Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

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French Alps lost a third to more than half their cultivated ground to erosion
between the time Columbus discovered America and the French Revolution.
By then people crowding into cities in search of work could neither
grow nor pay for food.
A decade of persistent hunger laid the groundwork for revolution as the
homeless population of Paris tripled. According to the bishop of Chartres,
conditions were no better in the countryside, where “men were eating grass
like sheep, and dying like flies.” Revolutionary fervor fed on long lines at
bakeries selling bitter bread full of clay at exorbitant prices. Anger over the
price of the little available for sale and the belief that food was being withheld
from the market spurred on the mobs during key episodes of the
French Revolution.
Dissolution of the nobility’s large estates freed peasants to grab still
forested uplands. Clearing steep slopes triggered debris torrents that
scoured uplands and buried floodplain fields under sand and gravel. Large
areas of upper Provence were virtually abandoned. Between 1842 and 1852
the area of cultivated land in the lower Alps fell by a quarter from the ravages
of landslides and soil erosion.
French highway engineer Alexandre Surell worked on devising responses
to the landslides in the Upper Alps (Hautes-Alpes) in the early 1840s. He
noted the disastrous consequences that followed when cultivation pushed
into the mountains. Torrents cascading off denuded slopes buried fields,
villages, and their inhabitants. Everywhere the forests had been cut there
were landslides; there were no landslides where the forest remained. Connecting
the dots, Surell concluded that trees held soil on steep slopes.
“When the trees became established upon the soil, their roots consolidate
and hold it by a thousand fibres; their branches protect the soil like a tent
against the shock of sudden storms.” 8
Recognizing the connections between deforestation and the destructive
torrents, Surell advocated an aggressive program of reforestation as the way
to a secure livelihood for the region’s residents. Plowing steep land was an
inherently short-term proposition. “In the first few years following a clearing
made in the mountains, excellent crops are produced because of the
humus coat the forest has left. But this precious compost, as mobile as it is
fecund, lingers not for long upon the slopes; a few sudden showers dissipate
it; the bare soil quickly comes to light and disappears in its turn.” 9
Measures to protect the forest and the soil were often unsuccessful because
it was more immediately profitable to clear and plant, even though deforested
slopes could not be farmed for long.
let them eat colonies