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  • From: Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>, sanet-mg@googlegroups.com
  • Subject: [permaculture] We need to protect the world's soil before it's too late | Popular Science
  • Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2017 23:18:13 -0400

http://www.popsci.com/topsoil-agriculture-food?dom=currents&src=syn

We need to protect the world's soil before it's too late

Book Excerpt: The Ground Beneath Us
By Paul Bogard <http://www.popsci.com/authors/paul-bogard> March 21, 2017

*The following is an excerpt from The Ground Beneath Us
<http://amzn.to/2n9NwIU> by Paul Bogard.*

It’s hard to believe that American society could possibly collapse because
of a lack of soil
<http://www.popsci.com/biodiversity-below-ground-is-critical-to-biodiversity-above-ground>.
And it’s true that we in the States are blessed to live in a country so
rich in this life-giving source. But in a small world growing smaller all
the time, what happens to the soil in other parts of the world—often much
more at risk than our soils—will eventually affect us and our economy, and
the stability of the world around us.

For example, soil scientists fear that we are wasting and damaging our
topsoil—the layer in which most of our food grows—at an entirely
unsustainable rate.

How unsustainable? One recent study reported that on average the world has
only sixty harvests remaining. “On average” because although in the United
Kingdom that number is one hundred harvests and in the United States the
number is even higher, for other parts of the world—think Africa, India,
China, and parts of South America, where the human population is largest
and growing ever larger—the number of remaining harvests is lower, meaning
that in fewer than sixty years the topsoil will no longer support the
growing and harvesting of food.

Two incompatible facts: at the very moment when we know that by 2050 we
will need significantly more food, we are paving over some of our most
fertile soil. Human settlements have traditionally taken root in fertile
areas, and as these increasingly urban areas grow in human numbers, we are
developing the ground and thus losing the best soils for growing food. In
the United States, the amount of ground being lost to development is
stunning—more than a million acres a year. As one result, whereas in 1980
the nation had an average of nearly two acres of cropland for each citizen,
thirty years later and with ninety million people added, that number had
fallen to 1.2 acres per American. “How an Exploding U.S. Population Is
Devouring the Land that Feeds and Nourishes Us,” reports the subtitle of a
study
<https://www.numbersusa.com/sites/default/files/public/assets/resources/files/vanishing-open-spaces-study.pdf>
on sprawl. And once this ground is paved, there’s no going back. As one
expert noted, “Asphalt is the land’s last crop.”

While soil sealing and sprawl are urban-focused impacts that many of us can
see at our feet, other serious threats to soil take place far from sight.
These are primarily threats created by agriculture, and especially
industrial agriculture as practiced by Western countries and exported to
developing lands. The main culprits? Intensive tilling and the overuse of
synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. The resulting degradation of soils
includes salinization, compaction, acidification, and the decline of
organic matter. Around the world, experts say, about 40 percent of soil
used for agriculture is already considered either degraded or seriously
degraded, meaning that in this 40 percent at least 70 percent of the
topsoil is gone. In total, in the past 150 years, half the topsoil on the
planet has been lost. This means a lot less food for an already hungry—and
ever-growing—human population.

“Under a business as usual scenario,” says John Crawford, an Australian
sustainable agriculturist, “degraded soil will mean that we will produce
thirty percent less food over the next twenty to fifty years. This is
against a background of projected demand requiring us to grow fifty percent
more food, as the population grows and wealthier people in countries like
China and India eat more meat, which take more land to produce.”

The potential for human suffering and environmental catastrophe is
enormous. Consider the East African country of Tanzania, home to a human
population of some fifty million. Tanzania is also home to an elephant
population already decimated from years of poaching. In just six years,
from 2009 to 2015, the country saw more than half its hundred thousand
elephants killed. What happens if, as projected, Tanzania’s human
population doubles to more than one hundred million in the next twenty
years, while at the same time the soil’s ability to produce crops
diminishes? What happens to wildlife when millions of people don’t have
enough to eat? And then what happens when the wildlife is gone? Similar
scenarios for disaster exist all over Africa, and on other continents as
well.

Even in considerably more stable situations such as in North America and
Europe, we are not immune from the consequences produced by the continuing
loss of soil and depleting of soil’s quality. For example, degraded soil
means soil that contains fewer nutrients and grows food that is less
nutritious. That’s why, as Crawford explains, modern wheat varieties have
half the micronutrients of older strains, and the same is true for fruits
and vegetables, many of which have lost a significant percentage—sometimes
more than half—of their nutritional value just since 1950. “If it’s not in
the soil,” he says, “it’s not in our food.”

All this might not matter so much if we could just find more soil, or just
make soil ourselves. But for all practical purposes soil is a nonrenewable
resource. The recipe for soil is incredibly complex, requiring an intricate
mix of the right chemistry, biology, and physics. And it simply takes a
long time to form. The rule of thumb? Between five hundred and several
thousand years for an inch of topsoil.

Which brings us back to sustainability. What we need to be talking about,
one soil expert told me, is, “Can we continue agriculture the way we’ve
been doing it the past fifty years for the next two hundred years? The
answer is almost certainly no.”

In fact, while there are many examples of how our way of life is
unsustainable, our abuse of soil may rank as the worst. The British writer
George Monbiot recently described our soil crisis this way:

Imagine a wonderful world, a planet on which there was no threat of climate
breakdown, no loss of freshwater, no antibiotic resistance, no obesity
crisis, no terrorism, no war. Surely, then, we would be out of major
danger? Sorry. Even if everything else were miraculously fixed, we’re
finished if we don’t address an issue considered so marginal and irrelevant
that you can go for months without seeing it in a newspaper.

George Monbiot

The number of harvests we have left, whether it’s sixty or ninety or
thirty, isn’t the point. The point is that if we do not change the way we
farm and build, we will run out of soil. “Almost all other issues are
superficial by comparison,” writes Monbiot. “What appear to be great crises
are slight and evanescent when held up against the steady trickling away of
our subsistence.”

*Excerpted from The Ground Beneath Us <http://amzn.to/2n9NwIU>, Copyright ©
2017 by Paul Bogard. Used with permission of TKTK. All rights reserved.*




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