Soil loss articles in National Geographic

There are some good articles on global soil loss in this month's National Geographic.
Surprisingly, no mention of Israel.

can't wait to read it. I wait for hand me down NG's.  Puts me behind a bit but saves paper and money.

Ben Souther wrote:Surprisingly, no mention of Israel.

Maybe I'm missing something but why is that surprising?

I found a few of the NG articles online:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/09/soil/mann-text
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/09/soil/bourne-text
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/09/soil/quiz-interactive got a 40 :<

I read the first "Our Good Earth" article and found it very informative. Unfortunately though there was no mention of permaculture, which is odd given it's focus on building healthy soil and successes doing so, especially in "third world" contexts.

Until I read some of Daniel Quinn's works and started learning about permaculture, I had no idea desertification was a large problem caused by "civilized" agriculture. This article confirms that often many highly publicized famines, like those in Haiti and the Sahel of Africa, were caused by "green revolution" type cultivation aimed at export crops. While sustainable traditional methods, like the usage of terra preta discussed in the article, are often demonized as "backwards," so-called development actually makes the people doing the work poorer.

tranquil wrote:
Maybe I'm missing something but why is that surprising?

It surprised me because Israel's got a great reputation for both managing to grow crops in a desert (drip irrigation etc..) and for actually transforming deserts into farmable land with topsoil.

https://permies.com/permaculture-forums/682_0/permaculture/build-46-inches-of-topsoil-in-a-year-video
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drip_irrigation