The Ground We Are Losing

First, our very foothold in the New World is at stake—the earth the pioneers cleared and broke and handed on. We are told how fertile top-soil equal in area to the State of Pennsylvania has been washed away, how it took three thousand years to create three inches of layered dirt which Illinois wheat fields have lost in three generations...Now comes the land and water planning envisioned by the National Resources Board and the prophecy drawn from the studies of the Mississippi Valley Committee that we have scarcely two decades in which to set going a program that must literally save the country—from erosion, floods, dust storms...