Headline news for more than a half
year now is the fiasco involving our major banking and lending institutions, but
money is not the only area where we’ve been living beyond our means. Other, far
more critical resources—air, water, and dirt—have fallen victim of similar
levels of greed and corruption, only they are not as immediately obvious as the
debacle on the financial front.
I’m of an age that has a broader—if
not better—perspective on the situation. Consider what my first morning in
college contained when in successive classes I was treated to what remain to
this day sterling icons of the malapropos.
Eight o’clock was Geology 101, which
saw the department dean wind up his catalog of earth-building processes with a
snigger for the small body of heretics who preached the theory of continental
drift. He laughed. We all laughed…right from that moment (1954) until 1957 when
deep ocean research undertaken as part of the International Geophysical Year
brought about The Unified Theory of Plate
Tectonics, a very simplified version of what today is a highly diverse and
increasingly contentious vision of what’s happening beneath us.
Next came Economics 101, taught once
again by the department dean, who led off with an overview of what the course
was and wasn’t about. “There are two kinds of goods in the world,” he pronounced
with that certainty reserved for the deeply anointed, “free goods, and economic
goods.” He then went on to explain that air, water, and dirt were the free goods
because they were not, in that day’s thinking, subject to the laws of supply and
demand.
I suspect that these pronouncements
caused these gentlemen some discomfort in their later years, but both,
expounding the beliefs then in vogue, could, at least, plead ignorance. Today we
have no such shield to hide behind, where, as dirt-movers, our impacts are
increasingly obvious.
It’s not so much that we’re unaware
of the rules and regulations in place for preventing soil loss or the fines and
penalties for ignoring them, nor would most of us knowingly take part in or
sanction actions destructive of the environment, but there is incontrovertible
evidence in the degradation of our air and water resources, as well as
accelerating soil loss, that we’re waging a losing war. Part of the problem is
the absence of strict monitoring and enforcement activities that allow shortcut
practices to appear economically sound, but the crucial factors for success lie
in the realms of knowledge and a commitment to effective soil management
practices.
Our sister publication, Erosion
Control is the go-to place for best management approaches, techniques, and
practices aimed at limiting our destruction of fragile earth resources. While
its content is international and multi-spectral (agriculture, construction,
recreation, etc.) fully a half of its articles are relevant to development and
dirtmoving activities. All of its articles since 1999 are available online at www.erosioncontrol.com, so why not
take a moment to check on the kinds of information magazine presents in every
issue. While there why not click on the “SUBSCRIBE” button and sign up for a
free subscription. That’s pretty sound economics for a free good.