RECLAMATION AND RESTORATION - The Soil - page 202

CHAPTER 10
RECLAMATION AND RESTORATION
In this country, we do not have the massive problems of soil reclamation which face
many parts of the world. Our reclamation problems arise not from deforestation, pro-
longed overgrazing, or the tillage of fragile soils subject to drought or erosive monsoon
rains, but from the mining of mineral resources and the dumping of industrial wastes.
We have, in the past, created enormous areas of derelict land from the mining of coal
and oil shale, clay and gravel, chalk and limestone, ironstone and fluorspar. In such
a crowded country, this has become quite unacceptable. An outcry against the despo-
liation of the landscape reached a pitch in the 1960s with such topics as John Barr's
Derelict Britain. As a result of government legislation, there has been a concerted ef-
fort since then to reclaim some of the worst areas, and to ensure, in future, that restor-
ation of the land is planned, as far as possible, as an integral part of any new mineral
working. Today, it is widely recognized that good restoration is the key to future plan-
ning consents.
However, even with the best programme of strip mining, in which subsoil and
topsoil are replaced, major physical and biological disturbance is inevitable. In more
severe cases, the topsoil may become degraded through prolonged storage while, in
the worst cases, materials may be exposed or tipped which have few or none of the
characteristics needed to support life. Yet all natural soils are derived from the weath-
ering of initially inhospitable substrates; there must be few that can outdo the products
of Nature's volcanic furnaces or glacial epochs. The spoil from the Northamptonshire
ironstone workings is, after all, little different from the boulder clay that was left when
the glaciers retreated. This chapter looks first, therefore, at some of Nature's solutions
to the problems of building an ecosystem on such materials, and then examines some
of the human solutions for restoring or re-creating soils with as many desirable features
as possible.
N ATURAL PROCESSES
Some aspects of soil weathering and maturation depend on very slow processes as de-
scribed in chapter 2 ; they may require centuries or longer periods of time. However,
plants are themselves agents in initial soil formation. The sequence of natural vegeta-
tion development seen in disused mineral workings gives us clues to the development