Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

ing with the Germans, Kalmyks were exiled en masse to Siberia in 1943. By
the time they returned fifteen years later, the Soviets were busy creating
Europe’s first desert.
Throughout the cold war, Soviet policies favored plowing up Kalmyk
pastures to increase cereal and melon production. The number of sheep
almost doubled on the remaining grassland. Forage crop yields declined by
half between the 1960s and the 1990s. Each year the desert consumed
another 50,000 hectares of bare fields and overgrazed pasture. By the 1970s
more than a third of the republic was partially desertified.
Plowing the native grasslands of this semiarid region led to problems
reminiscent of the Dust Bowl. Developed on sand deposited on the bed of
the once more extensive Caspian Sea, Kalmykia’s rich soils were held
together by the roots of the lush native grass. Within decades of plowing,
more than a third of a million hectares of grassland were transformed into
moving sand seas. In 1969, after extensive agricultural development, a
major dust storm blew soil to Poland. Fifteen years later another dust
storm sent Kalmyk dirt all the way to France. The republic’s president pronounced
a state of ecological emergency on August 1, 1993—the first such
proclamation from a national government in regard to soil erosion.
The superpowers of the late twentieth century were not alone in losing
soil faster than nature makes it. Erosion outpaces soil production by ten to
twenty times in Europe. By the mid-1980s roughly half of Australia’s agricultural
soils were degraded by erosion. Soil erosion from steep slopes in
the Philippines and Jamaica can reach four hundred tons per hectare per
year—the equivalent of carting off almost an inch and a half of soil a year.
Half of Turkey is affected by serious topsoil erosion. Once done, the damage
lasts for generations.
In the 1970s sub-Saharan Africa experienced its own dust bowl. Until
the twentieth century, West African farmers used a shifting pattern of cultivation
that left fields fallow for long periods. Grazing was light as animal
herders moved long distances across the landscape each year. In the twentieth
century, the combination of a rising population and encroachment of
agricultural fields on traditional pastures intensified land use by both farmers
and pastoralists. Extensive land clearing and degradation led to extreme
soil loss that created a flood of environmental refugees.
The African Sahel lies in the semiarid zone between equatorial forests and
the Sahara. On average the region receives six to twenty inches of rainfall
annually. But the rain varies widely year to year. In a good year, it rains more
dust blow 165