Word: topsoil
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hundreds of environmental pressure groups advising the Earth Summit negotiators, the world has lost 200 million hectares (500 million acres) of trees since 1972, an area roughly one-third the size of the continental U.S. The world's farmers, meanwhile, have lost nearly 500 million tons of topsoil, an amount equal to the tillable soil coverage of India and France combined. Lakes, rivers, even whole seas have been turned into sewers and industrial sumps. And tens of thousands of plant and animal species that shared the planet with us in 1972 have since disappeared...
Countless examples show that disregarding the natural balance is self-destructive. Deforestation in Southeast Asia has let the rivers wash fertile topsoil down the drain, so to speak, destroying the land and the habitat of the indigenous human population that was supposed to benefit from the cleared space. The same thing is being repeated in the Amazon...
...LISTING of the great millennia always reminds me of the cross-sections of soil levels that we learned in science class. Topsoil, sedentary soil, shale coal, diamonds, oil, primordial sludge, fire brimstone the boogey monster and the other side of the globe...
...clean swaths that farmers have plowed across the prairie are well suited to the efficient use of farm machinery. But they encourage erosion that has allowed vast amounts of topsoil to be blown away by wind or washed into the rivers and lakes. Chemical fertilizers, insecticides and weed killers have contributed to harvests that make U.S. agriculture the most productive in the ! world. But they have also leached into groundwater, contaminating wells in rural communities across the nation. "Not every well is polluted, and not every farmer has an erosion problem," says Ernest Shea, executive vice president of the National...
Five hundred miles south, you can stand on the banks of the Mississippi and watch that topsoil roll by, going down to the Gulf of Mexico. The 34 million acres of fragile cropland taken out of production over the past few years have helped stem this wash, but farmers are still losing to erosion four tons of topsoil for every ton of grain produced...