NEW! Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations -Soil Abuse is Destroying Us- Montgomery

Description: NEW! Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations -Soil Abuse is Destroying Us- Montgomery____________________________ Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizationsby David R. MontgomeryPublished by University of California Press (2012) Condition:BRAND NEW Softcover Book! The binding is tight and all 285 pages within are bright white with NO WRITING, UNDERLINING, HIGH-LIGHTING, RIPS, TEARS, BENDS OR FOLDS. The covers are perfect, as can be seen in my photos. You will be happy with this one! Always handled and packaged with care! Buy with confidence from a seller who takes the time to show you the details and not use just stock photos. Please check out all my pictures and email with any questions! Thanks for looking! About the Book:The underlying problem is confoundingly simple: agricultural methods that lose soil faster than it is replaced destroy societies. Dirt, soil, call it what you want―it's everywhere we go. It is the root of our existence, supporting our feet, our farms, our cities. This fascinating yet disquieting book finds, however, that we are running out of dirt, and it's no laughing matter. An engaging natural and cultural history of soil that sweeps from ancient civilizations to modern times, The Erosion of Civilizations explores the compelling idea that we are―and have long been―using up Earth's soil. Once bare of protective vegetation and exposed to wind and rain, cultivated soils erode bit by bit, slowly enough to be ignored in a single lifetime but fast enough over centuries to limit the lifespan of civilizations. A rich mix of history, archaeology and geology, Dirt traces the role of soil use and abuse in the history of Mesopotamia, Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, China, European colonialism, Central America, and the American push westward. We see how soil has shaped us and we have shaped soil―as society after society has risen, prospered, and plowed through a natural endowment of fertile dirt. David R. Montgomery sees in the recent rise of organic and no-till farming the hope for a new agricultural revolution that might help us avoid the fate of previous civilizations. About author, David R. Montgomery:David R. Montgomery is a MacArthur Fellow and professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington. He is an internationally recognized geologist who studies landscape evolution and the effects of geological processes on ecological systems and human societies. An author of award-winning popular-science books, he has been featured in documentary films, network and cable news, and on a wide variety of TV and radio programs, including NOVA, PBS NewsHour, Fox and Friends, and All Things Considered. When not writing or doing geology, he plays guitar and piano in the band Big Dirt. He lives in Seattle, with his wife Anne Biklé and their black lab guide-dog dropout Loki. A Book Review:5/5 Stars - The environmental collapse being inflicted by our civilization!I've been interested in history, ancient and modern, since my early childhood. Back then, that meant cool armor, swordfights, and dogfighting jet fighters. Now, it's more to do with deforestation and climate cycles. In either case however, and in a host of other realms besides, at some point I grew to notice a conspicuous omission in the narratives: no one seemed to be appropriately concerned with the material facts that drove historical changes. Too much was attributed to forces I had a hard time believing responsible for such momentous changes, like moral decadence and poor leadership, and too little to serious factors that I would now think of in the context of human ecology. As I grew older, I became concerned with the environmental collapse being inflicted by our civilization. I learned of various Very Bad Things like pollution and climate change and ocean acidification and the depletion of ocean fisheries and deforestation and our very own modern Extinction Event. Eventually, my conception broadened to include the environmental mismanagements perpetrated by early humans: the extinctions of macrofauna in Australia and the New World. What has been conspicuously (and rather inexcusably, as we'll see) missing from both of my explorations has been the subject of this book: the mismanagement of agroecology, and, in particular the twin dangers of soil erosion and siltation. David Montgomery follows in the footsteps of Soil Conservation Service writers Vernon Gill Carter and Tom Dale. Their 1970's book Topsoil and Civilization was mentioned in Shumacher's Small is Beautiful, and was my introduction to the topic. They do a perfectly good job summarizing the effect soil management has played in the course of Western history, as well as warning of the dangers facing our new globalized meta-civilization. Those dangers are quite severe, and quite underrepresented in even the most sensationalist or well-informed treatises of the environmental-movement. Our civilization might just survive in the face of all the looming specters in our path, of which Peak Oil and Global Warming are but the most oft-discussed. The one factor that seems to almost guarantee collapse is the same mistake that sealed the fates of Mesopotamia, the Roman Empire, the Maya, Easter Island, and a whole litany of others whose ruins now haunt the public and mystify clueless scholars on the History Channel. The historical record provides a fairly generalizable pattern for the rise and fall of agricultural civilizations. Populations and cultures bloom in the pantry of early cultivation of fertile land. Then, each time a drought occurs and hard times set in, the hungry populace seeks more and more land to cultivate. This pattern continues: growth in good times and expansion in hard times. Finally, the civilization pushes to its geographical limits. Then, in hard times, farmers must turn to land that is far less suitable for agriculture: hilly land that erodes quickly, or forests with poor soils. When all available land, even the most marginal, is being plowed and loses its fertility to erosion, the large population the civilization had sustained begins to experience serious social pains, as natural mechanisms of population reduction kick in: famine, disease, and war. Sometimes, this collapse is severe enough to make people resort to cannibalism. When the collapse occurs, it is generally quite swift. We are currently enacting this same frightening mistake on a global scale. The amount of land currently being cultivated is estimated to equal the acreage already lost to degradation. Grain belts in the US, Russia, and China have lost considerable amounts of their topsoil. Iowa has lost half its topsoil in the past 150 years. Losses in soil fertility have been made up for with chemical fertilizers, but per acre production cannot be expected to increase and will likely decline soon, as irreplaceable topsoil is lost. There is still enough food for everyone currently living. This will not be the case soon, as arable land is lost to erosion, degradation, and most of all to urbanization. Then the inequal distribution of food now will become much more dire. In response, the poorest of us will be forced to work even more marginal land and work it even harder (the tropical rainforests are the one remaining supply of untapped arable land). Things will not be good then. Montgomery presents a bevy of great information and great stories. He begins with an introduction to soil physics, chemistry, and ecology. I wish he'd spent a bit more time on this, of course, but it was much better than either of the other two books I've read on the subject so far (Topsoil and Civilization and Daniel Hillel's Out of the Earth). He spends only a chapter succintly reviewing what Dale and Carter did in Topsoil, without leaving out anything important and adding in besides a number of interseting levels to the stories told. I found his analysis of the role soil erosion has played in US history quite fascinating (it was the true cause of the Westward expansion and, indirectly, the Civil War). He also reviews the history of fertilizers and their organic alternatives. Finally, much of the second half of the book is spent quite poignantly reviewing the situation I shoddily described above. That is, the dire peril soil erosion presents to our civilization. He is not overtly pessissimistic about things, as I am, for whatever reason. It seems that the evidence he and others presents says that, once a civilization has reached the overshoot we have now, the desperation of overpopulation finishes off the job despite any level of environmental consciousness and political response mustered at that stage. And I for one am certainly not impressed with the environmental consciousness and political response we have right now. It's quite late already, and there is still no evidence that things will or can change in time.--Adam Copyright © 2018-2024 TDM Inc. The photos and text in this listing are copyrighted. I spend lots of time writing up my descriptions and despise it when un-original losers cut and paste my descriptions in as their own. It is against ebay policy and if you are caught, you will be reported to ebay and could be sued for copyright infringement and damages.

Price: 18.99 USD

Location: Orem, Utah

End Time: 2024-08-20T15:43:46.000Z

Shipping Cost: 6.79 USD