ABSTRACT
Those few who have dealt with the topic in South Africa-where there was a similar environmental disaster in the 1930s-rely heavily on the doom-laden and portentous language of the Drought Commission. This was a key document in analysis of the ecological problems caused by settler stock farming which pictured ‘a great South African desert in the making’ (Drought Investigation Commission, 1922:2). The term was taken from the Great American Desert, marked on early-nineteenthcentury maps as the region between the 98th meridian and the Rockies. Ironically, this referred to American land that had not yet been colonized-and which many thought never could be because God had made it so-as opposed to land that had been laid waste by settler occupation. (By the time of the Drought Commission’s investigations, man rather than God or nature was blamed for barren land.) When two
British colonial soil scientists, G.V.Jacks and R.O.Whyte, attempted a comparative international view of soil erosion in the 1930s, they called their book The Rape of the Earth (1939) and pinpointed the USA and South Africa as two of the most degraded zones. They regarded the South African situation as more urgent, however, for the American authorities appeared to be doing more about it.
