332 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1957 



western mind the much advertised project to reclaim 70 million acres 

 of semiarid virgin land in central Asia for grain production seems a 

 colossal waste of effort when so much more could be done by intensi- 

 fying production on the naturally fertile and more accessible black 

 earths of the Ukraine, but it must be remembered that so far the 

 influence of Man on the soils of the Soviet Union as a whole has been 

 very small, and parts of that vast country are still in the shifting- 

 cultivation stage. There is still the urge to people the empty spaces, 

 which appears again and again, and not only in Russia, in schemes 

 to reclaim deserts or to settle the Arctic, and reflects the inborn long- 

 ing of Man to be master of all he surveys. 



One must recognize, too, that the Chinese Communist revolution, 

 with its emphasis on industrialization, may bring new life to China's 

 wornout soils, many of which seem to be in the last stages of decline 

 after some thousands of years under Man's control. But the revolu- 

 tion has scarcely started yet. 



SOUTH AFRICA AND AUSTRALIA 



These two large countries are taken together not because of any 

 similarity in their agriculture or soils, but because both are at the 

 same critical stage of soil evolution. In both, soil exhaustion and 

 erosion have been very severe and have caused the utmost alarm to 

 farmers, financiers, and politicians. Indeed, the late General Smuts 

 once said that soil erosion was bigger than politics — which meant 

 something in South Africa ! 



Since the last war, however, a remarkable change in outlook has 

 come over both countries. Immense progress, for so short a time, 

 has been made in the reorganization of agriculture on a soil-conserva- 

 tion basis, particularly by the establishment of soil-conservation dis- 

 tricts based on the American model, and by the intensification of 

 agriculture and the introduction of ley farming. In both countries, 

 too, agriculture has ceased to be the main occupation of the inhabi- 

 tants. In Australia three-quarters of the whole population is now 

 urban. In South Africa heavy industry produces more wealth than 

 either mining or agriculture. Both countries have just reached the 

 stage where the wealth of the towns can begin to fertilize the soil. 



The voluntary communal control of soil erosion by means of soil- 

 conservation districts, which has taken such firm root in America, 

 Australia, South Africa, and also on European land in Rhodesia, 

 seems to be the modern equivalent of the communal farming rules 

 enforced to check soil exhaustion throughout feudal Europe. Land- 

 use regulations, made to ensure the maintenance of soil fertility, are 

 enforcible by a district's own laws, as the fallow was enforcible by 

 manorial law. The old three-field system, however, merely prevented 



