“Joseph Russell Smith, c. 1908.” Picture: American Philosophical Society Digital LIbrary, 2013.
Excerpt from Joseph Russell Smith's Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture
"Again I stood on a crest and scanned a hilly landscape. This time I was in Corsica. Across the valley I saw a mountainside clothed in chestnut trees. The trees reached up the mountain to the place where coolness stopped their growth; they extended down the mountain to the place where it was too dry for trees. This chestnut orchard (or forest as one may call it) spread along the mountainside as far as the eye could see. The expanse of broad-topped, fruitful trees was interspersed with a string of villages of stone houses. The villages were connected by a good road that wound horizontally in and out along the projections and coves of the mountainside. These grafted chestnut orchards produced an annual crop of food for men, horses, cows, pigs, sheep, and goats, and a by-crop of wood. Thus for centuries trees had supported the families that lived in the Corsican villages. The mountainside was uneroded, intact, and capable of continuing indefinitely its support for the generations of men.
Why are the hills of West China mined, while the hills of Corsica are, by comparison, an enduring Eden? The answer is plain. Northern China knows only the soil-destroying agriculture of the plowed hillside. Corsica on the contrary has adapted agriculture to physical conditions; she practices the soil-saving tree-crops type of agriculture.
Man lives by plants. Plants live in the soil. The soil is a kind of factory in which the life-force of plants, using plant food and assisted by bacteria and the elements of the weather, changes earth elements into forms that we can eat and wear, manufacture and burn, or use for building material. This precious soil from which we have our physical being is only a very thin skin upon the earth. Upon the hills and mountains it is appallingly thin. In some places there is no soil at all, and rocks protrude. Sometimes the earth mantle may be only a few inches in depth; rarely does the soil on hill or mountain attain a depth of many feet. Often soil is so shallow that one great rain storm can gash and gully a slope down to bare rock. Where man has removed nature‘s protecting cover of plants and plant roots, the destroying power of rain is increased a hundredfold, a thousandfold, even at times a millionfold, or perhaps even more than that."
Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture - 1929
A downloadable PDF file here, as the book is considered public domain.
Page 8
Chapter 2: The Idea
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