African Soil Mapped For the Very First Time 56
vikingpower writes "A team of international experts has drawn up the Soil Atlas of Africa — the first such book mapping this key natural resource — to help farmers, land managers and policymakers understand the diversity and importance of soil and the need to manage it through sustainable use. A joint commission of the African Union and the European Union has produced a complete atlas of African soils, downloadable as three hefty PDFs (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3). The initiative was announced four years ago, and is intended 'to help farmers, land managers and policymakers understand the diversity and importance of soil and the need to manage it through sustainable use.' A digital, interactive series of maps is (still) in the making."
Re:The consequence (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The consequence (Score:4, Interesting)
When done as part of a long, slow cycle of rotating between different locations --- where patches of land have decades to recover between burnings --- "slash and burn" agriculture is actually a highly sustainable system (that has worked continuously for hundreds to thousands of years in some parts of the world). The problem is when slash-and-burn traditions are combined with corralling traditionally wide-ranging groups of people onto tiny demarcated sections of land ("why should those stupid peasants need all that empty forest they aren't using at all?") --- so the same parcel of land gets burned over and over, without recovery, and rapidly is turned into desolate wasteland.