information:extraction, linguistic:paraphrasing
Colonial Impacts on Soil Depletion

Soil fertility can be severely challenged when land-use changes rapidly. For example, in Colonial New England, colonists made a number of decisions that depleted the soils, including: allowing herd animals to wander freely, not replenishing soils with manure, and a sequence of events that led to erosion. William Cronon wrote that "...the long-term effect was to put those soils in jeopardy. The removal of the forest, the increase in destructive floods, the soil compaction and close-cropping wrought by grazing animals, ploughing—all served to increase erosion." Cronon continues, explaining, “Where mowing was unnecessary and grazing among living trees was possible, settlers saved labor by simply burning the forest undergrowth...and turning loose their cattle...In at least one ill-favored area, the inhabitants of neighboring towns burned so frequently and graze so intensively that…the timber was greatly injured, and the land became hard to subdue...In the long run, cattle tended to encourage the growth of woody, thorn-bearing plants which they could not eat and which, once established, were very difficult to remove”. These practices were methods of simplifying labor for colonial settlers in new lands when they were not familiar with traditional Indigenous agricultural methods. Those Indigenous communities were not consulted but rather forced out of their homelands so European settlers could commodify their resources. This introduction of thorn-bearing plants, turning loose cattle, and intensive burning of land ruined soil fertility and prohibited sustainable crop growth.

While colonists utilized fire to clear land, certain prescribed burning practices are common and valuable to increase biodiversity and in turn, benefit soil fertility. Without consideration of the intensity, seasonality, and frequency of the burns, the conservation of biodiversity and the overall health of the soil can be negatively impacted by fire. Prescribed burning is used in many cultural rituals as a vital spiritual and ecological practice. The Karuk Tribe of contemporary California represent one community where this is utilized. The Karuk Tribe live in the Klamath River basin, and their cultural burning methods have been “actively suppressed by the USFS (United States Forest Service)”. A study by sociologist Kirsten Vineyta analyzes “how the USFS deployed anti-Indigenous rhetoric to justify its own unsubstantiated forest management agenda. USFS leadership racialized light burning by deridingly referring to it as ‘Piute Forestry.’ The agency has also discredited, downplayed, and erased Indigenous peoples and knowledges in ways that invoke tropes of the ‘Indian savage,’ the ‘Vanishing Indian,’ and the concept of ‘Terra Nullius’”. In the 1960s, the Civil Rights and American Indian Movements began to take flight, changing public and government sentiments on these century-long practices. After years of colonial oppression at the hands of the United States against the Karuk Tribe, the USFS started to reconsider the impact of these prescribed burnings. The USFS has since reversed its stance on the ecological role of fire to further support prescribed fire as a management tool.

In addition to soil erosion through using too much or too little fire, colonial agriculture also resulted in topsoil depletion. Topsoil depletion occurs when the nutrient-rich organic topsoil, which takes hundreds to thousands of years to build up under natural conditions, is eroded or depleted of its original organic material. The Dust Bowl in the Southern United States, as reinterpreted from its mainstream analysis by sociologist Hannah Holleman, is an example of “one dramatic regional manifestation of a global socio-ecological crisis generated by the realities of settler colonialism and imperialism”. Beginning with a period of new imperialism starting in the 1870s, conditions of economic expansion were emphasized globally and were demonstrated through policies such as increased seizure of Indigenous lands. Economic expansion is supported by the commodification of natural resources and the globalization of the ecological rift. Settler colonialists found they were able to profit from the divide in the relationship between humanity and nature since it is irreparable within capitalist society. These theories and policies of ecological degradation and social domination shaped global farming practices. As a result, agricultural regions were impacted, including, specifically argued by Holleman, the U.S. Southern Plains’ Dust Bowl due to the soil erosion crisis that developed in the 1930s.

The need to produce agricultural commodities represented in colonial and dustbowl soil depletion has its roots, according to Karl Marx, in capitalism. In 1867, Marx wrote of the role of capitalism in soil depletion, describing how “all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility”.