How Does Lifestyle Contribute to Soil Erosion?

Housing and Erosion

• Building houses on beautiful land often causes erosion. Steep slopes are poorly equipped to accommodate the demands of residential building. Erosion control in Los Laurales Canyon, California is only one example of the damage residential building can do to already fragile habitat. Not only buildings themselves but also landscaping and waste-water management damage fragile habitat, endangering both residents and their site.

Paving and Erosion

• Recreational and other uses of watershed land can inhibit natural absorption of water, resulting in runoff and erosion. The major reason is often the paved parking provided for visitors and customers. Natural runoff areas may be regraded to provide parking; paving covers large areas of soil that would absorb water. The same results can be ascribed to the creation of roads that make the parking accessible. The shopping malls typical of residential sprawl outside city centers occupy land that once held soil in place with natural plant growth and water collection and diversion areas.

Agriculture and Erosion

• The high dependence of developed countries on abundant animal protein presses land hard in two ways. Unrestricted grazing and watering can wear away at streambeds and ponds. Grading and clearing of the large amounts of land needed for feed crops strip trees and natural plantings in favor of grain production. Land becomes susceptible to both water erosion and, in off-season, wind erosion as well.

Public Policy and Erosion

• A University of Hawaii study links beach erosion with poor management of this coastal resource. Overlapping and contradictory authorities permit building encroachment far beyond limits needed for natural beach evolution and development. Bulldozed dunes destroy the sand stocks needed to fill in beaches after storms, and construction pushes to the tide-line, leaving scanty beach space vulnerable to storm and tide damage.

Erosion Prevention and Erosion

• A major source of water-based erosion is a structure created specifically to prevent it, like seawalls, levees, dams and groins. Texas A & M details ways in which erosion was made worse by specific structures intended to prevent flooding and erosion by interfering with and preventing natural distributions of water and soil. Large structures controlling water flow also have the consequence of permitting residential and other building much closer to theoretically protected areas, thus compounding problems and creating more erosion concerns.