Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley teaches fiction in the writing program at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. She is an environmentalist and writer of nature essays. Her novel, A Thousand Acres, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Today it is clear that the prairies not only look different from what the settlers found, they are different. The last hundred and fifty years have seen the erosion of half the original topsoil, topsoil the settlers rightly viewed as a priceless treasure. "So Shall We Reap, 1994.

Of the successive geological epochs of life on the prairie, no doubt the couple of hundred years that humans have tried farming it with plows and other machines will be the very shortest. Ibid.

According to Iowa's Department of Soil Conservation, the worst farming practices (fall plowing, planting up and down hillsides, leaving no crop residue on the surface) would use up eight inches of topsoil (which may have taken 7,000 years to create) in 36 years. Contouring, terracing, giving up fall plowing, and leaving crop residue on the surface all year long would make that eight inches last 2,224 years, which seems like more than enough to let our generation off the hook of reconceiving agriculture. Ibid.

The application of technology to agriculture on the North American prairies has not, so far, exempted our culture from the biological forces that have destroyed earlier civilizations. It is clear, rather, that big machines and strong chemicals have speeded them up. Ibid.

The enormous superstructure of American society rests on a tiny point - the point where fewer and fewer with larger and larger machines mine as much food as they can out of fields that are less and less what they once were. Ibid.

The floods we have seen are not an act of God, but a result of history, a result of choosing technology for an intensively tilled, monocultural, cash-crop-based agricultural system designed to satisfy the demands of ever-expanding markets . . . Ibid.

It is not "politically correct," or "morally right," or even "necessary" to heed the warnings abounding in the soil and water of the prairie. It is intelligent. Whether we do so or not is the measure of whether we have progressed beyond the Mesopotamians of four and a half thousand years ago, or whether we are, in fact, still caught in a comforting illusion of familiarity. Ibid.