When he was an undergraduate student, David Montgomery stumbled across a book that had been published in 1955. Topsoil and Civilization was the work of Vernon Gill Carter and Tom Dale, two soil scientists focused on conservation. Twenty years after its publication, the treatise hooked Montgomery, who is now a geomorphologist at the University of Washington Seattle. His own book, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, published last year, was inspired by that 1955 book and by many others that preceded it.
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