A Word About Bare Ground

The phenomenon of rampant soil erosion was first made a major issue, and rightly so, during the Dustbowl of the 1930’s, in response to the wholesale loss of topsoil from farmlands caused by the short-sighted wholesale plowing, followed by drought and windstorms. Government agencies, especially the SCS, were formed to tackle the problem, and had some success, although much of America’s fertile agricultural land continues to flow out to sea every year, one of the great tragedies of our reliance on cultivation-based agriculture. This being said, I believe the anti-erosion crusade has become too much a knee-jerk issue, too much a sacred cow, and people don’t always think critically enough about it--like they ceased thinking rationally about fire following the Smokey the Bear era, and about grazing in these anti-cow days. Another paradigm shift is due. 

The key is this: to distinguish erosion (by wind, water, whatever) in flat alluvial agricultural or valley lands--a bonafide disaster in my book--from erosion on steep slopes and in the mountains. This latter kind of erosion, although (ironically) treated by many as just as objectionable as valley-land erosion--is precisely the natural process that gave us those rich alluvial plains, and at the same time gave us the dramatic sculpting of the mountains themselves. It gave us, and still is giving us, beaches, and sand dunes, and alpine scree slopes where pikas frolic, and cliffs where swifts and peregrines nest, and myriad micro-landslides where new seedlings take hold. Bare patches made by erosion are often the preferred or only nesting sites for an endless company of native bees, wasps, antlions and all sorts of other wonderful micro-fauna. 

My point here is: don’t succumb to the knee-jerk compulsion (or exhortation) to cover every inch of your land with some sort of vegetation, and please don’t buy those reprehensible “erosion control” seed mixes--they’re little better than weeds. Certainly, if you see a gully starting to develop, fix it by all means, but if you have a more or less bare piece of slope, especially if it is more or less firm or (especially) vertical (vertical drops are often more stable than gentle slopes) just enjoy it as is and watch the digger bees fight over it.