Why Conservation is Important

Remarks by Bruce I. Knight, Chief, Natural Resources Conservation Service
at the Department of State’s 46th Senior Seminar
Arlington, VA
October 3, 2003

I was asked to open my remarks today with some thoughts on why conservation is important. Here is the short version: without conservation, the land ceases to be productive; when the land ceases to be productive, people starve. End of story.

I suspect you had a longer explanation in mind. And, fortunately, there is a more elaborate explanation, tied to world history and American history. I know this is a complex issue, but in its simplest form, agricultural productivity allows for division of labor and the growth of a society. The longevity of the society is connected to sustaining this productivity. However, achieving agricultural productivity and developing a system of transportation to distribute agricultural products takes decades and requires a stable political atmosphere. And it takes only a few years of misuse to destroy the land resources!

Conservation and Survival

Fifty years ago, the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) – now the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) – published a pamphlet called Conquest of the Land Through 7,000 Years that tells why conservation is so important to agriculture – and to culture as a whole. The author was W. C. Lowdermilk, the first Assistant Chief of the SCS, and an expert on conservation around the world.

Lowdermilk said that, “In the last reckoning, all things are purchased with food.” That is why all of our agriculture decisions and our conservation decisions have to take into account what farmers and ranchers need to produce the food we need and earn a living. Without agricultural productivity, the most we can hope for is to all be subsistence farmers. Famines around the world show that productivity does drop below subsistence levels in many places, decimating entire nations.

Lowdermilk’s Study

Lowdermilk traveled the world looking at places where the land has maintained its productivity for thousands of years and at places where the land ceased to be productive at some point. His formal inquiry into agricultural productivity began in the 1930s, right after the SCS was created.

The original focus of SCS, as its name implies, was Soil. And that is what Lowdermilk looked at. The dust bowl was showing us how easy it is to lose topsoil, how drought makes land susceptible to erosion, both from the wind and even from the rains when they do come. Eventually, we came to understand other threats – water quality, air quality, loss of habitat and others. But, at first, the focus was soil.

Lowdermilk’s Conclusions:

To Lowdermilk, it was obvious that soil erosion, deforestation, overgrazing, neglect, and conflict between cultivators and herders have helped topple empires and wipe out civilizations. There are similarities in how civilizations destroy their agricultural capacity. It starts as expanding population puts pressure on the uplands. Human activity expands beyond the valley bottoms to the slopes, moving ever upward into lands that are more susceptible to erosion. This expansion of activity produces one or more problems – erosion of improperly farmed cropland on the slopes, erosion of over-grazed pastureland, or erosion of poorly managed forestland.

Left unchecked, erosion permanently destroys the productive capacity of the uplands, and the silt creates problems in the water storage and irrigation systems in the lowlands. If a calamity disrupts the labor supply needed to maintain agriculture in the lowlands, the entire society can collapse. The valley bottoms still have fertile soil, so they can be returned to agricultural productivity.

We can see how lack of conservation has contributed to the lack of agricultural productivity in many parts of the world. Lowdermilk’s travels took him to the Middle East, China, North Africa, Europe, and the Americas. He saw areas where once productive uplands were eroded to bare rock, as in Israel and Jordan; areas where terracing had sustained upland agriculture for thousands of years, such as Syria, Lebanon, France, and Peru; areas where lack of maintenance caused terraces to fail, such as Lebanon and others; areas where overgrazing resulted in severe erosion, such as North Africa and others; areas where deforestation caused the erosion, such as Lebanon, China, and others; and areas where siltation rendered irrigations systems unusable, such as Iraq, China, and others.

The quality of the soil is not guaranteed. Farmers and ranchers can use conservation technologies to build on the natural productivity of the land. But it takes a sustained effort.

The Importance of Conservation

Conservation is important on many levels. On a humanitarian level, it leads to prosperous, healthy societies. On a geopolitical level, it leads to stable, self-sufficient countries.

Lowdermilk said, “The world is made dangerous by the desperation of peoples suffering from privations and the fear of privations.” Historically, and even in modern times, conflicts between nations can be linked to the scarcity of productive land. Today, we can add disputes over water supplies. I’ll leave it to you to connect the dots and conclude that conservation is important.

Unfortunately, even today, most of the developing countries of the world do not have policies for soil resource conservation, and the resource-poor farmers in many countries have no means to implement conservation practices.

Erosion, nutrient mining, and poor plant husbandry all contribute to poor production. The consequence is seen today in many forms. Lake Chad in Central Africa has decreased to about 30 percent of its original size since 1950. The productivity of many of the crops in Nigeria has systematically declined over the last few decades. (As an example, the average yield of cassava in Nigeria is 4 tons per hectare while in India it is 30 tons per hectare.) In the semi-arid tropics there is insufficient water to irrigate the thirsty lands, and in many countries water does not reach the delta or estuary, resulting in dramatic decreases in marine aquatic life. In India, one of the holy rivers is the Krishna and during the holy season there is insufficient water for the devotees to take a bath in the river.

Conservation in the United States

Fortunately, vast amounts of the land in the United States remain productive because we have been conscious of the need to protect our land. This is not merely due to the work of NRCS but due to the partnership with all land users. But we didn’t always have a clear understanding of the need to work towards sustaining productivity and protecting the land resources.

When Europeans first came to the new world, they opened up a whole new world of opportunity for immigration – millions of acres of timber, rangeland, and farmable land. People cleared the land, farmed out the soil and moved on. They clearcut the forests and moved on. They overgrazed the pastures and moved on. They extracted the minerals and moved on.

It was one of my idols, Theodore Roosevelt, who really got the Federal Government into the conservation business. His conservation ideas were largely related to saving forests from unrestricted logging and mining. He learned a lot from running a ranch in North Dakota, even though it failed because of overgrazing, bad weather, and poor markets, as did many other operations in the 1880s and 1890s.

It took the dust bowl to get the government into protecting the soil on America’s farmlands. That is how the Soil Conservation Service – now the Natural Resources Conservation Service – came into being. That was about 70 years ago.

But Lowdermilk, writing only 50 years ago, found that the resources of our own country still faced some serious threats. Three-quarters of our farmland was on sloping lands susceptible to erosion. Three quarters of our farmland was eroding faster than soil was being formed. Conservation methods were not widely applied.

Accomplishments

Since the dust bowl days, we have had great success in promoting voluntary use of conservation practices in this country. Farmers and other land users, and the general public, slowly have become aware of the links between protecting our soil, water, and air resources and protecting the ecosystem as a whole. Conservation has become an integral part of our life and is generally recognized as a key component to assure sustainability of agriculture.

We have made great progress in promoting a system of conservation ethics that supports environmentally friendly agriculture. We have conservation technologies at our disposal that can guarantee not only high productivity but also stability of production over a long timeframe.
The keys to our success in this country are voluntary conservation, locally Led. Our farmers and ranchers have reduced soil erosion by 40 percent between 1982 and 1997, reduced the loss of wetlands by 95 percent from 1954-74 levels, and restored nearly a million acres of wetlands since 1991.

NRCS promotes voluntary conservation by helping farmers and ranchers with their conservation plans, providing incentives for conservation practices, and making sure operators have access to the reliable scientific knowledge and up-to-date technology. Conservation is locally led, with people at the county and state levels setting their own priorities, making decisions, and building partnerships to bring in additional funding for conservation.

Challenges

We have more to do to address these traditional concerns, but there also are emerging challenges to address.

In terms of water management, 80 percent of water is used by agriculture. Agriculture must play a role in water management.

In terms of energy conservation and production, we need to find energy efficient practices, develop renewable energy sources, and improve air quality.

In terms of climate change, we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through carbon sequestration and animal waste management.

In terms of soil quality, we need to improve productivity and sustainability by preventing compaction, salinization, and loss of organic matter.

In terms of wildlife habitat, we must continue to increase opportunities for recreation, hunting, and agrotourism, and to help threatened and endangered species.

In terms of urban growth, we must do more to keep land in production, protect open space, prevent wildfire, and promote value-added agriculture.

You can read about our conservation successes and challenges in a document called Food and Agricultural Policy: Taking Stock for the New Century, which the Department of Agriculture put out a couple of years ago. It is available on the Web at http://www.usda.gov/news/pubs/farmpolicy01/fpindex.htm

That is the long version of the answer to the question of why conservation is important, both in the United States and around the world, and why sound conservation knowledge and good conservation leadership are so important to the long-term survival of any nation.