Quotes About Topsoil

One of the more interesting things I learned from my first job as a foundation inspector was that preparing a building site means carting the topsoil off to a landfill. Sometimes the fine topsoil was sold as fill for use in other projects. Completely paved, Silicon Valley won't feed anyone again for the foreseeable future.

The United States has lost one-third of its topsoil since colonial times—so much damage in such a short history. Six to seven billion tons of eroded soil, about 85 percent, are directly attributable to livestock grazing and unsustainable methods of farming feed crops for cattle. In 1988, more than 1.5 million acres in Colorado alone were damaged by wind erosion during the worst drought and heat wave since the 1950s.

The winter period between September and March in this country, when land sits fallow and is subject to topsoil loss, we could be enriching the soil and growing all the biomass we need to replace imported gasoline.

The Lebanese flag has a cedar tree on it because much of what is now desert was thickly forested before the harbingers of civilization--i.e., woodcutters, farmers, and goats--saw to it that large stands of cedar will never grace the Holy Land again. The stark and sere limestone hills that we think of as typical Greek and Italian landscape were once all but invisible beneath a layer of long-gone topsoil held in place by forests of cedar and oak.

When the French were here, they began cutting down the trees. Haiti's dictators finished the job, leaving the topsoil to run into the ocean. All that splendid mahogany furniture in Paris salons and this is the result: a bald brown island with a muddy coast.

Topsoil is a place of digestion. It sucks and chews things into smaller pieces. When it's hungry, it turns grey and stony; when it's thirsty, it opens thousands of cracked lips. Subsoil is more skeletal: it doesn't digest.

In a broad reach of savanna, the Beni's original inhabitants built raised fields—artificial platforms of soil that lift crops above the floodwaters. Like the raised beds in temperate-zone gardens, they promote drainage and increase the amount of topsoil available to plants. The few carbon dates available suggest that the fields date from about three thousand years ago to about five hundred years ago—roughly the time the conquistadors arrived, bringing European diseases.

Scientists estimate that it took a thousand years for an inch of topsoil to accumulate on the arid high plains. It was the work of a moment to blow it away. Topsoil exposed by the disc plows turned to dust, and the dust began to eddy, roil, and lift on the wind. "Rolling dusters," they were called, or "black blizzards." There were fourteen of them in 1932. The year after that, thirty-eight.

One hundred million acres had lost most of its topsoil and nearly half had been "essentially destroyed" and could not be farmed again, Bennett said.

The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil...It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it, not by ambition or aggressiveness. It is enriched by all things that die and enter into it. It keeps the past, not as history or as memory, but as richness, new possibility...

the overburden like that they've turned the geology upside down. Topsoil is on the bottom and rock that was on the bottom is now on top. Native plants and trees won't grow in it. So they introduce non-native plantings that are royally screwing up the ecosystem.

Somebody told me it was frightening how much topsoil we are losing each year, but when I told that story around the campfire, nobody got scared.

A significant proportion of the work of the Reclamation and Reconstruction Corps had been concerned with replacement of topsoil lost by erosion caused by overfarming, or poisoned by industry during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, or stripped away by floods and hyperstorms during the Overturn.