Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

Figure 13. French farmers loading soil from their lowest furrow into a cart to be
hauled back uphill in the late 1930s (Lowdermilk 1953, 22, fig. 12).
sion stopped once vegetation covered the land, freezing the landscape in
time. At issue was whether topography was the ultimate fossil, left over
from Noah’s flood. Hutton questioned de Luc’s view, pointing to the turbid
waters of flooding rivers as evidence of erosion endlessly working to
lower mountains. “Look at the rivers in a flood;—if these run clear, this
philosopher [de Luc] has reasoned right, and I have lost my argument. Our
clearest streams run muddy in a flood. The great causes, therefore, for the
degradation of mountains never stop as long as there is water to run;
although as the heights of mountains diminish, the progress of their
diminution may be more and more retarded.” 13 In other words, steeper
slopes eroded faster, but all land eroded.
A few years later Hutton’s disciple, geologist and mathematician John
Playfair, described how weathering created new soil at about the rate that
erosion removed it. He saw topography as the product of an ongoing war
between water and rock. “Water appears as the most active enemy of hard
and solid bodies; and, in every state, from transparent vapour to solid ice,
let them eat colonies 105