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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Slow Money: Reconnecting The Economy To Soil, Biodiversity and Food Quality,
  • Date: Sun, 05 Dec 2010 11:35:58 -0700


Slow Money: Reconnecting The Economy To Soil, Biodiversity and Food Quality,
By Woody Tasch December 4th, 2010
http://www.motherearthnews.com/nature-community/slow-money-ze0z10zhir.aspx
EXCERPT

The following is an excerpt from Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money:
Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered by Woody Tasch (Chelsea
Green, 2008). Tasch presents an essential new strategy for investing in local
food systems, and introduces a group of fiduciary activists who are exploring
what should replace the outdated concepts of industrial finance and
industrial agriculture. This excerpt is from the prologue.

Civilization is a big idea. So is the idea that as soil goes, so goes
civilization. So is the idea that as money goes, so goes the soil. We don’t
need any more big ideas.

We need small ideas. Beautiful ideas. Beautiful because they lead to a large
number of beautiful, small actions — the kind alluded to by Wendell Berry:
“Soil is not usually lost in slabs or heaps of magnificent tonnage. It is
lost a little at a time over millions of acres by careless acts of millions
of people. It cannot be solved by heroic feats of gigantic technology, but
only by millions of small acts and restraints.”

There is another kind of erosion at work, just as surely, here: erosion of
social capital, erosion of community, erosion of an understanding of our
place in the scheme of things.
Peak Soil

It takes roughly a millennium to build an inch or two of soil. It takes less
than 40 years, on average, to strip an inch of soil by farming in ways that
are more focused on current yield than on sustaining fertility. A third of
America’s topsoil has eroded since 1776. In the 1970s, the United States lost
4 billion tons of soil per year. Roughly a third of all farmland in the world
has been degraded since World War II, with annual soil erosion worldwide
equivalent to the loss of 12 million hectares of arable land, or 1 percent of
total arable land. About a third of China’s 130 million hectares of farmland
is seriously eroded, and Chinese crop yields fell by more than 10 percent
from 1999 to 2003, despite increasing application of synthetic fertilizers.

Awareness of the centrality of soil health is nothing new. Aristotle laid the
foundation for the humus theory of plant nutrition, and his student,
Theophrastus, is often called “the father of botany.” The homo of Homo
sapiens is derived from the Latin, humus, for living soil. Leonardo da Vinci
observed, “We know more about the movement of the celestial bodies than about
the soil underfoot.” Darwin spent the last years of his life studying the
role of earthworms in soil fertility. After World War I, Sir Albert Howard,
perhaps the father of 20th-century organic agriculture, heralded the problems
that would follow the manufacture of synthetic fertilizers by munitions
factories looking for new postwar markets for nitrates: Fertilizers offered
farmers boosts in yield but had deleterious effects on the health of
microorganisms and the processes of growth and decay that are vital to the
preservation of humus. In the first decade of the 21st century, despite
beyond-explosive growth in our knowledge of everything from atomic energy to
galactic motion, our ignorance with respect to life teeming in the soil
remains humbling: It is estimated that in a gram of soil, there are billions
of single-celled organisms and millions more multicelled ones, as well as
more than 4,000 species, most of them not yet named or studied by scientists.

Yet we have slipped during the past half century — as if pulled by the
gravitational or centripetal forces of population growth, technological
innovation, consumerism and free markets — into a food system that treats the
soil as if it were nothing more than a medium for holding plant roots so that
they can be force-fed a chemical diet.

We have become dependent on technology and synthetic inputs, subsidized by
what was, until very recently, cheap oil, which facilitated not only the
production of nitrogen fertilizer, but also the management of large-scale,
mechanized farms and the energy-intensive system of processing and long-range
transportation necessary to bring agricultural products to distant markets.
Agriculture accounts for more than 20 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas
emissions — all the more shocking when one realizes that recent science
indicates that fertile soil is a potent carbon sink, holding the potential to
play a significant role in remediating global warming.

The problems of our food and agricultural systems go beyond Peak Oil and Peak
Soil, however. Aquifer depletion, biodiversity decline, widespread use of
pesticides and other toxics, industrial feedlots that pose health and
waste-management problems, nutrition and food safety challenges that attend
centralized processing, the decline of rural economies, price volatility in
global commodities markets: It is quite a litany, surprising in its breadth
and even more surprising in the degree of its invisibility when seen through
the lens of the modern economy.

A Flawed System

You wouldn’t use a 747 to go to the corner store for a quart of milk. You
wouldn’t use a backhoe to plant a garlic bulb. You wouldn’t use a factory to
raise a pig. You wouldn’t spray poison on your food. You wouldn’t trade fresh
food from family farms down the road for irradiated or contaminated or
chemical-laden or weeks-old food from industrial farms halfway around the
world. You wouldn’t create financial incentives for farms to become so large
that they need GPS technology to apply chemical inputs with quasi-military
precision. You wouldn’t design a system that gets only 9 cents of every food
dollar to the farmer. You wouldn’t allow topsoil to wash down the Mississippi
River, replete with pesticides and fertilizer residues, creating a dead zone
the size of Rhode Island in the Gulf of Mexico. You wouldn’t use 57 calories
of petro-energy to produce one calorie of food energy.

No, no one ever sat down and designed such a system. Yet it is precisely such
a technology-heavy, extractive, intermediation-laden food system that we now
need to remediate and reform.

This is the system that has evolved in the wake of global capital markets and
the investors who use them, much as industrial farmers use their land—as a
medium into which to pour capital in order to harvest maximum yield.




  • [Livingontheland] Slow Money: Reconnecting The Economy To Soil, Biodiversity and Food Quality,, Tradingpost, 12/05/2010

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