Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

When Moses and company arrived, Canaan was a collection of citystates
subjugated by Egyptian military superiority. Heavily fortified
Canaanite cities controlled the agricultural lowlands. Undeterred, the new
arrivals farmed the vacant uplands. “But the mountain-country shall be
yours. Although it is wooded, you shall cut it down, and its farthest extent
shall be yours” (Joshua 17:18). Settling in small villages, they cleared the
forests and farmed terraced slopes in the hill country to gain a foothold in
the Promised Land.
The Israelites adopted traditional Canaanite agriculture in their new
hillside farms, growing what their neighbors grew. But they also practiced
crop rotation and fallowing and designed systems to collect and deliver
rainwater to their terraced fields. With the development of new iron tools,
greater harvests led to agricultural surpluses that could support larger settlements.
Leaving fields fallow every seventh year was mandated and animal
dung was mixed with straw to produce compost. 12 Land was regarded
as God’s property entrusted to the people of Israel for safekeeping. In the
Judean highlands, Lowdermilk noted how a few well-maintained stone
terraces still held soil after several thousand years of cultivation.
Agriculture expanded so much under the later Roman occupation that
the empire’s Middle East provinces were completely deforested by the first
century ad. Grazing typically replaced forests on terrain too steep to farm.
Throughout the region, flocks of goats and sheep reduced vegetation to
stubble. Catastrophic soil erosion followed when too many livestock grazed
steep hillsides. Forest soils built up over millennia disappeared. Once the
soil was gone, so was the forest.
In a radio address from Jerusalem in June 1939, Walter Lowdermilk
offered an eleventh commandment he imagined Moses might have slipped
in had he foreseen what was to become of this promised land. “Thou shalt
inherit the Holy Earth as a faithful steward, conserving its resources and
productivity from generation to generation. Thou shalt safeguard thy
fields from soil erosion ...and protect thy hills from overgrazing by thy
herds, that thy descendants may have abundance forever. If any shall fail in
this stewardship of the land ...thy descendants shall decrease and live in
poverty or perish from off the face of the Earth.” 13
As Marsh had before him, Lowdermilk worried about the implications
of what he saw in the Middle East for America’s long-term prospects. Both
looked to the Old World for lessons for the New World. Neither realized
that the scenarios they worried about had already happened in America.
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