Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

Figure 12. Mid-eighteenth-century agricultural landscape (Diderot’s Encyclopédie,
Paris, 1751–80).
hungry population. When eighteenth-century farmers began clearing
steep lands bordering the French Alps, they triggered landslides that carried
off soils and buried valley bottom fields under sand and gravel. By the
late eighteenth century, the disastrous effects of soil erosion following
deforestation of steep lands had depopulated portions of the Alps. Nineteenth-century
geographer Jean-Jacques-Élisée Reclus estimated that the
let them eat colonies 101