Soil Scientists And Volunteers Dig In To Save The Earth

In Blaenavon, South Wales, on a warm September morning last year, a psychotherapist from Colorado and a computer repairman from northeastern England, both on vacation, sat on a grassy hill slope and measured how water flowed through the layer of topsoil covering the hill. Their readings will help determine the quality of this land, which is currently used for sheep grazing. The next day, on a nearby tract of land, a California elementary school teacher and a New Hampshire accountant, both also "on holiday," assessed the health of some 250 baby alder, ash, and sycamore trees that had been planted about a year earlier. Assisting the two Americans were Anatoly Mandych, the director of the Coastal Geographic Systems Laboratory at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow, and Marin Penkov, chairman of the national land council of Bulgaria, who, in addition to his state position, is a soil scientist. The nonscientists from the U.S. and England were four of the 12 members of the first of two teams of Earthwatch volunteers who came to Wales to help Martin Haigh, a soil scientist and lecturer at Oxford Polytechnic in England, on his mission to save the decaying soil of this former Welsh coal mining district. For the past 4 1/2 years Haigh has been collaborating with the Bulgarian government on this and a similar project in Bulgaria, and last year the British government decided to provide some financial support. Besides being a native Welshman concerned about his country's landscape, Haigh has more than 100 papers to his credit on such subjects as soil erosion and hillslope and gully evolution in Illinois and Oklahoma, and landslide prediction and control and flood hazards in the Indian Himalayas. But the distinguishing characteristic of his two most recent reclamation projects, conducted in Septem- ber and October last year in Blaenavon, were his "lab assistants," the vacationing volunteers from Earthwatch who not only provided the time and labor for these initiatives, but also paid for the privilege. Vacationing For Science Earthwatch is a 20-year-old organization located in Auburn, Mass., that to date has coordinated more than 1,000 expeditions, in which some 23,000 volunteers have labored along with scientists on environmentally conscious research projects throughout the world. Earthwatch's scientific committees choose the researchers, like Haigh, whose projects are aided by the volunteers. For United States expeditions, an average volunteer spends about $700. For projects in the former Soviet Union, the cost to a volunteer can be as high as $2,200. In addition to underwriting the costs of matching the volunteers and the projects, Earthwatch supplies money to supplement the volunteer support. The tale of Haigh's first Earthwatch expedition, in September, contained many dramatic ingredients: Eastern bloc scientists aiding Earthwatch volunteers in the soil analysis and the measurement of tree heights; a scientist trying to save the earth in South Wales; the possibility that coal might be mined again in Blaenavon. And, in fact, these newsworthy elements were compelling enough to attract the attention of British Broadcasting Company (BBC) television, which sent a crew to record the activity. But the rest of the story lies under the surface of the earth and involves the 41-year-old Haigh's 10 years of research into the land. Just beneath the treeless, undulating, grassy hills of this southern Wales region are coal mining debris that are slowly destroying the soil, according to Haigh. When the coal was removed from the ground, rocks and earth were dug up and left there, disturbing millions of years of natural formation. These "mine spoils," unearthed over 100 years of deep and surface coal mining, created artificial hills and valleys in this "post-industrial landscape," Haigh says. For the past 40 years, coal mining engineers from British Coal Ltd. and local civil engineering agencies have put a layer of topsoil seeded with grass over the mine spoils in an attempt to restore the land to its condition before mining. But the reclamation has not been not successful, say Haigh and Penkov. Erosion channels are forming in the hills; grass is being replaced by other species, like moss and lichens; and the soil is turning into fine, compacted clay that is resistant to water and life, they say. "The soil is decaying and eroding," says Haigh, who wants to understand and stop the process. His approach is new to his part of the world. Instead of the cosmetic vegetation-planting method practiced in Blaenavon and generally used to reclaim mine-spoiled lands, he wants to "create reclaimed lands, which support robust soils [and] self-sustaining ecosystems and require little maintenance." One way to do that, Haigh believes, is to plant trees. Reclamation Via Tree-Planting In January of 1991, Haigh planted 250 trees on land provided to him by a local landowner. Most of the other land Haigh is conducting his research on is owned by British Coal Ltd. or is common land owned by the county and used for sheep grazing. According to Haigh, the local authorities had written off the land as not being suitable for tree growth. But Haigh found that when he fenced off the land from grazing, little alder tree saplings started to grow. "That gave us hope that in our top soil layer we could at get least these trees growing if we hold back the grazing," he says. What Haigh is trying to do is bring life back into dying soil. The disintegration of the soil is a multistep process, he explains. Soil becomes compact, preventing water flow because of the breakdown of shales--rocks that have been brought to the surface as a result of the mining. At the surface, the shales, exposed to weathering processes such as wetting and drying or freezing and thawing, are breaking down rapidly. "You get boulders disintegrating down to clay fractions in a few weeks," Haigh says. The clay clogs up the pores found in fertile soil, and reduces the soil's ability to store water. This essentially kills off any life that could exist in it. The older reclaimed lands are in worse shape than the more recently reclaimed lands because the former have been exposed to more shale breakdown and weathering than the latter. "You can see the loss of life under the electron microscope," Haigh says. Roots formed by trees and the microbes that live off them will inject life into the soil and prevent destruction caused by the clay formation, Haigh predicts. "These microbes will release organic soil-binding materials and take the clays produced by weathering and stick them together as stable aggregates," he says. "If the clays are covered by the organic material, we won't get the compaction, and it will make a better environment for life to continue." Earthwatch's Role But reclaiming mine-spoiled soil by planting trees requires an initial investment of money and labor, and it is still not a proven method to prevent the soil degradation process. That's where the Earthwatch volunteers came in. By exercising their muscles and brains together with Haigh, they helped take science from the laboratory into the landscape. Besides the four volunteers who studied water flow and tree vigor during that week in September, eight other nonscientists dug meter-deep pits in the land; characterized the soil they saw by such features as color, texture, and water retention; and took soil samples for laboratory analysis in facilities in Sofia, Bulgaria, and at Liverpool Polytechnic. Their purpose: to see how the soil responded after different reclamation initiatives. Haigh had found that the older the reclamation effort, the worse off the soil. The volunteers were collecting more data to prove that. In October, another Earthwatch team planted an additional 500 trees. The September Earthwatch team also mingled with the people of Blaenavon, one of the oldest and most devastated mining towns in South Wales, to tell the locals of Haigh's plan and informally assess their feelings about a new strip mine being planned by British Coal, slated to be one of largest mines ever started in the area. The townspeople were of mixed opinion. Some thought it would create an additional blight on the landscape. Others thought that the income from the mining activity would be an economic boost to the depressed town. At a major public hearing Haigh testified about the quality of past reclamation, but offered no position on the proposed mine. The decision on the mine will be made late next year by the Welsh government. In addition to Earthwatch support, Haigh gets funding for his work from the Bulgarian and British governments. Haigh is collaborating with Penkov, who has a similar, successful tree-planting mine-spoils reclamation project ongoing in Bulgaria, also partially supported by Earthwatch. The British government pays airfare for scientists to travel back and forth between the two countries. Besides the scientists and the volunteers on the September trip, Simon Davis, a former student of Haigh's who is now a graduate student in entomology at Cambridge University in England, and Lindsey Ellis and Mark Goodhand, two Earthwatch employees in the Oxford office, joined the expedition. Haigh's wife, Anna, a hydrologist who does some of the water runoff studies, is also a member of his scientific team. Even more support poured in for Haigh after October 20, this time from the local community, when the BBC aired the episode of the television show "Country Life" that highlighted Haigh and the first Earthwatch team operation. "They were probably embarrassed that foreigners were doing this thing and they [the Welsh] weren't," Haigh says. Because the air date of the BBC show coincided with the arrival of the second Earthwatch team, the locals were able to join the undertaking. An area gardener donated 500 trees to the project. "His strong lads also did some planting," Haigh adds. "The county council sent some people up who decided they ought to help by putting up some fences around the young trees," Haigh says. "And the local farmers said they would look after the land with the planted trees, and offered us a place for our climate station [a device to measure temperature and precipitation in the area]. Others said they would keep an eye out to make sure our fences weren't cut." Long-Term Benefits Haigh believes that reclaiming mine spoils as eventual forestland in the long run will be cheaper than traditional grass carpeting reclamation efforts. "In Bulgaria they found they could do it at one-eighth to one-tenth the cost. The problem is, it takes eight to 10 times as long," he says. "Growing soils is a long business." An article about his Welsh mine reclamation work is expected to appear this year in the International Journal of Surface Mining and Reclamation, from A.A. Balkema Publishers, Rotterdam, Netherlands. Also this year, Haigh will host another Earthwatch team in Wales, and Penkov will lead two in Bulgaria. "We hope to save some of the soil testing by following up on some of the undergrowth on lands that have been protected from sheep grazing," Haigh says. "This may be a good indicator of what trees to plant and [may enable scientists to] see what kind of plants can grow on the mine spoils. We hope to get some botanists to look at the existing vegetation and undergrowth and see if we can learn how it varies from site to site." Global Implications While the issue of soil degradation may seem to be a specific problem in Wales, owing to its mine spoils, the problem is more global, according to Haigh. Another hat that Haigh wears is regional vice president for Europe of the World Association of Soil and Water Conservation. "You see destruction in the world's agricultural soils, where the the quality of the soil is in decline due to bad land management and the substitution of chemicals for organics in the soil," Haigh says. The symptoms of these soils are the same as those in Blaenavon: They are compacted, hold less water, and contain less microbiological life. Compounding the problem, Haigh says, is that very few scientists recognize that soil degradation is a threat to the earth. He says that many soil scientists believe that reclamation technology already exists to solve the problem. But Haigh feels that the breakdown of the soils in Wales exemplifies the failure of current reclamation technology. Through his association with Earthwatch, Haigh has been getting his message out, though. "Our work in [Wales]," he says, "is one small corner in a general restructuring of science from approaches that are centered on technology to those centered on ecological thinking." Robin Eisner was among the first contingent of Earthwatch volunteers assisting reclamation efforts in Blaenavon.

Soil Scientists And Volunteers Dig In To Save The Earth

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