David R. Montgomery (1) (1961–)

It was hard for me to believe how a book about soil erosion could be so fascinating. David Montgomery's Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations provides an historical survey of the role of soil erosion and depletion and the resulting impact on people. He provides a variety of examples from all over the world and from countries both big and small.

The first chapter of the book explains soil in great depth, starting with it's various layers, how it is formed, the role of earthworms and how soil becomes depleted.

The next chapters then start discussing how mankind caused soil erosion and soil depletion starting with the activities of the very first people who practiced agriculture. The book then discusses soil in early civilizations including Egypt, Mesopotamia, Rome, and China.

The next chapters then deal with the role of colonization and slavery contending that agriculture performed by people who are not directly connected to the land will be short-sighted and lead to more soil erosion. He also discusses regions where families had such small parcels of land that they could no longer practice the fallowing needed to restore the soil. As a result, the soil became less and less productive.

There are two chapters focused heavily on US agriculture leading up to the dust bowl. Most interesting, and surprising for me, was to learn that people like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were warning about the depletion of the soil in America. Later, in the 19th century, there were even more warnings about soil erosion and depletion. As part of this discussion, he talks about the very early pioneers of organic farming prior to WW II.

One of the cleverest chapters analyzes soil erosion and depletion in islands around the world ranging from Easter Island to Iceland to other Pacific islands as well as to Haiti and Cuba.

Reading the book is like drinking from a fire hose with so much interesting information presented in each chapter. Although this made the book exhausting to read, it turned it into a real page-turner.

The book is recommended to anyone interested in agriculture, environmental history, prehistory, or World history in general.… (altro)

"Growing a Revolution" is essentially a sequel to Montgomery's earlier work, "Dirt: the Erosion of Civilizations". While the previous work set out to show the consequences of poor soil management and agricultural practices, "Growing a Revolution" is a more upbeat and thrilling account of the author's research into how to avoid the bad endings that "Dirt" chronicled.

The book, broadly speaking, is a survey of conservation agriculture, told through a narrative lens of the author's encounters with the farmers themselves. I found this approach to be very engaging. Academic books, even those written for a lay audience, have the tendency to be dry and distant from their topics. This book, in contrast, is rich with the sense of the author's joy and wonder at the topic as well as enough recourse to the underlying science to satisfy the more skeptical reader. You could easily imagine Dr. Montgomery sharing some of these tales with you over small glasses of the Costa Rican mango brandy he describes.

The strength of the book, in my opinion, is connecting threads commonly seen in the organic agriculture community around no-till methods, soil amendment, and economics. There are many books on each of these topics, but fewer that draw attention to the interconnection between them.… (altro)