The Montecito mudslide is a tragic reminder to respect our soil
“A nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of the United States’s more quotable presidents. But one of his best is all too easily forgotten. In a letter to the governors of what was then just 48 states, Roosevelt wrote, “A nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.”
Before Roosevelt ushered in the atomic era, he was a tree-loving, soil-conserving Commander in Chief. On his private estate in Hyde Park, New York, Roosevelt created his own little woodlands to stopper the howling winds, prevent dust storms when the soil dried in summer, and stop the earth from slipping away in the rain. At the time, he was criticized for his strange experimentation, but eventually he took his timber test nationwide. Relying on the labor of the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps, he established the Great Plains Shelterbelt, comprised of 220 million trees in clusters stretching from North Dakota down to Texas. He also established the Soil Conservation Service and signed into law an act that paid farmers to lower their food production in order to prevent future Dust Bowls.
On Tuesday, mud swiftly swept down a hillside into the town of Montecito, California — a…
