Salination

Such extension of control diminishes disturbances of the peace, stabilises and thus promotes agricultural industry, and puts a check on the exhaustion and salination of the soil.

If you look down at the Punjab from an aircraft, you will see here and there below you, splotching the green fields like mold on the wall of an old house, patches of gray decay, rising patternless and ominous across the landscape. This is salination, a rotting of the land caused by a rise in the level of the underground water table, which forces the salts of the earth to the surface and gradually turns fields back to desert.

An environmentally conscious population labels the phenomenon of land degradation in Australia (specifically, the erosion of top-soil and salination caused by irrigation after deforestation) as AIDS of the earth; the same metaphor is used in America.

1939, James Stevens Simmons, Malaria in Panama, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, Chapter 7 “Sanitary methods used for the control of malaria in the Canal Zone,” p. 189, In many of the vast sea-level swamps of the Atlantic side, no slope whatever can be obtained, and here dependence is placed on a grid system of intercepting earthen ditches, communicating with seawater at each end whenever practicable, to insure quick run-off of rain water and thorough salination of every part of the swamps.

1989, Michael Renner, “Enhancing Global Security” in Lester R. Brown et al., State of the World 1989: A Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society, New York: Norton, p. 142, Disputes revolve around water diversion or reduced water flow, industrial pollution, the salination or siltation of streams, and floods aggravated by soil erosion.

It is evident […] that we ought to find every degree of salination of salt lakes.