Walter C. Lowdermilk
Assistant Chief, Soil Conservation Service

Moses was inspired to deliver to the Children of Israel wandering in the wilderness the Ten Commandments to regulate man's relation to his Creator and to his fellow men. These guides of conduct have stood the test of time for more than 3000 years. But Moses, leading the Israelites in the wilderness, failed to foresee the great need of the future for an Eleventh Commandment to regulate man's relation and responsibility to Mother Earth which must nourish all generations.

If Moses had anticipated what we have seen in North China, Korea, North Africa, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and our own United States, namely the wastage of land due to man's practices of suicidal agriculture and the resulting man-made deserts and ruined civilizations - if he had foreseen the impoverishment, revolutions and social decadence of billions of peoples through thousands of years, he doubtless would have been inspired to deliver an Eleventh Commandment to complete the trinity of man's responsibilities to his Creator, to his fellow men, and to Mother Earth. Such a Commandment should read somewhat as follows:

XI. Thou shalt inherit the holy earth as a faithful steward, conserving its resources and productivity from generation to generation. Thou shalt protect thy fields from soil erosion and thy hills from overgrazing by thy herds, so that thy descendants may have abundance forever. If any shall fail in this stewardship of the land, his fertile fields shall become sterile stones and gullies, and his descendants shall decrease and live in poverty or vanish from the face of the earth.

But no such Commandment has been part of man's attitude toward his occupation of the Mother Earth except in limited areas. Man has generally been an exploiter, despoiler, and destroyer of natural physical, plant and animal resources of the earth.

Today literally billions of acres of originally productive lands throughout the world bear the curse of unfaithful stewards through the centuries, and their agricultural sins are visited upon their descendants not only unto the third and fourth generations, but unto the tillers of exploited lands today, 1000 or more years later. This curse upon the land, by generations of inconsiderate stewards through ignorance, neglect, lack of forethought, or under the lash of oppression, represents a waste to humanity so stupendous as to exceed the comprehension of the human mind.

The world is now more fully occupied by the human race than ever before in the history of the world. Fully two billions of souls must find their daily food from the lands and the waters of the earth. All lands have been occupied or possessed by nations. No free land remains.

In the face of the limited area of land now available to the human race, the idea that man, at the same time, is still destroying the usefulness of great areas by inconsiderate use of the earth, comes as a shock to thinking people. If man is making deserts out of productive lands, it is a matter not only of national, but of world-wide concern.

An international tragedy, emphasizing the lack of available lands for exploitation or colonization, is taking place just now in the Mediterranean area. Countless refugees from Central Europe, with possessions confiscated, are taking passage at racketeering fares to flee from persecutions unparalleled in modern history. Their ships float for weeks and even months, from port to port, unable to gain admittance to a land of refuge except within quotas. Their crowded condition and suffering on condemned ships are far greater than occurred during the African slave days; for sold slaves had an economic value and were hurried to welcoming shores to be sold. These miserable people today, who are seeking a refuge on land, represent some of the best doctors, lawyers and tradesmen of Europe. They are turned away from every port; there is no room for them on the land. The refugees who have gained admittance to Palestine are carrying out the finest example of devotion to and reclamation of land that I have seen in three continents, and represents the possibilities of these wandering refugees if given a chance. Yet each nation feels overcrowded and closes its ports to them.

This overcrowded condition in a world of land hungry nations, whose soils are being impoverished by erosion, while populations increase, demands a new conception of individual and national obligations to the earth and to posterity. When men are unfaithful stewards in their use of the land they bring a curse upon succeeding inhabitants who inherit and seek to wrest a living from depleted lands and water resources. They find the very source of livelihood washed out from under them, gradually and diabolically impoverishing them. Life becomes such a struggle for more physical existence as to warp and crush the human spirit, bringing on revolutions or political and social decadence. In time the insidious forces of soil erosion and land wastage reach proportions beyond the control and resources of individual tillers of the soil; wearied and discouraged, they migrate, fight, or perish in the wrecks of misused land.

Travels through the morgues of former prosperous areas, now desolate and depopulated, are depressing to one who reads the Macbethan tragedy written far and wide on the landscape. It is appalling to see ruins of once great cities, ruins of civilizations and flourishing cultures, strewn like weather beaten skeletons in the graveyard of their erosion destroyed lands, which today are studded with tombstone-like ruins of their irrigation and agricultural works. We found huge olive presses littering areas where today not an olive tree grows within the circle of the horizon. Stone wine presses were found in great numbers as the only indication of the land use before man-induced erosion had transformed its productivity into sterility. Thistles and thorn-bush are the few Bedouin Nomads who are ready to fight for every water hole and blade of grass which appears after rains. They pitch their tents on the ruins of magnificent stone structures, whose floors were masterpieces of mosaics, whose porticoes were supported by massive columns and whose courts were beautified by marble statuary. Behind all these ruins is the stirring drama and destruction of life. Death of the fertile lands and of its people is a nameless tragedy writ across landscape after landscape.

It fills one with consternation to visit regions which have lain desolate and unproductive for centuries with their beautifully cut stone dams completely silted up as a Kurnub in the Negeb of Palestine, terraces broken down as above Petra in Trans-Jordan, aqueducts crumbled as in North Africa, cisterns and other evidences for the conservation of rain waters fallen into disuses as in Palestine, Trans-Jordan and North Africa. Such areas were abandoned when the erosion wasted soils could no longer feed the inhabitants. It is a story with a sad ending; a period of posterity, followed by one struggle with diminishing productivity, and finally defeat and death.

It was astonishing and revealing to find Mesopotamia literally covered with miniature mountain ranges of silt, some 10, 20, and up to 50 feet in height, piled beside the ancient irrigation ditches. Our automobile log recorded 98 of these ranges of silt during 106 miles of travel. This silt, the offspring of erosion in over-grazed watersheds, tells a story of the ceaseless struggles of millions of nameless toilers, before the potentially rich irrigated lands were allowed to revert again to desert, when due to wars or political decadence, the cleaning of silt from the canals was no longer continued. This valley, which formerly maintained from thirty to fifty million people, supporting a civilization of culture, refinement and learning, now maintains on a very low standard four to five million, whose comforts and accomplishments are a sad commentary on the decadence of cultures.

The Negeb and Sanai region is believed to have supported fully 100,000 inhabitants, but now it scarcely suffices for 2,000 Bedouins. In Trans-Jordan studies by the American School of Oriental Research reveal an extensive ancient agriculture from more than a thousand years B.C. to the 7th century A.D. The loss of fertile soil and the resulting reduction of food supply from the lands of Trans-Jordan are greater than the proportional decrease in population. The food supply and the standards of living and embellished cities among the cultural ancients have little counterpart in the rough stone houses and impoverished villages, and in the camps of illiterate Bedouins of today.

The soil wastage of North Africa is indescribable. We have seen ruins of cities of from 5,000 to 100,000 population with olive presses, wine presses, grain storehouses, remnants of aqueducts, cisterns, terraces, and such works, where today barren desolation, erosion gullies, rocky slopes, dotted here and there by the Bedouin bat-wing tents spread out amidst herds of black goats and camels. The former population is gone, with promise of no or only partial restoration of the former productive capacity of the land.

The staggering soil wastage of North China is unbelievable. Historical-records show that mountain slopes of North China were once heavily forested. The population increased in the alluvial valleys and farmers cleared away the forests and pushed cultivation up the slopes. Trees were cut, the fertile soils were dug up and planted to crops. In 3 to 20 years, depending upon gradients of slopes, the soils were washed off and the farmers abandoned these fields to clear new lands. Finally, the shifting cultivation was pushed up slopes to the summits. Accelerated erosion cut great gullies in deep loessal soils, and bared the rocky flanks of the mountains. Today, hundreds of millions of acres have been seriously reduced from productivity to barren slopes and labyrinths of gullies. Perennial streams are gone; lowlands have been damaged by debris from the slopes; old irrigation systems have been clogged and put out of use, while disastrous floods far away in the lowlands and deltas of the rivers rise to higher stages and cause enormous destruction of life and property.

Some students have attributed this disastrous loss of productivity and desiccation to adverse climatic change. But throughout northwest China, I found Temple forests as green emeralds in ugly settings of gully ridden landscapes, reproducing themselves naturally in the present prevailing climate and rainfall. In several remoter areas I found the diabolical process at work where a virgin forest was being cleared, not for timber, but to get at the soil for food production. The deep soils were sowed to crops and soil erosion soon destroyed the sloping lands. Here were the processes in action whereby man's suicidal agriculture had ruined extensive areas of good land and impoverished and reduced future populations.

In spite of this vast destruction by increased populations hard pressed for food, the Chinese in the alluvial and rice growing areas are the world's best farmers. For more than 6000 years they have farmed these lands which still produce four crops and more yearly. In West and South China, especially, they have level terraced all slopes by infinite labor and patience, and have shown what good stewardship of the land may be.

During five expeditions into North China, prior to 1927, my experimental studies, as reported to the 3rd Pan-Pacific Science Congress, Tokyo, 1926, determined for the first time, comparative rates and amounts of run-off and soil erosion from land within temple forests and adjoining like areas which had been cultivated and denuded. We found that often 60 times as much water, in the form of liquid mud, flowed from cultivated and barren areas as from the forest. The run-off from the latter was scarcely discolored, showing little or no erosion, while the storm run-off on denuded areas tore away the soil, causing permanent loss to the land.

On the basis of these measurements of widespread soil loss by erosion, my estimate is that 12 to 18 inches of soil have been removed from scores of millions of acres of sloping lands in northwest China by man-induced erosion. Fields were abandoned and herds were turned out on them to graze. Goats and erosion were effective in preventing a return of a protective cover of vegetation. By such diabolic processes areas formerly capable of supporting great populations in prosperity, now provide meagre existence for lesser numbers who are also subject to the hazards of drought, floods and famine.

So devastating has been the occupation of man throughout the earth that, with few exceptions, a desert or near-desert condition is often associated with his long habitation in the semi-humid regions which proved the most favorable sites for the early development of human culture. Wittingly or unwittingly generations upon generations have been unfaithful stewards. Their agricultural sins of long, long ago, continue to blight the earth and their successors who seek a living thereon. So ruthless has been the abuse of the productivity of the land that some of these formerly occupied areas have lain desolate and unused by succeeding generations for a thousand years or more.

Until very recently, the desiccation and torrential flooding of inhabited areas was considered an act of a Supreme Being wherein man was the hapless victim. That man may be a decisive factor to so-called vagaries of many natural phenomena is a recent conception.

The rapid growth of this idea of man as a destroyer may be partly attributed to the fact that America has developed desiccated and unproductive lands more rapidly than ever before in the history of the world. Effects have followed so closely on the heels of causes that the reasons are obvious to students of land problems. Striking formations have been visible to eye witnesses within a single generation. We have come to know soil erosion for what it is.

The exploitation of great areas, whether in America, Africa, Australia, or elsewhere, where farmers and stockmen have cleared and grazed new lands at a rate hitherto unknown, tell the same story. The lands at first were plentiful and seemed to be inexhaustible. The best areas were first exploited and then abandoned to a race between erosion and the healing agencies of vegetation. Erosion, aggravated by herds, completed the destruction. Thus, within the memory of the present inhabitants of certain portions of the world, men have witnesses the transformation of fertile plains from luxuriant vegetation into barren windswept desert lands, periodically whirling blizzards of fine soils to parts unknown, and leaving behind sandy hummocks. Stockmen tell of grazing paradises, which within their day, have been depleted of vegetation and gouged with gullies. People who paid their taxes for the building of irrigation dams and reservoirs have already seen some of them abandoned and useless, while other reservoirs are silting up at an alarming rate. The inhabitants of dependent irrigated lands thus threatened, may have to bear the sins of negligent stewards who have destructively cultivated the slopes or overgrazed the hills in the catchment areas feeding such reservoirs.

The vast virgin forests of all these newly exploited continents have largely disappeared. It has been annihilation rather than rational cutting with a planned maintenance of the forest for permanent productivity, and for the control of erosion and flashy storm run-off. In a few countries such as Germany, Italy, and Japan a high conception of the permanent value of natural resources for future national greatness has been developed a vital policy of national planning. Germany and Japan are exemplary in forest and land conservation. Italy is rushing her program of conservation and reclamation as a basis for a greater empire. "Believe! Obey! Fight!" is the billboard slogan of Italy. In these countries individual interests of the present are swept aside for the sake of the national glory of the future.

Fortunately, though belated, a national movement for soil and water conservation was initiated by President Roosevelt, which arouse the American people to the menace of soil erosion. This enemy of civilizations has already destroyed 51 million acres of farm lands and impaired the productivity of 200,000,000 acres more. As a result, the United States has begun the largest and most comprehensive movement for soil and water conservation in the history of the world. But only a beginning has been made; it must be continued and enlarged.

If a nation would project itself into the future it must protect its lands from the ravages of erosion. Erosion is now recognized as a major factor in destroying the usefulness of basic resources in lands, waters, and the spirit of peoples, nations, and civilizations. Erosion undermines the very foundation of an enduring social order; it begets social and political decadence. When lands are impoverished, people lower their standards, both physically and spiritually. Erosion expresses itself as a deficiency disease of the land which begets deficiency of food, vitality, and higher values for peoples and nations.

When nations thus infected with the evils resulting from erosion, they as well as their lands invite invasion by more energetic people. Frequently the bigotry and sheer brute force and cruelty of invaders wipe out the advances and higher values in land conservation gained from the struggles with losses and gains of many generations over long periods of time. Silent and dark centuries follow invasions. Sometimes many centuries elapse before the former degree of civilization and culture are restored, if ever.

As we travel through these lands which have been cultivated - over which destructive armies have marched and nomads run their herds - where people have risen to varying degrees of culture and have been thrown back again to primitive conditions, we are deeply moved by the futility, wastefulness and ineffable sadness of man's effort to adjust himself to the land. Everywhere one sees decadence, ruins, fragments of a greater past. It is an arresting tragedy. How can we make peoples realize that present day agricultural operations have everlasting significance for present and succeeding generations?

Man's methods of inducing accelerated soil erosion are the same in the Far East, Near East, old world and new world. Erosion is a destroyer; not only of sloping lands but of standards of living. The immediate offspring of an erosion wrecked landscape is a decadent population.

Erosion has now been diagnosed; its processes are known and its control is possible. The hope for the future lies in a realization that man has an obligation born of a higher economics, a moral obligation to bountiful Mother Earth which must nourish all present and future human beings on the earth as long as it lasts. It is nothing short of criminal for individuals of one generation to sacrifice the rights of future man to survive because of traditions of special privileges to exploit the earth. The present and future well-being of a people calls for long range policies for the maintenance of productive lands and resources. These policies must be founded on what is right for the greatest number of people in the long run. It becomes a matter of social economics and national ethics. Practices of land use which work against the good of the whole must be regulated, whether by law or public opinion to achieve a dual purpose; to maintain individual initiative, and to safeguard the integrity of resources. A permanent agriculture is vital to the rise and maintenance of a civilization as well as to a rapid recovery after national calamities. A nation must be healthy today, if it would persist into the unknown future.

Exploitation is self limiting and suicidal. It uses up the principal and makes no provision for future balancing of the national resources budget. Finally when a nation is reduced to desperation to supply food for its people, it will go to an expense far beyond any tax burden yet known to cultivate diminishing soils. Rock wall terraces in old lands prove the Herculean labor and expense to which people will go maintain a food supply; the cost of such terracing of steep lands would amount to several thousand dollars per acre at labor wages today. Yet such works were carried out to survive. The economics of survival prevailed.

Land thus becomes not a commodity but an integral part of the corporate existence of a nation, even as its people are. This principle justifies the safeguarding of soils and the restoration of denuded areas on a basis of national ethics and national economy. Economic considerations of today must be shot through with economics of a higher order to meet problems of sustained land use constructively for generations to follow.

Thus for the very endurance of the race, an ethical approach to land use as a trusteeship, to be used and handed down in a productive condition to succeeding generations, becomes imperative. Man expresses his moral obligation to posterity most surely through the earth. The fertile or sterile lands which are passed on to feed future civilizations are, apart from blood descendants, our most direct link with the future. The ethical motivation identifies the interests of the individual with those of one's family of today and tomorrow, outward through local groups to the nation, and eventually to mankind. It draws support and depth from experiences of the past to long range vision and conservation for the future.

Each nation today needs to have a Moses of land conservation, to install in the national consciousness the principle of an Eleventh Commandment to regulate man's relation to the holy earth as a faithful steward, to conserve its productivity from generation to generation. Then fields will be protected from soil erosion and hills from overgrazing by herds, and future generations may be assured of abundance forever.

With the recognition of man's moral obligation to Mother Earth, each nation must assume the responsibility of taking over the reclamation of wasted heritages by unfaithful stewards whose lands have become sterile stones riddled with gullies - and by intelligent land use, bring them back to productivity as much as possible. When its resources are fully husbanded in the advanced knowledge of full conservation, the possibilities of the earth for increased populations are far beyond the imagination of mankind in general. If the vast energies of the human race could be directed toward a goal of conservation instead of destruction, the good earth would respond with abundance of food for all.

Only by conservation in the fullest sense, of the basic resources of land, water, and the spirit of peoples, can we maintain the human values of wholesome standards of living, opportunity, freedom, justice, and faith in the destiny of our modern civilization. Only in conservation have we the assurance of continued progress in the search for that something which has led humanity out of the stone age to a modern mechanical age of development. Only by conservation can we be led on to a higher spiritual and physical development which will express itself in stewardship of the earth for the well-being of humanity for all time.

Editor's note: Thanks to Bruce McCammon for pointing us to this classic of conservation writing.