and salmon shows what can happen when we favor short-term thinking and returns. Here is a common lesson in our long-running failure to address the underlying causes of salmon declines and soil erosion, a lesson pertinent to other major issues of pivotal societal importance, such as climate change. Working against nature in the short run may not pay off in the long run.
How might we rethink the conventional wisdom of conventional agriculture to find a way to work with nature? We could start by shifting our view of soils from a mere substrate for growing plants to ecological systems for feeding plants and making them thrive—and thereby ourselves. What will it take? Adapting agriculture to treat the soil as an ecosystem rather than trying to make soil adapt to our technology, and then having to compensate with fertilizers and biocides because we have transformed fertile soil into sterile dirt. Poisoning the foundation of our food web through addiction to pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers isn't much of a strategy for sustaining civilization. It's time for a greener revolution.
What can we do to start rebuilding and restoring agricultural soils? Public investment should support agricultural research that is focused on working with soil ecosystems rather than working against them. A new approach could include reducing subsidies for conventional, erosive farming practices; increasing support for development of perennial crops and low-input, no-till farming; promoting practices that increase soil organic matter to both sequester carbon and improve soil fertility; and adopting policies to promote the viability of small-scale, organic farms. We don't have to revert to pre-industrial practices. We don't have to choose between sustainable agriculture and feeding the world. In many cases crop yields from so-called alternative agriculture can match the output of what we now call conventional agriculture. And no matter how one looks at it, restoring native soil fertility will become increasingly important for sustaining agricultural production in a post-oil (and most likely post-cheap fertilizer) world.
The quiet crisis of soil degradation presents one of this century's most daunting challenges. If, as I have, you were to tell a policy-maker that soil erosion and degradation of soil fertility threaten humanity's future, you too might endure a mini-lecture about how a crisis potentially decades in the future is irrelevant to politics today. But the thin layer of weathered rock, dead plants and animals, fungi and microorganisms blanketing the planet has been and always will be the mother of all terrestrial life—and every nation's most critical resource, one that is either renewable or not, depending on how it is used.
Homo sapiens, wise man indeed. There's still time to live up to our name—if only we stop treating our soil like dirt.
NOTE
1. You can find the resulting paper and all the data I compiled in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2007, v. 104, p. 13,268-13,272).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book could never have been written without the support of Anne Biklé who, once again, put up with a dining room table covered with endless revisions. Susan Rasmussen chased down obscure historical sources and proved an incredible library sleuth. Polly Freeman, Blake Edgar, and Edith Gladstone provided exceptional editorial input and guidance, and Sam Fleishman was a tremendous help in finding the manuscript a good home. Charles Kiblinger and Harvey Greenberg helped prepare the illustrations. I am also grateful to the Whiteley Center at the University of Washington's Friday Harbor Laboratory for providing the perfect environment to finish the manuscript. I am deeply indebted to the researchers whose work I have relied on in this synthesis and compiled at the end of the book for readers interested in finding the original sources. Naturally, I alone remain responsible for any inadvertent errors and oversights. Finally, in the interest of brevity and narrative I have chosen not to focus on the history and details of the work of the Natural Resources Conservation Service (formerly the Soil Conservation Service), even though its important work remains among the most underappreciated on the planet—and essential to our future.
ONE
Good Old Dirt
What we do to the land, we do to ourselves.
WENDELL BERRY
ON A SUNNY AUGUST DAY IN THE LATE 1990s, I led an expedition up the flank of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines to survey a river still filled with steaming sand from the massive 1991 eruption. The riverbed jiggled coyly as we trudged upriver under the blazing tropical sun. Suddenly I sank in to my ankles, then my knees, before settling waist deep in hot sand. While my waders began steaming, my graduate students went for their cameras. After properly documenting my predicament, and then negotiating a bit, they pulled me from the mire.
Few things can make you feel as helpless as when the earth gives way beneath your feet. The more you struggle, the deeper you sink. You're going down and there's nothing you can do about it. Even the loose riverbed felt rock solid after that quick dip in boiling quicksand.
Normally we don't think too much about the ground that supports our feet, houses, cities, and farms. Yet even if we usually take it for granted, we know that good soil is not just dirt. When you dig into rich, fresh earth, you can feel the life in it. Fertile soil crumbles and slides right off a shovel. Look closely and you find a whole world of life eating life, a biological orgy recycling the dead back into new life. Healthy soil has an enticing and wholesome aroma—the smell of life itself.
Yet what is dirt? We try to keep it out of sight, out of mind, and outside. We spit on it, denigrate it, and kick it off of our shoes. But in the end, what's more important? Everything comes from it, and everything returns to it. If that doesn't earn dirt a little respect, consider how profoundly soil fertility and soil erosion shaped the course of history.
At the dawn of agricultural civilizations, the 98 percent of people who worked the land supported a small ruling class that oversaw the distribution of food and resources. Today, the less than 1 percent of the U.S. population still working the land feeds the rest of us. Although most people realize how dependent we are on this small cadre of modern farmers, few recognize the fundamental importance of how we treat our dirt for securing the future of our civilization.
Many ancient civilizations indirectly mined soil to fuel their growth as agricultural practices accelerated soil erosion well beyond the pace of soil production. Some figured out how to reinvest in their land and maintain their soil. All depended on an adequate supply of fertile dirt. Despite recognition of the importance of enhancing soil fertility, soil loss contributed to the demise of societies from the first agricultural civilizations to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and later helped spur the rise of European colonialism and the American push westward across North America.
Such problems are not just ancient history. That soil abuse remains a threat to modern society is clear from the plight of environmental refugees driven from the southern plains' Dust Bowl in the 1930s, the African Sahel in the 1970s, and across the Amazon basin today. While the world's population keeps growing, the amount of productive farmland began declining in the 1970s and the supply of cheap fossil fuels used to make synthetic fertilizers will run out later this century. Unless more immediate disasters do us in, how we address the twin problems of soil degradation and accelerated erosion will eventually determine the fate of modern civilization.
In exploring the fundamental role of soil in human history, the key lesson is as simple as it is clear: modern society risks repeating mistakes that hastened the demise of past civilizations. Mortgaging our grandchildren's future by consuming soil faster than it forms, we face the dilemma that sometimes the slowest changes prove most difficult to stop.
For
