From World History Connected June 2011 at

http://worldhistoryconnected.press.uillinois.edu/8.2/br_swidler.html

Book Review  
 

David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations. Berkeley and Los

Angeles: University of California Press, 2007.  Pp. ix + 285. $17.95 (paper)
     The humanly caused environmental issues of our current world present
us with an imperative. Scientists on the one hand, and those trained in the
social sciences and humanities on the other, must begin to not only talk to
each other and read each other’s work, but to synthesize their knowledge
together into a single coherent body which can make observations and
recommendations relevant to the world at large and its pressing
problems. Dirt is just such a synthetic attempt, bringing the environmental
concerns of a soil scientist to the understanding of history and to the public
at large, in the hope of addressing human sustainability. Written in an
approachable style and aimed at an educated general audience, this book
reminds us that, so far, many scientists have made valiant efforts to
popularize their disciplines and to offer up to citizens what insight their
fields have, while environmental historians have lagged behind.

     The author, David R. Montgomery, is a geomorphologist, a geologist

who specializes in landscapes and topography. His book reflects both the
strengths and weaknesses of that training.

     On the positive side for students of history, who often are ill at ease with
the sciences, Montgomery’s relaxed presentation of soil science gives the
reader the necessary background of geology, chemistry, and biology in a
substantial but non-threatening, digestible way. He assumes, correctly, that
to understand agricultural history we need to know some science, and he
also assumes that any reader can understand that science if it is properly
presented. An additional benefit to Montgomery’s scientific background is
that scientists seem, on the whole, far more open (than American historians,
anyway) about searching for contemporary policy lessons from examples of
environmental destructiveness in the past. Montgomery’s assumption that
he has valuable policy insights drawn from history and science to put before
his readers, and his willingness to do so, is both refreshing and an
instructive model for us in the social and human fields.

     However, the negative side of Montgomery’s scientific background is, to

a historian at least, substantial. A quick perusal of his roughly 300
references showed fewer than ten that were written by historians of the last
century or so. Most of the entries provided came from other scientists
(geologists, biologists, etc.), while a sprinkling of more scientifically
oriented geographers and anthropologists were also present. The blurbs on
the back of the book come from Nature, New Scientist,
Bioscience, and Geotimes. The publisher’s offered bookshelf categories are
natural history, ecology, and conservation. Even the Library of Congress
agrees that this is a science book, listing as the three subject headings:  Soil
science—History, Soils, and Soil erosion.

     What is striking, then, is that despite the lack of consultation of historical

research and discourse, the vast majority of this work is in fact clearly about
human history and not about soil science at all. The topics Montgomery
covers range from the history of the Soil Conservation Service to the causes
of the domestication of crops, from the capital costs of agricultural
mechanization to the politics of banana exports in Guatemala. His
interdisciplinarity is commendable; only someone willing to tackle the
human and social history of farming as well as the sciences of soil and
agronomy can create the kind of picture of agriculture that is called for to
understand our bleak modern scenario. Such a synthesized picture, however,
calls not just for mastery of soil science and its literature, but also for a
social scientist’s or humanist’s attention to analyzing, dissecting, and
understanding societies and their dynamics, rather than merely reporting on
their activities, and here Montgomery fails. The lack of historical references
seems in this case to reflect, or at least accompany, a lack of historical
theory.

     While historians do not dismiss ‘facts,’ they also know that historical
content is not clearly separated from the form of an argument, that choice
and decision create a narrative, and that history is an interpretive activity.
Montgomery’s presentation of the course of history resembles a traditional,
superficially empirical, history textbook of the kind that most historians try
to avoid using: debates, disagreements, alternative understandings, and
competing interpretations are largely invisible on these pages, which instead
follow a single, unchallenged narrative. And as that narrative is also one
which historians are particularly unlikely to find convincing, the lack of any
other presented option is even more unhappy.

     Montgomery’s basic theses are close to pure environmental determinism.

For him, not only does soil fertility and health drive the rise and, especially,
fall of civilizations, but some combination of climate, inexorable (and
presumably ‘natural’ or biologically derived) population growth, and soil is
what accounts for many of the important events of human history. Even the
European colonization of the Americas, he asserts in his Chapter Five,
entitled “Let Them Eat Colonies,” was heavily inspired by the need for
more food, which was in short supply due to soil degradation in the Old
World. Elsewhere he posits that the U.S. Civil War was triggered by soil
erosion, and that the historical appearance of social classes occurred as a
result of the fertile soil of the Mesopotamian river valleys. Montgomery is
following a long tradition of thinking in these kinds of terms, from Soil and
Civilization by Edward Hyams, published in 1952, to the more recent The
Green History of the World by Cliff Ponting or David Hillel’s Out of the
Earth: Civilization and the Life of the Soil, (all three of which he cites), but
this is one theoretical tradition which is heavily suspect, or at least hotly
contested, in environmental history today. We would have no inkling of this
intellectual debate from this book’s pages, however.

     This book, which does provide a solid collection of relevant information,

would in fact be perhaps best read in a history class exactly as an example
of environmental determinism. Used side-by-side with, and in direct
counterpoint to, a varied series of socially focused analyses on the self-same
topics, it would provide the possibility of fascinating contrasting
interpretations for class discussion and evaluation.  Possible simultaneous
readings might include Blaikie and Brookfield’s Soil Degradation and
Society on that topic, Leach and Fairhead’s Misreading the African
Landscape on desertification, James Blaut’s Colonizer’s Model of the
World on tropical agriculture and tropical soils, or James C. Scott’s Seeing
Like a State on modern agriculture. Other comparative possibilities include
the widely available debates on the role of population growth in the origins
of agriculture, and the interesting non-conforming case study of New
Guinea as one of the earliest independent originators of agricultural
domestication, where the invention of agriculture never correlated with
cities or social stratification as it is frequently claimed that it must.

     Having disagreed with most of this book’s methodology and

interpretation, I nevertheless applaud Montgomery’s missions of integrating
scientific understanding into human history, of speaking to the larger
community about issues we academics have knowledge of, and of
advocating for policy based on whatever our best current understandings
are. In closing, Montgomery appeals to our moral responsibility to the
future in making a plea to treat soil as a communal inheritance rather than a
commodity, and on this I couldn’t agree with him more.

Eva Swidler, an environmental and agricultural historian, teaches in the

interdisciplinary bachelor’s program at Goddard College. She can be
reached at eva.swidler@goddard.edu.