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Show V I "Feet On The Good Earth" i (A guest editorial by Montana's Governor Sam C. Ford reproduced reproduc-ed from the July 16 issue of The Denver Post.) A nation whose armies and defenses have been riddled by bullets, its government threaten-! threaten-! ed by internal strife and discord and its economy impaired by foreign for-eign ideology may and probably will recover within a generation or two. Oblivion of the dark ages faces the civilization whose people lose sight of true happiness inherent from the" soil in their frantic search for an easier way of life. The original source of all earthly riches is the good earth, which is gone with the wind and floods unless man himself maintains main-tains or reverts to first principles of the law of gravity by keeping keep-ing his feet on the ground even though flights of fancy may carry car-ry his head into the clouds of scientific discovery. Only through an ever intensified intensi-fied soil conservation program can man meet and conquer the vast soil-erosion threat created by his own hand in the earlier mad and unguided rush for material ma-terial well-being. It has been said that the good earth is the heritage of all mankind. man-kind. It was thus through countless count-less ages in the past it will ever be thus in the undetermined centuries cen-turies of the future. From the unsolved un-solved mystery of the soil come the formation, the growth, the development and the subsistence of all living things upon which humanity' exists. We who populate popu-late the universe today are but custodians in whom the Creator has placed a sacred trust to use, but preserve, the fertility of the I land that it may be perpetpat-ed perpetpat-ed through generations to come, that they can dwell here where we have lived and enjoy the fruits, the health, and the benefits bene-fits which we today have inherited. inher-ited. The conservation of soil and water resources is one of the "must" jobs of this country. The United States Department of Agriculture has pointed out that no other nation has lost so much soil in so little time. It stresses the fact that erosion has ruined for any further cultivation some 50 million acres of cropland an area equal to more than one-eighth one-eighth of our present total cropland. crop-land. Another 100 million acres of cropland have t lost more than half of their productive topsoil while on yet another 100 million acres of cropland the erosion is underway. For a grand total, erosion has already damaged more . than two-fifths of- all the cropland of this nation with additional ad-ditional hundreds of millions of acres of range and pasture land being seriously damaged. The prosperity and very life of the country is endangered by this major threat which each year is costing the United States in the neighborhood of nearly 4 billion dollars in wasted soil, railroad and highway damage, flood damage, abandonment of farms, reduced reservoir capacity capaci-ty and other losses. Since the beginning be-ginning of history poverty has . followed in the wake of erosion, i In this country the first effective effec-tive step to halt the inroads of erosion occurred in the middle 1930's when the blowing soil began be-gan blotting out the sun at midday mid-day in many of the Great Plains states, and Congress established the Soil Conservation Service to carry on a nation-wide program of action against what was described des-cribed as a national menace. For the first time in history an overall over-all program for protecting the land against wind and water even ev-en while the land is being used for crop production was developed develop-ed and given what has proved to be a most successful test. Farmers in practically every state in the union have and are placing their stamp of approval on this program by taking advantage ad-vantage of the organized and trained assistance offered through state and federal soil conservation agencies. There must be no let-down in this assistance as-sistance as the battle for survival is a never-ending one. Erosion is peacetime No. 1 enemy. It is ruthless, tireless and subversive, The only antidote is the sounding of a continuous alert by every state and full soil conservation cooperation on the part of an aroused citizenry. |