The Montecito mudslide is a tragic reminder to respect our soil
Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of the United States’s more quotable presidents. But one of his best is all too easily forgotten. In a letter to the governors of what was then just 48 states, Roosevelt wrote, “A nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.”
Before Roosevelt ushered in the atomic era, he was a tree-loving, soil-conserving Commander in Chief. On his private estate in Hyde Park, New York, Roosevelt created his own little woodlands to stopper the howling winds, prevent dust storms when the soil dried in summer, and stop the earth from slipping away in the rain. At the time, he was criticized for his strange experimentation, but eventually he took his timber test nationwide. Relying on the labor of the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps, he established the Great Plains Shelterbelt, comprised of 220 million trees in clusters stretching from North Dakota down to Texas. He also established the Soil Conservation Service and signed into law an act that paid farmers to lower their food production in order to prevent future Dust Bowls.
On Tuesday, mud swiftly swept down a hillside into the town of Montecito, California—a harrowing reminder of the importance, complexity, and uncontrollable nature of the earth below us. Houses (including Oprah’s) were inundated with mud, some submerged in brown goop up to the roofline. At least 17 people were killed, with many swept away by the powerful flows.
While the tragedy of the mudslide cannot be understated, experts weren’t exactly surprised. Vanessa Bailey, a second-generation soil scientist at Pacific Northwest National Labs, said recent events had set the stage for exactly this type of disaster.
Since December, Southern California has been besieged by wildfires. The Thomas Fire, which began December 4 and was still only 92 percent contained a month later, is officially the largest wildfire in California’s recorded history. As a result, large swaths of the region had seen all of their plants burned away. Without anything to hold the soil in place or consume any of the moisture, the next rain seemed poised to bring about some kind of shift. “It’s the perfect combination of removing the vegetative cover with the heavy rain,” Bailey says. “Earth moves,” Bailey says, “especially when it’s wet.”