“The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.”- President Franklin D. Roosevelt
Not great for growing mangos in.
I used to have one of those armbands (you know, a knock-off Lance Armstrong one) that said “Water is Life.” When I was in Cairo two years ago, a man in the bazaar told me that it says something to that effect in the Koran as well so I gave it to him (Koran 21:30 if you’re curious). We’re used to thinking about water and even air as life. Possibly because we don’t interact with it much, we typically don’t worry about the soil as much. Topsoil, though, is just as essential to human existence, and we’re destroying it at an incredible pace.
I came across a site called Culture Change that had an interesting post by Alice Friedemann on why cellulosic ethanol and biofuels are ultimately going to make us reach “peak soil” much faster. Overall, I think a lot of the stuff on that site is pretty doomsday and pessimistic, but Ms. Friedemann’s overall points and well-researched argument should serve as a significant call to action. Though she picks apart the case for these fuels in many ways, her basic point is that farmers will need their residual crop “waste” to replenish top soil rather than turning it into ethanol. We’ll essentially be turning from drilling for oil to mining the source of our food supply.
In his last book, Collapse, Jared Diamond draws lessons for the present by examining what factors determined the failure or success of past civilizations. For every civilization he examines, the health of the soil is a primary cause. Depletion of soil led to a severe Malthusian catastrophe for many of the societies he examines. He cites some alarming statistics. Iowa one of the major world breadbaskets, for instance, has lost about half its top soil in the last 150 years.
I sometimes worry that we get caught up in what seem to us to be relatively frivolous questions that only the wealthy can worry about: Should we buy the organic apples or the conventional? But if we want to ask the question, how urgent is sustainable agriculture, the answer is clear. It’s as important as our own survival as a civilization.
