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Agriculture and soil abuse

gromaca

The stone structures above, uphill from Grabov Rat, are a result of land clearance for the nineteenth century enormous expansion of vineyards, now abandoned, a significant addition to the petrification of the Dalmatian landscape. Although removed stones were partially used in the drystone retaining walls for the vineyard terraces, a huge surplus was dry-built into structures called gomila and gromača. I prefer the term gromača because gomila (a 'pile [of rocks]') is not adequate: those are not just piles of rocks, those are dry-stone struc- tures. Sadly, I don’t know of good English translation of the term gromača; I saw that ‘drystone wall’ is used but those structures by their purpose are not walls.

an excerpt from Out of the Earth, Civilization and the life of the soil by Daniel Hillel (University of California Press, Berkeley,1991).

Before I began my research, I had held the rather prevalent idea that human abuse of the environment is a new phenom- enon, mostly a consequence of the recent population explosion and of our expansive modern technological and materialistic economy. Ancient societies, I presumed, were more prudent than ours in the way they treated their resources. For the most part, that has turned out to be a romantic fiction. My research has led me to the conclusion that manipulation and modification of the environment was a characteristic of many societies from their very inception. Long before the advent of earth-moving machines and toxic chemicals, even before the advent of agriculture, humans began to affect their environment in far-reaching ways that destabilized natural ecosystems.

In many of the older countries, where human exploitation of the land began early in history, we find shocking examples of once-thriving regions reduced to desolation by man-induced soil degradation. Some of these civilizations succeeded all too well at first, only to set the stage for their own eventual demise. Consider, for example, the southern part of Mesopotamia (‘the land between the rivers’) which, as every schoolchild knows, was a great ‘cradle of civili- zation’. We need only fly over this ancient country, now part of Iraq, to observe wide stretches of barren, salt-encrusted terrain, crisscrossed with remnants of ancient irrigation canals. Long ago, these were fruitful fields and orchards, tended by enterprising irrigators whose very success inadvertently doomed their own land.

A haunting example of soil abuse on a large scale can be seen in the Mediterranean region, which has borne the brunt of human activity more intensively and for a longer period than any other region on Earth. Visit the hills of Israel, Lebanon, Greece Cyprus, Crete, Italy, Sicily, Tunisia, and eastern Spain. There, rainfed farming and grazing were practiced for many centuries on sloping terrain, without effective soil conservation. The land had been denuded of its natural vegetative cover, and the original mantle of fertile soil, perhaps one meter deep, was raked off by the rains and swept down the valleys toward the sea. That may have been the reason why the Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthag- enians, and Romans, each in turn, were compelled to venture away from their own country and to establish far-flung colonies in pursuit of new productive land. The end came for each of these empires when it had become so dependent on faraway and unstable sources of supply that it could no longer maintain central control.