Word: soiling
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...Soil for the Future. Obviously, the James Joyce Memorial Liquid Theatre has more the air of group therapy than it does of legitimate theater. But it would be a mistake to dismiss it as some sort of peripheral fad. The true purpose of the avant-garde is to provide the soil in which future drama will grow. Aesthetic soil means shaping a mentality. For example, the Depression created the mentality of social consciousness, and out of that mentality sprang the social protest plays of the '30s and the Group Theater. The mentality of Freudian psychology prefigured Tennessee Williams...
...skills at roughly the same time in what is now Mexico and Central America. More recent discoveries by members of a University of Hawaii expedition in northern Thailand may well push the birth of agriculture even farther back. The Thai evidence suggests that peoples of Southeast Asia tilled the soil more than 2,000 years before anyone began to farm in the Middle East or the Americas...
FERTILIZERS. To boost crop production, nitrogen fertilizers are spread liberally on California's superb farm lands. Just as people get hooked on drugs, so the soil seems to become addicted to chemical additives and loses its ability to fix its own nitrogen. As a result, more and more fertilizer has to be used. What makes the problem doubly serious is that the nitrates eventually turn up in the water supply, where they endanger human health...
...farm land in the nation, producing five or six bumper crops a year. The valley's intense irrigation, however, is raising the level of the water table to the bottom of the irrigation trenches. Salts are pulled to the surface ?and salts do not evaporate. In time, the soil becomes too saline to support normal crops...
Good Life and Do-Sooders. At Weatherford (pop. 6,000), on the lip of the red-soil belt, small frame houses have given way to sprawling ranch-style -spreads inhabited by workers in new industries. "Our salaries are low by Northern standards," concedes Ed Berrong, an insurance man and a state senator. "But we just live a good life -until the do-gooders come down here from Washington and tell us we're poverty-stricken." In Okemah (pop. 2,900), an electronics plant provides a $30,000 monthly payroll, and merchants have responded with a modern Ben Franklin variety...