the sense of attacking crops and reducing yields) by eradicating all their competitors and natural predators as well as decreasing the presence of organisms in the soil that stimulate plants to produce chemicals to defend themselves.
Pesticide contamination of farmers, farm workers, water, and the food itself is pervasive. Natural enemies are killed along with the target pests, frequently leading to the outbreak of previously insignificant secondary pests. As target pests develop resistance to the pesticides used, a treadmill is created, necessitating higher pesticide application rates, the use of multiple pesticides, and the continual introduction of new pesticides. This creates a chemical arms race between crop pests and pesticide makers, driving pests to evolve resistance to widely used pesticides. The occurrence of many pest problems on industrial agriculture farms is an outcome of farming under the constraints of capitalist economics and ideology rather than a product of nature. This is partially a result of practices that, among other effects, decrease soil organic matter.
More fertilizer is needed as organic matter decreases because the nutrient-supplying ability of soils is tied so intimately to the amount of organic matter present. And decreased organic matter reduces the amount of rainfall that can infiltrate and be stored in soils, leading to rifts in the hydrologic cycle. This is then counteracted by more frequent irrigation. While these so-called remedies—pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, more irrigation—help to maintain high yields in the short term, crop yields are usually lower than would occur with soils richer in organic matter.
THE HYDROLOGIC CYCLE
Freshwater comprises less than 2 percent of the earth’s total water, and is unevenly distributed around the globe. Freshwater is needed for drinking, irrigating crops, raising farm animals, and many other human endeavors. Thus, the questions of how water cycles—where it rains and where it doesn’t, how much it rains and the intensity of rainfall, and how much of the rainfall infiltrates the soil and how much runs off the land—are all critical. Today the cycling of water is being significantly distorted in a number of ways: changes in rainfall patterns as global warming proceeds, pumping water from subsurface aquifers (permeable strata) faster than replenishment occurs, transporting water long distances to supply another region, excessive use during irrigation and growing water-needy crops in regions with inadequate rainfall, and contamination of surface and subsurface water with industrial chemicals.
Freshwater will soon be the key resource that nations will fight over. Already there are struggles between the states of Georgia and Florida over water use, and the disagreements among western U.S. states are legendary. Dams built by China and other countries along rivers, without being part of a regionally agreed-upon water allocation strategy, lead to headlines like the Guardian’s “A Waterfight Like No Other May Be Brewing Over Asia’s Rivers.”34 Upriver dams, used for irrigation and producing hydroelectric energy, lessen the downriver flows and change the annual flow patterns, harming river fisheries and other traditional uses.
The earth’s warming is projected to increase drought stress in northern South America and parts of Central America and Africa and decease water availability in the large river basins of Southeast Asia. On the other hand, greater precipitation, much of it in more intense storms, is anticipated for portions of the continental United States.35 Regions with increased probabilities of intense storm occurrences includes parts of England, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific coastal regions of Colombia and Ecuador.
Perhaps as an indication of what is in store for the United States, for a period of a little over twelve months beginning in May 2015, “dozens of people [were] killed and thousands of homes swamped with water in extreme events in Oklahoma, Texas, South Carolina, West Virginia and Maryland.”36 The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that eight 500-year storms occurred during this period. The devastating storms that hit Louisiana in August 2016 dropped up to 24 inches (60 cm) of water over a forty-eight-hour period. “The Louisiana flooding has been so exceptional that some places in the state experienced storm conditions considered once-every-1,000-year events.”37
During normal rainfall events, an estimated 60 percent of the precipitation that falls on land enters the soil and is stored there. The remaining 40 percent either flows through the soil into aquifers and springs or overland into streams, rivers, lakes, wetlands, and oceans. Removal of native vegetation and conversion of forests and grasslands to plowed fields decreases soil organic matter and disturbs natural soil structure, decreasing the amount of rainfall infiltrating soil, leading to accelerated runoff and erosion as flowing water carries soil sediments downhill.
Large-scale agriculture, stimulated by economic incentives that encourage growing row crops and covering ever-larger land areas, have accelerated the natural process of soil erosion.38 For example, more than half of Iowa’s topsoil—originally fourteen inches deep—has been eroded by water flowing over soils used to grow corn and soybeans.39
Huge expansions of urban and suburban areas have resulted in increasing portions of land being covered with impermeable structures: houses, commercial buildings, schools, roads, driveways, and, in particular, parking lots:
It’s estimated that there are three nonresidential parking spaces for every car in the United States. That adds up to almost 800 million parking spaces, covering about 4,360 square miles—an area larger than Puerto Rico. In some cities, like Orlando and Los Angeles, parking lots are estimated to cover at least one-third of the land area, making them one of the most salient landscape features of the built world.40
Sealing so much of the soil surface contributes to large pulses of runoff from storms, swelling local streams and rivers and leading to flooding and water pollution.
Irrigating agricultural fields uses the largest amount of water by far, accounting for 70 percent globally. In California, agriculture accounts for 80 percent of total freshwater use. A sizable further portion is used (and polluted) by the oil and gas industry due to the huge increase in horizontal drilling (fracking) that produces enormous quantities of contaminated wastewater. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimates that up to 9.6 million gallons of water are used for every fracking well.41 Even the oil and gas industry recognizes its use of a huge amount of water. In a series called Measuring Success, the engineering firm Siemens, which builds monitoring equipment for wells, claims that “the biggest product of the US petroleum industry [is] water.” If the idea of oil and gas companies producing water sounds strange, that’s because it is. “Produced water” is an Orwellian term invented by the industry used to describe the toxic cocktail of fracking chemicals and contaminated water the industry disposes of by burying it underground.
Reinjection of fracking wastewater into the ground has dramatically increased the frequency of earthquakes. The state of Oklahoma, where earthquakes were rare, now experiences them as often as California.42 In the Dallas–Fort Worth area earthquakes had never before been recorded until 2008, after wastewater injection took off. Local resident Cathy Wallace describes having to contend with the knowledge that quakes could come at any time: “Every time it happens you know it’s going to hit, but you don’t know how severe it’s going to be…. Is this going to be a bigger one? Is this the part where my house falls down? It’s scary. It’s very scary.”43 The USGS estimates earthquakes caused by wastewater injection will threaten the lives and livelihoods of up to 7 million people in the United States.44
What’s most remarkable is that we have known for decades that injecting large quantities of high-pressure liquid into the ground is a direct cause of earthquakes. Experiments in the 1960s conclusively demonstrated the exact amount and pressure of liquid required to destabilize a fault. In reference to these experiments, Stanford University geophysicist Bill Ellsworth notes, “Scores of papers on injection-induced earthquakes were published in the geophysical literature in the following 40-plus years [1960s on], and the problem was well understood and appreciated by seismologists.”45
