∎ PDF Free Dirt The Erosion of Civilizations David R Montgomery 9780520258068 Books

Dirt The Erosion of Civilizations David R Montgomery 9780520258068 Books

Download As PDF : Dirt The Erosion of Civilizations David R Montgomery 9780520258068 Books

Dirt The Erosion of Civilizations David R Montgomery 9780520258068 Books

Dr. Montgomery studied geology at Stanford and geomorphology at UC Berk. He has travelled widely and studied how cultures fail when they let their soil erode. His writing style is superior as is his commitment to his subject of interest. If you w ant to get down in the dirt about how to survive, this is the most important book to read. I rarely put my Oasis down before I finished it. My primary interest now is soils. My mission is to do things as close to perfectly on my one quarter of an acre. The first premise is no tilling, using cover crops, composting, and moving into planting as many perennial food trees, shrubs, etc. as I can fit in.
Read it, read it. read it. Do not let whatever soil you have blow away or wash away. Cherish your dirt as the most important thing you have because it is.


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Dirt The Erosion of Civilizations David R Montgomery 9780520258068 Books Reviews

Every person should take the time to read this revealing book. It talks about the world today, not some questionable computer model for the future. The earth is running out of fertile soil and the vast frontiers of new virgin land are gone. The agricultural practices of modern technology vs. the population growth are not sustainable. It's not too late, there are ways to learn the lessons of the past and do it right. The solution will take time, education and sacrifice. The book presents the hard evidence---you walk on it every day. Who will embrace the facts and be part of the solution?
I found this book to be so engaging and informative, I have been giving them out as gifts. While I work in agriculture and know more than your average bear about soil, David Montgomery's book Dirt gave me a whole new insight and forever changed the way I look at society's relationship with soil and agriculture.

I just ordered his newest book, The Hidden Half of Nature The Microbial Roots of Life and Health, and cannot wait to dive in deeper on the topic.
Are humans capable of learning from past mistakes? I consider myself more soil literate than most people, enough to recognize the process of desertification on the ground. I’ve long read about the rise and fall of civilizations based on the health of their soils. However, David Montgomery’s “Dirt The Erosion of Civilizations” provided a deeper, more riveting account of the repeated rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall of civilizations due to failure to learn from the past.
Walking the reader through a history of agriculture throughout the world, Montgomery introduces different soil types and climate issues, as well as the social-political circumstances that contributed toward erosion and collapse of past civilizations. While some regions lost their soil and permanently collapsed, others recovered enough to allow the same mistakes to play out again and again.
In general, agriculture and urban centers arose, cultivating the most favorable, typically level plots. Food production enabled a bigger population, which then added pressure to deforest and plow hilly uplands, resulting in a surge of erosion. Sometimes too slowly to perceive in human terms, erosion deteriorated the uplands and often buried the lowlands. Crop harvests crashed, and people either starved or migrated elsewhere, leading to collapse of civilization after a few centuries. The land was abandoned. Nature began to form new soil from bedrock, and many centuries later, people returned to make the same mistakes all over again.
Not only did the boom and bust cycle repeat, but keen observers such as Aristotle and Plato diagnosed the problem and witnessed the remains of past civilizations, yet, they too were unable to change the outcome.
It is easy to imagine some future soil sleuth will write a book about the collapse of the American empire due to soil loss. Maybe they will even find an old, tattered copy of Dirt The Erosion of Civilization, and they will see that David Montgomery, like Aristotle and Plato, strived to call attention to the health of the soil.
Better yet, let’s all read Montgomery’s book now and increase our soil awareness to avoid becoming trapped in the cycle of doom.
I had first learned about the destruction of Carthage and North Africa during the Roman Empire during an economic botany course in the 70’s. I also learned about the findings of environmental destruction determined from rodent middens studies in the Holy Land, Lebanon, Chaco Canyon, and other sites. Dirt provides a thorough chronical of the widespread degradation of soils by many other cultures throughout human history.

Being a geologist, Montgomery tends to look at the situation in terms of dirt when the real harm is the loss of organic matter and the critical soil biology which are critical components of soil. Dirt is not soil. He paid only passing reference to soil biology and what he generally calls microbes. He could have made Dirt more relevant by including the work of soil microbiologists such as Elaine Ingham et. al. who have provided substantial research into the role of soil biology in plant growth and health.

Dirt is a good and insightful book that would be important for environmentalist and agriculturalist to read along with American Canopy.
This is the dirt (the scoop) all right. It is a highly important book. Every policy maker in Washington and all the world's capitals should read it. This book gives a side of history that has been left out of the usual history books. And that is really too bad. This information needs to become widely known.There are a variety of eye-openers here, about numerous periods of history. This book not only teaches about agriculture and the misuse of land and soil, it also reveals a side of colonialism we usually do not think about. This colonialism has not yet completely disappeared.

From another perspective Never before have I appreciated the "humble" earthworm so much as I have since reading it. I never knew about rock weathering and the fact that earthworms literally create soil from rocks. We should bow down to earthworms. They make it possible for us to eat and live.

The writing style is easily read. Yet emotionally, I find it hard to read more than one chapter at a time. I seem to need rest between them. They are very filling.
Dr. Montgomery studied geology at Stanford and geomorphology at UC Berk. He has travelled widely and studied how cultures fail when they let their soil erode. His writing style is superior as is his commitment to his subject of interest. If you w ant to get down in the dirt about how to survive, this is the most important book to read. I rarely put my Oasis down before I finished it. My primary interest now is soils. My mission is to do things as close to perfectly on my one quarter of an acre. The first premise is no tilling, using cover crops, composting, and moving into planting as many perennial food trees, shrubs, etc. as I can fit in.
Read it, read it. read it. Do not let whatever soil you have blow away or wash away. Cherish your dirt as the most important thing you have because it is.