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Nature Out of Control

A. W. Steen

1940

Published in:

• Social Trends Newsletters, Apr. 1996, No. 146 excerpted from the article Engineering With Nature in The Technocrat, no. 41, March 1940 and no. 42, Apr 1940.

Three centuries ago, North America was a virgin continent. It was abundantly rich in soil, timber, minerals, and wild life. Only a fraction of its vast area had ever been touched by the hand of the white man. Its wealth seemed inexhaustible.

Today a great part of this natural heritage is gone, and more is going fast. In the headlong commercial expansion of our frontiers and exploitation of our resources, there was little care for the future. Our forests are disappearing. Our land is giving way to erosion. As a consequence of this devastating neglect, greater and greater areas of America are turning to desert and her rivers are causing successively greater flood disasters.

This havoc wrought by wind and water cannot be blamed on Nature. The depletion of soils and forests and the destructiveness of the floods are the results of humankind's activities.

Nature was exceptionally good to this Continent. She set mountains on the eastern and western sides, creating a valley in the center drained by the Mighty Father of Waters, and protected its face with grasses and forests.

Nature laid out the Mississippi River to drain 31 states and two provinces of Canada, or 43.7 percent of the total area of Continental United States. This mighty river has thousands of tributaries extending from the state of Pennsylvania to the state of Montana, or, from the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachian Mountains. As the water must be carried down to the Gulf of Mexico in one major channel, Nature regulated this great area by growing forests, brush, and grasses along its adjoining streams and rivers. The forest protected the ground from frost, leaving it porous and sponge-like so that the snow, when it fell, could melt and soak in, feeding the subterranean channels gradually and thus keeping the water table normal. The forests acted as a guard against the hot sun and winds, thus tempering the climate and also regulating the flow of the streams.

The upper tributaries were of a winding nature, along which the beavers built dams, creating a natural check-dam system. Sudden floods were thus averted; the major channels were fed gradually. The swamps covering a large area in the Middle Western and Northern states acted as storage basins for the early rains and runoff from melting snows. The roots of grass and plants held the topsoil of the great plains in place. This Continent was in dynamic equilibrium, or natural balance; nature had built a perfect system of drought and flood control to protect the fertile soil. Animal and plant life continued to develop in harmony through thousands of years.

The American Indians were lovers of nature and in their lore and traditions knew the forests to be a shelter for birds and game and the regulator of the streams. But the White Man has taken soil fertility for granted, has destroyed and sold it off as though it were as inexhaustible as the air. We financed the building of America by trading soil capital for Old World money capital. It was a costly trade. Within a couple of generations many farms have passed through the destructive cycle from virgin soil to ruin.

In the interest of settling this country, it was the national policy to dispose of the public domain as quickly as possible. Grants were made right and left to all sorts of groups and individuals, a great many of whom considered land and forests merely as something to be acquired and exploited or resold at a profit. During only two decades, the 1850s and 1860s, there passed into the hands of western railroad promoters and builders a total of 158,293,000 acres, an area almost equaling that of the New England States, New York, and Pennsylvania combined.

This quick transfer of the land from public to private ownership was accompanied by settlement and commercialization. Great areas of grazing lands were plowed for the first time and turned into crop lands. Timber cutting became an industry. Thus began the upsetting of Nature's dynamic equilibrium in the soil and forests that is resulting in an annual waste of resources far greater and more serious than most individuals realize.

Keystone in the equilibrium were the forests. Besides their effect of binding the soil together with their roots and checking the flow of water and the melting of snow, trees have a tremendous influence on precipitation. Trees are a primary cause of much local rain; without them moisture laden air might drift over great distances, away from where rain is needed. Trees also emit much moisture through their leaves. Over a given area, trees can give out into the atmosphere, by "transpiration", more moisture than that which will evaporate from a body of water covering a like area.

Thus, forests prevent sudden water flow, or floods; they cause local rains; they form windbreaks; and they give off much-needed moisture to surrounding country. But as we mentioned above, most of our original forests have been destroyed — much of it wastefully. And only a small part has been replanted. With the destruction of our forests, water and winds have been free to erode our soil.

The destruction of our soil cannot be measured in dollars and cents. Ten billion dollars could not buy back the top soil that has been washed into the ocean, taken out by crops, or blown away. It is irreplaceable. Oddly enough, soil, the Continent's most valuable resource, is the last of the Continent's important natural resources to become the object of popular conservation interest. The urgency for protecting it from wasteful destruction is one of the greatest.

Fertility may be lost or removed from the soil in four distinctly different ways: (1) By erosion, either through surface washing or wind action; (2) by harvesting crops; (3) by leaching (draining away to deeper soil), and (4) by volatilization (escaping into the atmosphere). In most areas, erosion and crop harvesting cause the greatest losses. Because cropping requires cultivation and cultivation increases erosion losses, the two causes are obviously interrelated in the problem of erosion. The most serious of all soil losses is the loss of the soil itself through the action of water and wind. Of the two forces, water and wind, water usually causes the most spectacular and destructive erosion.

With the soil-binding vegetation uprooted and the topsoil blown away, nothing is left to hold the rain and away it goes — loaded with more soil — to the ocean. So floods, too, continue to get bigger and more destructive as time passes.

It should be evident that tons of this Continent's irreplaceable soil resources are being wasted by various forms of erosion and depletion.

It should be evident that as soon as possible a Continent-wide program to combat this destruction must be undertaken.