Email   Print

A book excerpt from Slow Money, by Woody Tasch

Excerpts from "Reconnoitering" in Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered by Woody Tasch. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Chelsea Green Publishing.

There is little dispute about the numbers. The only real dispute is about what story accompanies the numbers. Are these merely the unfortunate side effects, or “externalities,” that accompany economic growth? Are these problems that will be handled, each in turn, by technological fixes? Or, are these serious, structural cracks in the foundation of industrialization? Are these feedback loops calling into question the linear fallacies of economic growth?

And then there are the numbers and the stories of the soil.

Every second, a dump-truck load of topsoil is carried by America’s rivers into the Caribbean; every year, millions of tons of topsoil erode from farmers’ fields in the Mississippi River basin. “An estimated 36% of the world’s cropland is suffering from a decline in inherent productivity from soil erosion,” reports Lester Brown, one of the world’s leading ecosystem monitors. Globally, we are losing more than 10 million hectares of arable land each year, with soil loss exceeding new soil production by 23 billion tons, resulting in the loss of 0.5 percent or more of the world’s soil fertility, annually.

Worldwatch Institute calls it “the quiet crisis of the world economy.” Let us call it Peak Soil.

The phrase Peak Soil is currently being used by anti-biofuel advocates, highlighting the problems of diverting arable land from food production to fuel production. The phrase hints at something more ominous than the current controversy about ethanol, however.

Peak Soil suggests the exhaustion of a resource that is ultimately far more vital to civilization than either oil or ethanol. “Societies that deplete natural stocks of critical renewable resources—like soil—sow the seeds of their own destruction,” writes David Montgomery, professor of earth and space sciences at the University of Washington. “Technology, whether in the form of new plows or genetically engineered crops, may keep the system growing for a while, but the longer this works the more difficult it becomes to sustain—especially if soil erosion continues to exceed soil production.”

Beyond a small number of geologists, environmentalists, and organic farmers, the idea of Peak Soil seems as inconceivable today as global warming seemed two generations ago. One is tempted to ask with all incredulity: Could we really run out of dirt?

Which leads us back to Question Two in the Terra Madre of All Final Exams. The question is not only a question of erosion, it is a question of fertility. It is a question of nematode and protozoa, a question of fungi and bacteria, a question of microorganisms too numerous to count. Studying virgin prairie soils and cultivated soils in Missouri in the 1930s, soil scientist Hans Jenny found that after sixty years of cultivation, farm soils had lost a third of their organic matter, even in the absence of soil erosion. Our understanding of the soil has not advanced much since then.

“Soil science is in its infancy,” geneticist David Suzuki wrote in 1998. Our attention remains focused on what goes on above the ground. To paraphrase organic farmer Eliot Coleman, we are so busy feeding the plants that we have forgotten to feed the soil. (And he’s talking about compost and manure, crab shells and seaweed and crop residues and peat, not empty, synthetic calories of the N-P-K kind.)

* * *

Each gram of fertile soil contains hundreds of billions of bacteria and actinomycetes, hundreds of thousands of fungi and algae, and tens of thousands of protozoa, nematodes, and other microfauna. That was each gram of fertile soil. Let soil quants extrapolate this to shovelfuls, yards, tons, and acre-feet. I see your trillions, and I raise you trillions and trillions more: How many trillions of microorganisms are in the soil for every dollar of derivatives that circulate the globe?

<< PREVIOUS   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 NEXT >>
view as a single page