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Page 10 · column 4 of 6 · from the scan, no model involved
minerals are valuable, and tney have become mighty necessary to our way of life. But the soil is the one basic resource. VVe can get along without oil to burn, without steel for our cars, yes, even without uranium and other sources of atomic power, but we still have to have that “cheap dirt” to provide the food to keep our bodies alive, we have many other resources that are valuable, but they are not basic. The one basic resource, the one that is essential to life itself, is soil; and by that 1 mean the thin layer of topsoil. The one thing that worries a lot of folks today is the fact that our soil resources are shrinking—shrinking vertically.
In spite of our efforts, we are still losing our topsoil. So the first question we want to consider is how thick is our all-important layer of topsoil ? Or, how much can we lose and still get by? Well, let’s consider, world-wide, our available land in taking this inventory. The earth we live on is a sphere eight thousand miles in diameter, twenty-five thousand miles in circumference, and it has a surface of about 200 million square miles. Water covers two-thirds of the earth leaving about one-third of the 200 million square miles as land. Now of this remaining onethird of the earth which is land, less than half of the soils are suit
68.8%