Word: soiling
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...life, with new combinations of clay, flint and bone, new firing methods and temperatures, and new glazes. Smallpox cost him a leg, but that gave him all the more time to meditate on the potter's trade. "I saw the field was spacious," he wrote, "and the soil so good as to promise an ample recompense to anyone who should labor diligently in its cultivation...
...doubt was a bitter comment on the West's terrible uncertainty. It was in the Italian peninsula that the West's Christian faith, bearing a cross and strange new hopes, had begun its conquest of the world. Was it to be defeated now, on the soil on which it had been strongest, by the new tyrannical faith of Communism...
...will not place in the fertile soil of their intelligence more seed than their natural capacity can nourish effectively. We will fight with all our might against parasitic . . . intellectualism...
Thus far, the increase has been taken care of chiefly by cultivating new land. But this recourse, Osborn thinks, is pretty nearly exhausted. Almost all the good land is already cultivated. Most of the remainder has something wrong with it: bad climate, bad soil or both. There is still room for pioneers, but not enough to make much difference...
Much of the world's best land has been so badly treated that its productivity is falling steadily. Osborn retells the familiar tale of "soil-mining," deforestation and erosion all over the world. As people grow more numerous, the soil they depend on grows poorer & poorer. The low point has almost been reached in the Near East, where man-made deserts occupy large areas that were once fertile and populous. Like most conservationists, Osborn is something of an alarmist. He tends to underestimate the ability of modern agricultural science to revive maltreated soil, make deserts productive by irrigation...