"... It was the basic principle ... which during the 1930's and 40s, inspired a few New Zealanders ... to set out to develop a soil conservation consciousness in this country, and to bring to an indifferent public's attention the way New Zealanders were destroying their land by overgrazing and by the wholesale destruction of protective forests and tussock cover high in the watersheds. The disastrous East Coast floods of 1938 helped these pioneers to bring the realities of the situation before both Government and people, and in 1941 an imaginative piece of legislation - the Soil Conservation and Rivers Control Act - linked together for the first time the problems of flooding and soil erosion, and established an organisation to deal with it. L. W. McCaskill's account of the monumental task before the Soil Conservation Council and the Catchment Boards, and the manner in which these organisations successfully halted the rapid deterioration of New Zealand farmlands, first by winning the farmers over to their side and then by introducing reafforestation schemes, pest control, and countour ploughing is by no means a dry history of a dull subject ... The campaign against soil erosion in New Zealand is by no means over ..." -- Inside front