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Book Review
| Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations. By David R. Montgomery. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2007. ix +285 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $24.95.
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| Dirt is a euphemism for soil, that vital component of the earth's surface that provides sustenance through agriculture, provides essential cycling of elements between the atmosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere, and provides a store for carbon. In some parts of the world it provides a record of environmental and cultural change, but in others its existence is threatened by the dual forces of people and nature that cause soil erosion, which, in turn, is a threat to nature and culture |
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This book opens with a reminder of soil's importance, notably its understated role in the maintenance of life, its underpinning through food provision of past and present civilizations, and the threats it has experienced. Despite this, soil rarely receives the attention of the popular media. Subsequent chapters deal with soil components and processes and their influencing factors; the initiation and spread of agriculture in the wake of the last ice age, especially in the context of river-based civilizations that utilized alluvial deposits; and ancient civilizations from China to South America through the Mediterranean Basin and the role agriculture, and hence soils, played in their rise and fall. Montgomery discusses how food provision, or lack of it, in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries prompted the "expansion of Europe" into the New World, setting in motion new regimes of soil depletion and erosion. Gold and silver may have been the goals of colonial powers, but other precious commodities such as maize and potatoes were discovered. These were introduced to Europe, just as European crops and domesticated animals were introduced to the colonized lands, profoundly altering indigenous agricultural systems.Further chapters consider the impact of Europeans on North America, including the travesties of slavery and tobacco. The latter's cultivation meant then as it does now the exploitation of soils for a good financial return but an altogether negative social impact (no food value and poor health value), and great drought/erosion episodes such as the Dust Bowl, which influenced government involvement in land management. Such problems are also common elsewhere; for instance, in the Russian steppes, Africa's Sahel, and Ethiopia. |
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Chapters 8 and 9 examine the state of soil chemical and physical deterioration worldwide; the significance of nitrogen fertilizers for crop-yield increases, but which rely on fossil fuels, organic farming, biotechnology, and crop productivity; and no-till cropping as a conservation strategy. The overriding question is: Given an increasing population, can the world's agricultural soils cope? Biotechnology may be able to produce crops suited to impaired soils, but technology has not ventured far into soil engineering, probably because soils are so biologically, chemically, and physically complex. |
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Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations is a good, easily readable, and well-priced introduction to a fundamental component of all human life, one that is under-regarded and that deserves a wider audience. |
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A. M. Mannion, formerly senior lecturer, is now honorary fellow in the Department of Geography, University of Reading, UK. Mannion has written several books, the latest being Carbon and Its Domestication (Springer, 2006). |
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