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By Root 1085 0

Much of the soil itself is being lost, and this, too, is a concern. Fertile soil builds up only very slowly, often requiring 100 years of natural processes to create a single inch, and it is being lost at a rate that far exceeds its rate of accumulation. Some of it is lost slowly through simple erosion over time, and sometimes it is lost rather dramatically, as was the case in the U.S. dust bowl in the 1930s, when a single dust storm on April 14, 1935 was calculated to have contained 300,000 tons of topsoil, twice as much material as was dug from the Panama Canal.7

Desertification is another destructive process that is often initiated and accelerated by the actions of humans. The process usually involves overgrazing of already marginal, dry lands, which destroys the meager plant cover that protects what little soil there is. Eventually a fine wind storm comes along and blows that soil away, and then nothing is left to absorb the sparse rains when next they come. Plant roots themselves also play an important role in both capturing and liberating water; they perform vital functions lost to overgrazing and difficult to reestablish once gone.

Conclusion

All of this is to say that instead of building up our primary wealth—soils—we’re rather steadily, and sometimes dramatically, eroding and depleting them. Sustaining our current farming yields currently requires enormous energy inputs to create the fertilizers and run the irrigation pumps. But these practices are themselves unsustainable. Sooner or later, the energy won’t be there to create the fertilizers and irrigate the fields.

Taken together, these facts about the fate of our soils and available farmland lead me to a stark conclusion: The cost of food is going to go up rather dramatically in the years to come. Farming on arid land isn’t sustainable. Farming in a way that depletes the soil isn’t sustainable, nor are methods that cause soil to be eroded faster than it’s created.

The whole story of farming on an industrial scale is one of low costs and even lower sustainability. In order to farm sustainably, soils must be minimally maintained at their current depths and levels of fertility. In a world of surplus energy, these defects can be hidden by “nutrient subsidies” hauled in at great energy costs from far away. But when the energy subsidy is withdrawn, the true state of our croplands will be revealed.

The alternative to this bleak story of lost soil and squandered nutrients begins in your local area. There are farming practices available that build soils and nutrients; these have begun to “close the nutrient loop” and are therefore on the path toward being sustainable. It would be a useful exercise to explore how these options are (or aren’t) being applied in your area.

The bottom line with regard to soil is that it is the single most important form of primary wealth. Without soil, we’d be entirely lost. Without food, nothing else is possible. It is past time to reconnect with our soil and treat it with the respect and admiration it deserves.

CHAPTER 21

Parched

The Coming Water Wars

When you were young, perhaps your mother admonished you to turn off the tap while brushing your teeth to conserve water. That’s good advice, and I don’t want to diminish it, but the coming water predicaments will be driven more by the food on your plate than by what swirls down your drains. Water tables all across the globe are falling fast as aquifers are pumped at rates far faster than they are being recharged.

As Lester Brown explains:

The link between water and food is strong. We each consume, on average, nearly 4 liters of water per day in one form or another, while the water required to produce our daily food totals at least 2,000 liters—500 times as much. This helps explain why 70 percent of all water use is for irrigation. Another 20 percent is used by industry, and 10 percent goes for residential purposes. With the demand for water growing in all three categories, competition among sectors is intensifying, with agriculture almost always losing.