The Land Speaks Thru Neil D Hamilton

Emeritus professor of law and former director of Drake University’s Agricultural Law Center, Neil Hamilton, joins us to discuss his book, The Land Remains: A Midwestern Perspective On Our Past and Future. Published by Ice Cube Press, The Land Remains “tells the story of our land and our relationship to it, particularly with an Iowa focus and with a largely agricultural focus as well, because agriculture is such a dominant part of our society. It’s part history, part memoir…there’s some law in it and contemporary discussion of positive things and the challenges we face as well, as it relates to land and water, public lands, and that whole suite of issues.”

One chapter of The Land Remains deals specifically with soil conservation and the importance of soil health. Hamilton says that people today assume that soil conservation has been taken care of. However, he explains, “We lose more soil than we should. In many ways, lose almost as much as we did in the 1930’s because our farming systems are so much more intensive and we’re farming so much more marginal ground…so we continue to lose soil, and we’re basically mining our way down through this wonderful topsoil…I supposed we’ll continue to do it as long as we can keep pouring fertilizer on it and get a crop out of it.”

Hamilton also points out that whether we own our own land or not, we’re all essentially landowners. “…there’s a billion acres of public-owned land, hundreds of thousands of acres… almost no one lives less than 5 miles away from public land, whether it’s a city park, or a county park, or a state park, or a river that you can paddle on, because all of the water in the state’s public property, public resources, and so, we’re all land owners of that public land and both have the opportunity to use it, have a responsibility to it, and are benefited by policies that help add to it, for example, and take care of it. But I also make the point that all the land, even land that people think of as being privately owned, has a public dimension to it.”