permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

[he leaves out a few prominent permaculture dignitaries]

We’re treating soil like dirt. It’s a fatal mistake, because all human life
depends on it | George Monbiot | Opinion | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/25/treating-soil-like-dirt-fatal-mistake-human-life

We’re treating soil like dirt. It’s a fatal mistake, as our lives depend on
it - George Monbiot
https://www.theguardian.com/…/treating-soil-like-dirt-fatal…
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/25/treating-soil-like-dirt-fatal-mistake-human-life>
magine 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.

It’s literally and – it seems – metaphorically, beneath us. To judge by its
absence from the media, most journalists consider it unworthy of
consideration. But all human life depends on it. We knew this long ago, but
somehow it has been forgotten. As a Sanskrit text written in about 1500BC
noted: “Upon this handful of soil our survival depends. Husband it and it
will grow our food, our fuel and our shelter and surround us with beauty.
Abuse it and the soil will collapse and die, taking humanity with it.”

The issue hasn’t changed, but we have. Landowners around the world are now
engaged in an orgy of soil destruction so intense that, according to the
UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, the world on average has just 60
more years of growing crops. Even in Britain, which is spared the tropical
downpours that so quickly strip exposed soil from the land, Farmers Weekly
reports, we have “only 100 harvests left”.

Landowners around the world are now engaged in an orgy of soil destruction

To keep up with global food demand, the UN estimates, 6m hectares (14.8m
acres) of new farmland will be needed every year. Instead, 12m hectares a
year are lost through soil degradation. We wreck it, then move on, trashing
rainforests and other precious habitats as we go. Soil is an almost magical
substance, a living system that transforms the materials it encounters,
making them available to plants. That handful the Vedic master showed his
disciples contains more micro-organisms than all the people who have ever
lived on Earth. Yet we treat it like, well, dirt.

The techniques that were supposed to feed the world threaten us with
starvation. A paper just published in the journal Anthropocene analyses the
undisturbed sediments in an 11th-century French lake. It reveals that the
intensification of farming over the past century has increased the rate of
soil erosion sixtyfold.

Another paper, by researchers in the UK, shows that soil in allotments –
the small patches in towns and cities that people cultivate by hand –
contains a third more organic carbon than agricultural soil and 25% more
nitrogen. This is one of the reasons why allotment holders produce between
four and 11 times more food per hectare than do farmers.

Whenever I mention this issue, people ask: “But surely farmers have an
interest in looking after their soil?” They do, and there are many
excellent cultivators who seek to keep their soil on the land. There are
also some terrible farmers, often absentees, who allow contractors to rip
their fields to shreds for the sake of a quick profit. Even the good ones
are hampered by an economic and political system that could scarcely be
better designed to frustrate them.
Why are organic farmers across Britain giving up?
Read more

This is the International Year of Soils, but you wouldn’t know it. In
January, the Westminster government published a new set of soil standards,
marginally better than those they replaced, but wholly unmatched to the
scale of the problem. There are no penalities for compromising our survival
except a partial withholding of public subsidies. Yet even this pathetic
guidance is considered intolerable by the National Farmers’ Union, which
greeted them with bitter complaints. Sometimes the NFU seems to me to exist
to champion bad practice and block any possibility of positive change.

Few sights are as gruesome as the glee with which the NFU celebrated the
death last year of the European soil framework directive, the only measure
with the potential to arrest our soil-erosion crisis. The NFU, supported by
successive British governments, fought for eight years to destroy it, then
crowed like a shedful of cockerels when it won. Looking back on this
episode, we will see it as a parable of our times.

Soon after that, the business minister, Matthew Hancock, announced that he
was putting “business in charge of driving reform”: trade associations
would be able “to review enforcement of regulation in their sectors.” The
NFU was one the first two bodies granted this privilege. Hancock explained
that this “is all part of our unambiguously pro-business agenda to increase
the financial security of the British people.” But it doesn’t increase our
security, financial or otherwise. It undermines it.

The government’s deregulation bill, which has now almost completed its
passage through parliament, will force regulators – including those charged
with protecting the fabric of the land – to “have regard to the
desirability of promoting economic growth”. But short-term growth at the
expense of public protection compromises long-term survival. This
“unambiguously pro-business agenda” is deregulating us to death.

There’s no longer even an appetite for studying the problem. Just one
university – Aberdeen – now offers a degree in soil science. All the rest
have been closed down.

This is what topples civilisations. War and pestilence might kill large
numbers of people, but in most cases the population recovers. But lose the
soil and everything goes with it.

Now, globalisation ensures that this disaster is reproduced everywhere. In
its early stages, globalisation enhances resilience: people are no longer
dependent on the vagaries of local production. But as it proceeds,
spreading the same destructive processes to all corners of the Earth, it
undermines resilience, as it threatens to bring down systems everywhere.

Short-term growth at the expense of public protection compromises long-term
survival

Almost all other issues are superficial by comparison. What appear to be
great crises are slight and evanescent when held up against the steady
trickling away of our subsistence.

The avoidance of this issue is perhaps the greatest social silence of all.
Our insulation from the forces of nature has encouraged a belief in the
dematerialisation of our lives, as if we no longer subsist on food and
water, but on bits and bytes. This is a belief that can be entertained only
by people who have never experienced serious hardship, and who are
therefore unaware of the contingency of existence.
The stories you need to read, in one handy email
Read more

It’s not as if we are short of solutions. While it now seems that ploughing
of any kind is incompatible with the protection of the soil, there are
plenty of means of farming without it. Independently, in several parts of
the world, farmers have been experimenting with zero-tillage (also known as
conservation agriculture), often with extraordinary results.

There are dozens of ways of doing it: we need never see bare soil again.
But in the UK, as in most rich nations, we have scarcely begun to
experiment with the technique, despite the best efforts of the magazine
Practical Farm Ideas.

Even better are some of the methods that fall under the heading of
permaculture – working with complex natural systems rather than seeking to
simplify or replace them. Pioneers such as Sepp Holzer and Geoff Lawton
have achieved remarkable yields of fruit and vegetables in places that
seemed unfarmable: 1,100m above sea level in the Austrian alps, for
example, or in the salt-shrivelled Jordanian desert.

But, though every year our government spends £450m on agricultural research
and development – much of it on techniques that wreck our soils – there is
no mention of permaculture either on the websites of the two main funding
bodies (NERC and BBSRC) or in any other department.

The macho commitment to destructive short-termism appears to resist all
evidence and all logic. Never mind life on Earth; we’ll plough on
regardless.

• A fully referenced version of this article can be found at Monbiot.com
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<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/25/treating-soil-like-dirt-fatal-mistake-human-life>
We’re treating soil like dirt. It’s a fatal mistake, because all human life
depends on it | George Monbiot
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War, pestilence, even climate change, are trifles by comparison. Destroy
the soil and we all starve
theguardian.com|By George Monbiot