning to think in terms of a new science called ecology in terms of inevitable relationship: to recognize that all things under the sun—the clouds, the rocks, the soil, the streams; factories, cars, airplanes; the people, and the spirit of the people—are all of the same going concern. Sky and soil combine to determine man's habits and growths and hopes and character, almost as surely, though in far more intricate fashion, as sun and wind, the pattern of moss on moist springhouse stones and, in drier spots, the pattern of lichens on a rock. One difference is that the American family does not have to stick in one place and take what comes, as the lichen does. Men still have freedom of movement and of choice. But it becomes each year plainer that if man, in ignorance or carelessness, wounds topsoil, deranges water sources, or otherwise smashes the balance between that delicate interplay of natural forces which makes life possible and rewarding, then his freedom of choice diminishes. He is punished by poverty where he is; and he finds fewer and fewer favored spots to escape to. The awful displacement, first of soil, then of people, which we have witnessed in the Dust Bowl since the last World War boom is only part of the story. We may see, if we look, year in, year out, a tragic milling around of dispossessed, poverty stricken, homeless and all but hopeless people, in the washed-out expanses of the Cotton South. It would sometimes seem that tobacco and corn and cotton have taken a rather horrible revenge on us, under our clean culture, straight-line methods of tillage. The damage in the South becomes all the more striking in the light of estimates that for every bale of cotton we have shipped l abroad we have lost not only the plant food that is in that cotton, but at least 50 tons of topsoil to the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Grassy Hills and Clear Streams WE HAVE DURING THE PRESENT ADMINISTRATION MADE sweeping changes in our land policy; but it is wrong to think that we previously had no land policy at all. We had one from the first. It was to get the country opened up, settled, and clothed with farms. The Morrill Act, the Homestead Acts, and to a lesser extent the Smith-Lever Extension Act of 1914 all looked to that end. And the government was far from inactive, all along, in directing the design for agriculture. Often it was the wrong design; but the government was in there pushing it. For one thing, and this is important in our West especially, the government gave out land "on the square"—in an enlargement of the gridiron pattern of our wrongly laid out cities and towns. There are not many par of even flat land which can be farmed on the square an the soil remain stable. Too many easy flowing channels are thereby created. On straight-plowed corn land that looks level in southern Illinois, Arthur Mason discovered twenty years ago half or more of an 18-inch topsoil had washed away. "Agricultural regions with cloudy streams, Mason announced, "are, must be, temporary. Agricultural regions with clear streams are, must be, permanent." The answer he felt, was to abandon clean-tilled corn culture altogether, mat the prairie with a solid sward of leguminous grass, and feed that to livestock, dehydrated. Dehydrated grass, cut young, together with new developments as to ensilage, do promise to develop into important stays against erosion. The geneticists, too, may be counted on to produce changed plant forms that will grasp the land and at the same time feed us and our livestock without, as George Washington said, "filling all the land with Indian corn." But the whole answer to erosive wastes, as we begin to see it now, lies in no one line of attack, or defense; it involves a changed map of land use, a sweeping combination of cultural tactics, a whole new pattern of agriculture and residence. Stated in the simplest manner, it means putting land to the right use, and farming better. That may sound simple; but it is not simple. The problem is enormously complicated and challenging. Anyone who joins in the effort, or supports it, may truly feel that he is doing something for his country, the effects of which will be felt for the better long after he is gone. Arthur Mason felt this strongly: "The instinct that we all feel about good land," he wrote, "is sound—perhaps it is a latent feeling, that only from good land can a robust stock of men come forth, and one need not go far to verify this. . . . I have seen cattle deteriorate in poor country. . ." From Versailles to Triple-A WHEN, AT VERSAILLES, DISPUTED EVEN AS THE great powers buried their dead, known and unknown. and American boys returned from the battlefields of France to resume civilian occupation, Mason issued a call for a new kind of warfare. "How cheerfully our young men went into a great war for posterity's sake." he cried, "how languidly they hear of this more terrible enemy, insidious, undramatic, draining the nation's blood, the soil—the body of the soil itself—away to the sea!" Speaking more quietly in a book, "The Holy Earth," published as that European war was raging, a great agriculturist and prophet of this soil, Liberty Hyde Bailey, made plain what we all know to be true, instinctively: that there is such a thing as an ethic of agriculture and a morality of agricultural statesmanship; also, that in the last great War our record as farmers and statesmen was, on the whole, bad. It is both astonishing and humbling to look back now and consider, how with even as much as we then knew about accelerated erosion, we farmers and agricultural people consented to the plow-up of unsuitable acreage, the deforestation and cropping of unsafe slopes, a general headlong overcropping, both during the War, and in the boom days afterward. We skinned our land and piled the crops overseas. We reduced considerable areas, thousands of miles from the battlelines to the appearance of battlefields. blasted and pitted. And what in the end did we have to show 'or it? Paper payments, and Pretty soon most of the paper went bad. Let us never make that mistake again. Today we not only know better, we have new equipment; we have machine equipment. It has helped tear soil down, but may also be turned, we see now, to the task of defense, to build soil up again. We have new human equipment, young people with trained minds and a new concept of serving the land and the nation. And we have new human organizations, new social implements, afield. We have come to this knowledge and to these new social implements by forced marches, and even in recent years have made some bad mistakes. Much that we believed until recently about the virtues of a "fine dust mulch!' we know now to have been generally wrong and dangerous. Even more recently we have discovered that neither terrace, nor strip-cropping, nor any one single device is a cure-all for soil wastage. The trouble requires coordinated methods, and a coordinated approach. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration, first organized in 1933, was not set up to save soil, but to sustain our farm income. Yet it started almost immediately to sustain and improve soil. Even after that first smashing plow-up of cotton, a maneuver only to be countenanced in the light of the fact that another year of 5-cent cotton would have brought the South to absolute disaster—even after that first crude plow-up, you began to see in parts of the one-crop cotton country something rare and new: bright fields, bright with the living green of grass. Brooding upon what they had done, probably, and provided now with some money, both from an improved crop price and from Triple-A adjustment payments, thousands of farmers went out on their own volition and sowed those plowed-down strips to binding sod. Even the first year you could see the change. That was the beginning of a great growth and spread of new cover on worn soil and every year Triple-A payments have been more consciously designed to advance such changes. The process was definitely under way when the Supreme Court declared the first Triple-A unconstitutional. Strangely enough the trend of programs toward an induced and aided spread of conservation practices was greatly accelerated by that decision. NOT ALL OF OUR ADVANCES TOWARD SOIL CONSERVATION HAVE moved evenly together, without friction or duplication. Here in the Department of Agriculture we are doing all that we can now to make them move together for the good of the country as a whole. We have: At the National Level
At the State Level
WE HAVE, THEN, A LAND USE PLANNING STRUCTURE REACHING from the farms to Washington. Forty-five states are taking part in a cooperative land use planning project. Local land use planning committees are now at work in nearly all counties in these 45 states. Within less than a year after the Mt. Weather agreement, preparatory work had been begun in 830 counties, and intensive work in about 450 counties. An equal number is expected to begin intensive work in 1940. In at least one county in each state, a unified program of action based on community and county plans prepared locally, will be undertaken in 1940. By 1941, unified program action are expected to way in the 450 counties now engaged intensively in planning. It is intended eventually to carry on unified programs of action in all counties. We have personnel trained to provide technical leadership. In the field of research—state experiment stations, federal research bureaus. In the field of education we have 8500 extension workers, several thousand vocational agriculture instructors, colleges of agriculture, etc. In the field of planning we are developing cooperative planning pro. procedures involving thousands of farmers plus technicians and administrators. And in the field of action are 90,000 community and county AAA committeemen, 15,000 FSA personnel, 16,000 SCS personnel, 7500 Forest Service personnel, CCC camps, and soil conservation district supervisors. What is this new design that we propose for our farming and living? You will see it from the air, in places, as you fly across the nation, now. Here and there farmers have already joined in a new combination and a new field pattern of culture. Farms that used to resemble storehouses laid end to end now lock together in swirls. They sprawl on the earth securely. It is a striking design, dictated by the earth's conformation and as individual to a given stretch of country as a human fingerprint. The basic agricultural idea is to get away from square farming in a round country. The main thing is to reform fields and rotations into strip-patterns cut to the curve of the land, much as the parts of a garment are cut to the configuration of a human body. Land farmed along these lines is fairly sure to stay there; and it is beautiful. Some Pennsylvania-German farmers have been farming their land like this since the days of the first settlement. It is practical; it works. A strict gridiron pattern defies common sense and the laws of gravity. Our land is all of one body. Wind and water are no respecter of line fences, or state or county lines. There can be no real conservation without the wholehearted understanding and backing of all the people who live on the land or off the land. Only by thinking and working all together can we save our country and increase its yields. OTHER GREAT PEOPLES ARE UNDER ARMS AND AT WAR AGAIN. They have been driven again by pressures which we feel too, but which do not press Americans inevitably into policies of destruction. Let us here in the United States, and the whole of the western hemisphere, embark on a determined policy of conservation; of groundless restitution. The war for survival which needs most concern us now is not in Europe, and not in Asia, but on the ground at our feet.
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