Soil - Environmental Transformations - page 66

A history of the Great Plains: The Plow that Broke the Plains

The 1936 documentary film The Plow that Broke the Plains provides a helpful account of
the varied processes associated with the emergence of agriculture on the North American
Prairie. The documentary also explains how the Dust Bowl emerged and the socio-
ecological consequences that were associated with it.

In YouTube, search for The Plow that Broke the Plainsor go to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQCwhjWNcH8 (accessed 7 January 2013).

conditions, it is unsurprising to learn that the
Dust Bowl resulted in the mass migration of people
away from the Great Plains. In essence, a society
without its soil is quite simply no society at all.
In many respects, the story of the Dust Bowl is
one of the defining moments in the history of the
Anthropocene: a moment when the capacity of
humans to disrupt soil systems on an unprece-
dented scale became apparent. In this chapter we
explore the changing nature of human relations
with soil. While soil is a complex compound that
takes many forms, this chapter understands it as,
'[T]he biologically active, porous medium that has
developed in the uppermost layer of the Earth's
crust' (Merriam Webster, 2012). On these terms,
it is helpful to think of soil as a form of living skin ,
which coats large parts of the planet. As a living
skin, soil provides a collective home for water,
nutrients and organic matter. It also provides
a key link in both the carbon and nitrogen cycle,
as these two vital elements circulate around the
Earth's ecosystems. In addition to distributing
key nutrients, soils also provide a series of so-called
ecosystem services. Ecosystem services are the
valuable forms of assistance that things like soil
constantly provide to the broader biological
communities of which they are a part. In this
context, soils act a kind of filter through which
water can be cleaned and reused within an
ecosystem. As a form of interface zone between
life and death, soils also enable decaying waste
matter to be broken down and reused within an
ecosystem.

This chapter argues that the human use and
exploitation of soils has been a defining charac-
teristic of the Anthropocene. As humans have
sought to utilize soil resources in order to feed an
expanding global population, the condition and
quality of soils throughout the world has been
transformed. Some of these transformations have
been regional in nature, as topsoils have been over
exploited and eroded. Human attempts to enhance
the quality of soils through the application of
artificial fertilizers have, however, also had a
significant impact on the global nitrogen cycle and
the varied ecosystems that depend upon it. This
chapter begins by charting the human impacts on
soil and the nitrogen cycle. The second section
introduces the work of political ecologists, who
have developed helpful frameworks in and through
which it is possible to understand the transforma-
tion of soils as the complex outcome of physical
environmental, political, social and economic
factors. The final section of this chapter explores
all of these themes in greater detail through the case
of modern soil erosion in China.

4.2 SOIL AND
ENVIRONMENTAL
TRANSFORMATIONS

4.2.1 The human colonization of
soil: a brief history
The large-scale human transformation of soils
began some 12,000 years ago. It was at this point