Wild Free and Happy Sample 44 Update

 [Note: The following is a significant expansion of the Soil Destruction section of Sample 44.]

SOIL DESTRUCTION

Spencer Wells lamented the transition to food production, when folks shifted from foraging to farming and herding.  “Instead of being along for the ride, we climbed into the driver’s seat.”  Richard Manning agreed.  He said that in the good old days, “we didn’t grow food; food grew.”  Food production took an increasing toll on the soil.  Folks didn’t fully understand the consequences of what they were doing. 

In the good old days, wild ecosystems were complex communities of plants and animals.  These wild communities coevolved over time, which kept them fine-tuned for long term survival in ever changing local conditions.  Believe it or not, they could thrive, century after century, without irrigation systems, synthetic fertilizer, pesticides, fossil powered machinery, human stewards, and so on.

With the transition to plant and animal domestication, humans could produce greater quantities of food, and feed more mouths.  But the artificial ecosystems they created (cropland and pasture) commonly reduced natural biodiversity, encouraged erosion, and depleted soil fertility.

Walter Youngquist wrote that the average depth of the world’s topsoil is less than 12 inches (30 cm).  He added that almost all modern folks consider oil to be a vital strategic resource.  Oddly, far fewer have a profound appreciation for soil, the most precious mineral treasure of all.  For almost the entire human saga, our ancestors left fossil hydrocarbons in the ground, where they belong.  Soil is vital for the survival of the entire family of life — yesterday, today, and forever after.

He warned that, from a human timeframe, topsoil is a nonrenewable resource, because new topsoil is created over the passage of centuries, on a geological timeframe.  “Overall, one-third of the topsoil on U.S. cropland has been lost over the past 200 years.”  Humans are destroying it far faster than nature creates it. 

Youngquist mentioned the work of Peter Salonius, a soil scientist who performed 44 years of research.  Salonius came to the conclusion that all extractive agriculture, from ancient times to the present, is unsustainable.  Environmental history clearly supports his conclusion. 

Writing in 2000, J. R. McNeill wrote that the U.S. was currently losing 1.7 billion tons of topsoil per year to erosion.  At that time, there were 281 million Americans.  So, the loss would have been six tons per person.  Writing in 2007, David Montgomery noted that each year, the world was losing 24 billion tons of soil.  In 2015, Joel Bourne reported that every year, a million hectares (2.4 million acres) of world cropland are taken out of production because of erosion, desertification, or development. 

Richard Manning wrote, “There is no such thing as sustainable agriculture.  It does not exist.”  David Montgomery agreed.  “Continued for generations, till-based agriculture will strip soil right off the land as it did in ancient Europe and the Middle East.  With current agricultural technology though, we can do it a lot faster.”

Tobacco

Dale and Carter wrote a history of humankind’s war on soil.  Immigrants who colonized the U.S. behaved much like civilized colonists throughout history.  “They caused more waste and ruin in a shorter time than any people before them because they had more land to exploit and better equipment with which to exploit it.  Some ruined their land because they knew no better, and others destroyed out of greed for immediate profits, but most of them did it because it seemed the easiest thing to do.”

David Montgomery described the farmers of early America.  Tobacco was a goldmine, because it reaped six times more income than any other crop, and it could be shipped across the Atlantic and arrive in perfect condition. 

Growing tobacco was labor intensive, and slaves provided the muscle power.  It was also a heavy feeder on soil nutrients.  A farmer could make great money for three or four crops, after which the soil was severely depleted. 

At that point, they often abandoned the useless fields, and cleared forest to create new ones, for another round of jackpot moneymaking.  It was easier and more profitable.  In the early days, frontier land was abundant and cost little or nothing.

Back in Europe, it was foolish to greedily treat topsoil like a rape and run disposable resource.  Over time, agriculture had eventually collided with serious limits, when it was no longer easy to expand cropland area by exterminating forests.  So, respectful consideration was given to future generations of descendants, who wouldn’t enjoy inheriting a (%@&#!) wasteland.  Each generation deliberately made efforts to slow soil deterioration by regularly adding manure, compost, leaves, crushed bone, and other fertilizers.  Soil was treated like gold.

On the other hand, in early America, ambitious high achievers thought that being conservative stewards of the land was ridiculously stupid.  Livestock was needed to produce manure, and livestock required pasture.  Tobacco acres earned big money fast, and pasture acres did not.  Profit was their god word.

Cotton

Clive Ponting noted that a bit after the tobacco boom, the cotton gin made it more profitable to manufacture cotton fabric, rather than wool.  Cotton became a new goldmine for farmers and slave traders.  In Africa, slaves were often purchased by trading cotton cloth for them.  Like tobacco, cotton was very hard on the soil.  Compared to a food crop, it extracted 11 times the nitrogen, and 36 times the phosphorus.  Between 1815 and 1860, cotton was 50 percent of U.S. exports.

As with tobacco, depleted cotton fields were abandoned, and farm country migrated westward, as it devoured ancient forests.  It was cheaper, easier, and more profitable to move on, so they did.  David Montgomery described how these folks broke every cardinal rule of careful land stewardship.  Farmers did continuous planting without crop rotation, used little or no manure, and plowed straight up and down hills (not contour plowing). 

Highly explosive ignorance resulted in painful lessons and enduring destruction.  Stripping away the forests in hill country deleted what had held the soil in place for thousands of years.  Damage was extreme in the Piedmont belt of the southeastern U.S.  Further north, the wreckage was a bit lighter, because snow protected the soil during winter months.  But in the south, heavy rains were common.  Some regions eventually lost most of their soil, exposing portions of bedrock.  

Shockingly huge gullies were created in the wake of deforestation.  In Alabama, gullies up to 80 feet (24 m) deep soon followed land clearance.  One erosion gully near Macon, Georgia was 50 feet deep (15 m), 200 feet across (61 m), and 300 yards long (274 m).  Montgomery wrote, “By the early 1900s, more than five million acres of formerly cultivated land in the South lay idle because of the detrimental effects of soil erosion.”

Dust Bowl

As the colonization of the U.S. proceeded, folks continued migrating westward, moving beyond forested regions to the open prairies.  They perceived prairies to be wastelands, because they were largely treeless.  Many pushed onward toward Oregon, hoping to settle in lands having fertile soil.  In the process, they skipped right past the tallgrass prairie, home to the nation’s most fertile soil by far.  Eventually, they realized their mistake, and the primo tallgrass belt was settled. 

Latecomers got the less desirable shortgrass prairie, which had highly fertile soil, but it was lighter in texture, and more vulnerable to erosion.  In shortgrass country, strong winds and periodic droughts were normal and common, but evolution had fine-tuned the wild ecosystem to survive these conditions.

The natural vegetation was drought tolerant, retained moisture, and kept the soil from blowing away.  Unfortunately, the settlers brought state of the art steel plows, and proceeded to strip the vegetation off the land, and expose the precious soil.  Unintentional foolishness led to catastrophe.

David Montgomery mentioned a 1902 report by the U.S. Geological Survey that classified the high plains as being suitable for grazing, but not farming.  It was “hopelessly nonagricultural” because it was ridiculously prone to erosion.  Gullible farmers were encouraged by sleazy speculators to settle on the land and get rich quick.  And many did, for a while.

Walter Lowdermilk wrote that much of the time between 1900 and 1930 was a highly unusual period of above average precipitation.  During the wet years, farmers enjoyed big harvests and generous profits.  Wheat could do well in the shortgrass climate, and a thriving wheat field protected the fragile soil from erosion.  But in drought years, the wheat withered, and there was nothing to hold the soil in place when the winds began howling.

  Tractors were the latest cool gizmo.  A lad with a tractor could farm 15 times more land than a lad who used draft animals.  Cropland area greatly expanded, exposing more and more soil, which the winds carried away.  The stage was set for the Dust Bowl. 

Marc Reisner wrote, “The first of the storms blew through South Dakota on November 11, 1933.  By nightfall, some farms had lost nearly all of their topsoil.  At ten o’ clock the next morning, the sky was still pitch black.  People were vomiting dirt.”

“If not the worst man-made disaster in history, it was, at least, the quickest.”  From 1934 to 1938, there were numerous huge dust storms, “black blizzards” that could turn day into night.  In 1934, congressmen in Washington D.C. went outside to watch the sky darken at noon.  The jet stream carried dust across the ocean to Europe. 

In many regions, more than 75 percent of the topsoil was blown away by the end of the 1930s.  The Department of Agriculture estimated that 50 million acres of farmland had been ruined and abandoned during the Dust Bowl. 

Invisible Disaster

Humankind’s war on soil continues, and we’re winning.  In a 2012 article in Time magazine, John Crawford, a risk analysis expert, wrote that “A rough calculation of current rates of soil degradation suggests we have about 60 years of topsoil left.  Some 40% of soil used for agriculture around the world is classed as either degraded or seriously degraded — the latter means that 70% of the topsoil, the layer allowing plants to grow, is gone.”  [LOOK]

In some locations, visible evidence of this loss is obvious, in large clouds of dust, ghastly erosion gullies, or rain shower runoff that looks like chocolate milk.  In other places, the loss may not be readily visible during a lifetime.  When you gaze at a large field, decade after decade, you might not notice the gradual loss of tons of soil. 

Walter Youngquist mentioned a study finding that when one hectare of land lost six metric tons of soil, the surface of the soil dropped just one millimeter.  He thought that erosion was similar to cancer, a persistent intensifying destroyer.

Soils with less humus absorb less water, which increases runoff and soil loss.  Light soils are more likely to disappear than dense soils.  Sloped land is most prone to erosion.  Some regions of Europe typically receive gentle rain showers, while some locations in the U.S. often receive heavy cloudbursts.  Of course, wild grasslands and forests excel at absorbing moisture, building humus, and retaining soil. 

When forest is cleared, or grassland is plowed, the soil is exposed to incoming sunlight.  As the soil warms up, microbial activity is stimulated, which accelerates the oxidation of the carbon-rich humus.  Precious carbon built up over the passage of years is dispersed into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.  Soil fertility declines, and will not be promptly restored, if ever. 

All tilling, to varying degrees, degrades or destroys soil.  The healthy green blanket of natural vegetation that protects the precious topsoil is entirely torn off the face of the land.  The soil dries out, hardens, and absorbs less precipitation, which accelerates runoff.  This increases the chances of sheet erosion, gullying, landslides, and flooding.  It can sometimes take centuries for nature to replace the unprotected topsoil lost in a stormy hour. 

Long ago, the Mediterranean basin became a hotbed of civilizations as agriculture spread westward out of Mesopotamia.  The Mediterranean climate provided heavy winter rains, making it a suitable place to grow wheat and barley.  Much of the basin was sloped land, which was extensively deforested over time, driven by growing demand for lumber and firewood. 

Flocks of sheep and goats roaming on the clear-cut hillsides overgrazed, encouraged erosion, and prevented forest recovery.  By and by, the rains leached out the nutrients, and washed much of the fertile soil off the hillsides.  In many locations, bare bedrock now basks in the warm sunshine, where ancient forests once thrived in ancient soils.

Carter and Dale noted that, in the good old days, the Mediterranean used to be among the most prosperous and progressive regions in the world.  But when they wrote in 1955, most of the formerly successful civilizations had become backward, or extinct.  Many had just a half or a third of their former populations.  Most of their citizens had a low standard of living, compared to affluent societies.

Montgomery noted that these ancient civilizations often enjoyed a few centuries of prosperity, as they nuked their ecosystems.  Sadly, the soils of the Mediterranean basin were heavily damaged by 2,000 years ago, and they remain wrecked today.  They are quite likely to remain wrecked for many, many thousands of years.  Much of the region that once fed millions is a desert today.

I never learned any of this in school.  Instead, this region was celebrated as the glorious birthplace of civilization, democracy, culture, and science.  It had incredible architecture and dazzling artwork.  It was home to brilliant writers and philosophers (no mention of slaves).  Many of our public buildings today, with their ornate marble columns, pay homage to this era when we first got really good at living way too hard.

Of course, progress never sleeps.  In 2000, J. R. McNeill published a fascinating (and sobering) book on the environmental history of the twentieth century, when cultures blind drunk on gushers of cheap oil spurred a population explosion that probably caused the most destruction to Earth since the Chicxulub asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs.

In a 2014 book, McNeill narrowed his focus to the catastrophic changes that have occurred since 1945.  He noted that in the world, about 430 million hectares (seven times the size of Texas) has been irreversibly destroyed by accelerated erosion.  “Between 1945 and 1975, farmland area equivalent to Nebraska or the United Kingdom was paved over.”  By 1978, erosion had caused the abandonment of 31 percent of all arable land in China.

GeoDestinies 2022

 

Walter Youngquist (1921-2018) was a petroleum geologist, a University of Oregon professor, and my friend.  His life’s masterpiece is a 600 page book that’s now available to everyone as a free PDF download [HERE].  

Geologists study Earth resources, many of which are being degraded and depleted — aquifers, topsoil, hydrocarbons, minerals, etc.  These resources have limits.  Every drinker learns that the glass starts full, ends empty, and the faster you drink it, the quicker it’s gone.  Consumers pay little attention to resource limits, but they’re beginning to comprehend the impact of carbon emissions on the climate.  Mainstream experts repeatedly tell us not to worry.  They preach a fervent blind faith in miracles — a smooth and easy transition to a clean, green, renewable utopia.  Geologists wince. 

Youngquist didn’t believe in miracles or techno utopias.  Today, we’re living dangerously fast by destroying astonishing amounts of nonrenewable resources — a onetime binge that can never again be repeated.  Nonrenewable energy is finite.  We have been soaring in a beautiful dream world, where the air is perfumed with the intoxicating aroma of a nonrenewable prosperity.  The era of cheap energy is fading away in the rear view mirror. 

In 1973, the Eugene newspaper wrote a story about one of his lectures, “Dark Picture Painted by Youngquist.”  He gave many talks to Chamber of Commerce groups, trying to introduce them to the concept of limits.  He was almost never invited back.  America worships perpetual growth at any cost.  Growth is our god word.

In the mid-1990s, a number of the world’s petroleum geologists became alarmed that the volume of new oil discovered was declining, while the volume of consumption continued soaring.  This inspired the dawn of the Peak Oil movement, a wakeup call.  In 1997, Youngquist published GeoDestinies, which quickly sold out.  Folks begged him to print more, but Walt was reluctant.  He wanted to update the info first, but the story was moving faster than he could type. 

Finally, in 2012, he finished the update.  Unfortunately, the process hit some curves.  The book did not get to a printer, Walt died, the publisher went extinct, and the manuscript gathered dust.  In 2022, a small group of fans was able to get a digital copy, and make it available to the world.  Most of the content is still timely and very important.  For most readers, this book is largely going to be a banquet of new information, important stuff that’s rarely taught in school, if ever.

Today, many snicker at the Peak Oil dimwits.  Dudes, we didn’t run out!  We’ll always find more!  In the ’90s, the industry was primarily producing cheap and easy conventional oil (insert a straw and suck).  It appears that the global production of this oil peaked around 2005.  Unfortunately, mad scientists developed new technology for extracting oil, like hydro-fracking and horizontal drilling.  This enabled a sharp increase in the production of unconventional oil from sources including tar sands, heavy oil, shale oil (tight oil), and deep water wells.  This oil was far more challenging and expensive to extract (and the mother of many bankruptcies).

In addition to declining discoveries, a new boogeyman is EROEI (energy returned on energy invested).  It takes energy to extract fossil energy.  For example, a hundred years ago, the EROEI for conventional oil was very high.  Ram a drill into a huge pool of Texas oil, and a geyser of black gold often shot high in the sky.  Today, with the shift toward unconventional oil, the EROEI is far lower and declining.  As the energy needed for extraction approaches the energy content of the output, the industry moves closer to its expiration date.  A lot of fossil energy will be left in the ground forever. 

It took more than 500 million years for geologic forces to transform plant and animal residue into fossil fuels — coal, oil, and natural gas.  It will take less than 500 years for humans to extract it and burn it.  We live during a brief blip in Earth history, an ecological hurricane.  Walt’s core message was a blunt warning.  “The momentum of population growth and resource consumption is so great that a collision course with disaster is inevitable.  Large problems lie not very far ahead.  …In some respects, the twenty-first century will be like the twentieth century in reverse.”

The public believes that adequate “renewable” substitutes will be available when needed.  Alternative energy is not clean, green, and free.  The hardware components have limited working lifespans.  Scaling up to replace nonrenewable energy would require vast land area, roads, power lines, and backup for when adequate wind or sunbeams are unavailable.  Manufacturing solar panels requires critical minerals like cobalt, gallium, germanium, indium, manganese, tellu­rium, titanium, and zinc.  Each wind turbine requires tons of concrete, steel, and other resources.

Walt described the alternative energy options, and their many limitations.  He concluded that renewable energy will not come close to replacing fossil energy.  In 2021, Alice Friedemann presented a far more thorough discussion in her book Life After Fossil Fuels.  A renewable utopia seems impossible. 

Oil is just one of many Earth resource topics in Walt’s book.  Plants and animals don’t need it.  Less than 200 years ago, oil was of no great importance to anyone anywhere.  For many thousands of years, nomads wandered across the Arabian Peninsula, under which laid oceans of ancient oil.  It never occurred to them to extract it, burn it, blindside the climate, and race down crowded highways in powerful motorized wheelchairs.  Naturally, in those days, the planet was in far healthier condition.  Then, in the twentieth century, Arabia became very rich, very fast.

Other resources are genuinely essential for the survival of the family of life — soil, water, air, and sunlight.  Of all minerals, soil is the most precious by far.  Fertile soil is created so slowly that, from a human perspective, it’s essentially nonrenewable.  In his book Dirt, geologist David Montgomery wrote, “Continued for generations, till-based agriculture will strip soil right off the land as it did in ancient Europe and the Middle East.  With current agricultural technology though, we can do it a lot faster.”  Peter Salonius studied soil for 44 years.  He concluded that all extractive agriculture, from ancient times to the present, was unsustainable. 

The problems associated with soil destruction are widely understood, and widely disregarded.  Nobody became a billionaire by promoting soil conservation.  Globally, billions of tons are lost every year.  Overall, one-third of the soil on U.S. cropland has been lost over the past 200 years.  Half of the excellent topsoil of Iowa is already gone.  The highest quality soil is close to the surface, and the first to erode.  Walt wrote, “Worldwide, the con­tinuing loss of soil and depletion of groundwater is leading humanity directly over the cliff.”   

All life needs water.  Water allows mineral nutrients in the soil to be absorbed by plants.  Your body is about 60 percent water.  In some regions, farms receive adequate water from precipitation.  Other regions require irrigation.  About 17 percent of cropland is irrigated, but it produces 40 percent of the world’s crops. 

Some underground aquifers are unable to recharge as fast as pumps are extracting the water — like the vast Ogallala aquifer in the U.S. midlands.  They are unsustainable water mines.  Several communities in Colorado are (temporarily) drinking from reservoirs of 10,000 year old water.  Forty percent of humankind now lives in regions with chronic water shortages, especially Africans, with their rapidly growing populations. 

When ancient aquifers are depleted, subsidence can occur — the ground sinks, filling the empty space where the water once was.  This makes it impossible for the aquifer to ever refill again.  In some portions of Mexico City, subsidence has lowered the ground surface up to 28 feet (8.5 m), causing much damage.  Irrigation can also lead to the accumulation of salt in the soil, which eventually creates a permanent wasteland.  In the cradle of civilization, the once thriving Tigris Euphrates floodplain is now “a glistening desert of salt.”

Earth resources have played a starring role in world history.  They enable the rise of civilizations, and their limited eras of prosperity.  It’s no coincidence that the Industrial Revolution began in Britain, because they had abundant deposits of coal, iron, and limestone in convenient locations.  The U.S. skyrocketed into a global superpower by exploiting huge deposits of a wide variety of Earth resources.  In World War II, Japan was short on iron, coal, and oil.  Hitler invaded southern Russia in an effort to seize the huge Baku oilfields.

In coming years, as fossil fuel fades out, agriculture will once again be muscle powered and low tech (if the climate crisis allows crop production to continue).  Industrial scale food processing and distribution will fizzle.  Potent synthetic fertilizers and other agrichemicals will no longer be available.  As harvests decline, population growth will shift into reverse. 

Finally, a few footnotes.  GeoDestinies was written on a tiny digital typewriter that allowed files to be saved on a floppy disk.  As Walt typed, the display presented a single line of text.  He never owned a computer, and never had direct access to the internet or email.  He had no spare time.  Finishing this manuscript was job one.

I gave him prints of interesting online stuff, and copies of my book reviews, including Brian Fagan’s The Great Warming, and The Little Ice Age.  The Fagan reviews reinforced his belief that climate always changed.  Back in 2012, the notion that human-caused emissions were disrupting the climate was still controversial in the mainstream mindset.

In his 96 years, Walt witnessed remarkable changes in the American standard of living.  These were only possible because of our maniacal binge of energy guzzling.  Modernity’s high standard of living, and fabulous healthcare was awesome.  But the long term environmental impact of these short term benefits was huge.

He lacked some sympathy for environmentalists who opposed energy development projects in America, whilst they were enjoying a comfortable consumer lifestyle.  High impact projects were often diverted to poor nations that had few regulations, if any.  In 2012, Walt was not fully aware of the serious long term hazards of nuclear energy, and the lack of permanent storage for high level radioactive wastes.

Walt was especially horrified by exponential population growth.  In his lifetime, the human mob skyrocketed from 1.9 billion to 7.6 billion.  He was deeply disappointed that overpopulation was a taboo subject for secular and spiritual leaders.  Large numbers of immigrants to the U.S. came from cultures where large families are the norm.  Their dream was to live a maximum impact consumer lifestyle.

Youngquist’s book pulls away cultural blindfolds, and provides a mind-expanding full immersion baptism in the actual facts of life.  “The confluence of factors soon at hand may make this century the most turbulent in human history.  There will be adjustment of population size.  There will be a new energy paradigm.  There will be lifestyle change.  There will be great economic change.  There will be environmental change.  Although change has always been the order of life, the particular confluence of major factors in each of these areas will make the twenty-first century a fundamental turning point for mankind.”

Walt completed the manuscript of the second edition in 2012.  Since then, he wrote four papers for the Negative Population Growth Forum.  Our Plundered Planet (2014), A Geomoment of Affluence (2015), The Scale of Things (2016), Framework of the Future (2016). 

Wild Free and Happy Sample 44

[Note: This is the forty-fourth sample from the rough draft of my far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews.  These samples are not freestanding pieces.  They will be easier to understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE — if you have some free time.  If you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording my book HERE.]

SACRED SOIL

Life Giving Sunbeams

All animals, including humans, run on sunbeam energy.  We can’t absorb it directly, via exposure to the sunlight, but plants can.  They use the sunbeam energy to create carbohydrates, the building blocks of life.  Animals that eat plants can then absorb those nutrients.  Animals that eat animals can acquire the sunbeams from their prey. 

If there were no plants, there could be no animals.  Grazing animals are able to survive because they can digest grasses and forbs.  Many other animals can’t, including carnivores and humans.  Humans are omnivores, meaning that we can digest nutrients produced by a wide variety of plants and animals.  To oversimplify, when more food is available, human communities can expand.  The availability of food is affected by variables including temperature, precipitation, soil fertility, and daylight hours.

In the good old days, the plants and animals in wild ecosystems coevolved over time, which helped them adapt to stable long-term survival in local conditions.  With the transition to plant and animal domestication, humans could produce greater quantities of food.  But the artificial ecosystems they created (cropland and pasture) had less natural diversity and stability.  By increasing food production, agriculture could free some people from manual labor, allowing them to pursue specialized knowledge and technological innovation.  More recently, with the transition to mechanized, high-tech, fossil powered, industrial agriculture, both harvests and impacts sharply increased, as did the population of humankind. 

Both food production and population have experienced catastrophic growth in the last century.  The next 50 years are going to be very different from the last 50 years.  A number of factors are now increasing the risks for food production as we know it, and for life as we know it.  We’re getting closer to peak global food production, peak population, and the end of economic growth.  On the following pages, I’m going to briefly discuss some of these food-related factors, while paying more attention to farming than herding.

Soil Creation

David Montgomery is fascinated by soil, and extremely disturbed by humankind’s intensifying war on it.  Dirt begins as mineral particles that become detached from solid rock.  This can happen because of temperature shifts, frost action, abrasion, water, bacteria, fungi, penetrating plant roots, and so on.  At first this dirt is lifeless, like sand.  If not disturbed, it builds up over the centuries.

At the ground surface, where sunbeam energy arrives, the dirt is exploding with life, especially in wetter and warmer climates.  This big magic layer is called topsoil.  A shovelful can contain more organisms than the population of humankind — worms, insects, burrowing animals, and microbes.  Under ideal conditions, it builds up over thousands of years, and provides a good home for green solar collectors called plants. 

Topsoil is nourished by biomass — dead vegetation, discarded leaves, rotting wood, carcasses, poop, and so on.  The composting team turns this organic matter into a treasure called humus.  Humus retains moisture, keeps the soil loose, improves soil fertility, and provides a home for the legions of wee organisms that are necessary for plant growth.

The roots of plants penetrate into the soil, where they retrieve water and nutrients.  Up above, the carpet of vegetation in the sunlight helps hold the soil in place, so it isn’t carried away by wind or water.  Topsoil is the foundation of the family of life.  It nourishes the beings that are alive, and composts the biomass they leave behind.  This complicated process of big magic has worked wonderfully for several billion years — without human managers, if you can imagine that.

Unfortunately, the powerful and relentless enemy of topsoil is human cleverness.  Some cultures became dissatisfied with simply adapting to conditions in their wild ecosystems.  They were irritated by the persistent itch of population pressure, an itch that can turn people into blithering idiots.  Spencer Wells lamented the transition to agriculture, when we began shifting from foraging to producing food.  “Instead of being along for the ride, we climbed into the driver’s seat.”  We had no idea of what we were doing, or where we were going.  Richard Manning agreed.  He said that in the good old days, “we didn't grow food; food grew.”

Soil Destruction

Walter Youngquist wrote that the average depth of topsoil, around the world, is less than one foot (30 cm).  He added that almost all modern folks consider oil to be a vital strategic resource, but few have a similar appreciation for soil.  We can live without oil, and some day we will, once again, return to good old-fashioned, slower and simpler, oil-free living.  But soil is far more important to humankind, and to the rest of the family of life — yesterday, today, and forever after.

He warned that, from a human timeframe, topsoil is a nonrenewable resource, because new topsoil is created over the passage of centuries, on a geological timeframe.  “Overall, one-third of the topsoil on U.S. cropland has been lost over the past 200 years.”  Humans are destroying it far faster than nature creates it.  Some say 10 times faster, others say 20 or 40.  He mentioned the work of Peter Salonius, a soil scientist who performed 44 years of research.  Salonius came to the conclusion that all extractive agriculture, from ancient times to the present, is unsustainable.

It’s common to see the wishful label “sustainable agriculture” used to describe methods and products claimed to have miraculous qualities.  The folks who use it depend on a blindfolded, gagged, handcuffed, and castrated definition of sustainability (or a lively imagination).  A genuinely sustainable way of life is one that can survive for many thousands of years without self-destructing, or diminishing the wild ecosystem.  Sustainable agriculture strategies imply a never-ending need for unimaginably dedicated, principled, and knowledgeable human management. 

Big Mama Nature’s wild ecosystems are brilliant living masterpieces.  They require no active management from tropical primates.  The healthy verb is “adapt,” like our wild ancestors did for most of the human saga.  The toxic verb is “control,” an approach with a time-proven record of smashing apart ecosystems, harder and faster with each passing year.  Human cleverness could never create a system so complex, which worked so well, over enormous spans of time.  Nature thrives in absolute freedom, and takes great pleasure in sabotaging the plans of ambitious control freaks, who seem fantastically incapable of learning from their repeated mistakes.

Wild is a holy word.  “Wilderness” means “disorder,” a place that is out of control — in other words, “free.”  The emergence of agriculture, herding, patriarchy, and civilization was a tragic shift into an unfree culture of intense control.  Wilderness is a place without paths or roads that lead to a destination, a place with no speed limits or law enforcement, a place where you are free to move as your spirit inspires you.  Robert Harrison asserted that bewilderment (be wilder) is about being fully alive.  He wrote, “When one is fully alive, the entire world is alive.”

The culture of control, on the other hand, is diabolically destructive.  Joel Bourne reported that every year, a million hectares (2.4 million acres) of world cropland are taken out of production because of erosion, desertification, or development.  Writing in 2000, J. R. McNeill wrote that the U.S. was currently losing 1.7 billion tons of topsoil per year to erosion.  In 2000, there were 281 million Americans.  So, the loss would have been six tons per person. 

Where is this heading?  Writing in 2012, John Crawford, a risk analysis expert, wrote that “A rough calculation of current rates of soil degradation suggests we have about 60 years of topsoil left.  Some 40% of soil used for agriculture around the world is classed as either degraded or seriously degraded — the latter means that 70% of the topsoil, the layer allowing plants to grow, is gone.”  [LOOK]

In some locations, visible evidence of this loss is obvious, in large clouds of dust, erosion gullies, or runoff that looks like chocolate milk.  In other places, the loss may not be readily visible during a lifetime.  When you gaze at a large field, decade after decade, you might not notice tons of gradual soil loss.  Youngquist mentioned a study finding that when one hectare of land lost six metric tons of soil, the surface of the soil dropped just one millimeter.  He thought that erosion was similar to cancer, a persistent intensifying destroyer.

Soils with less humus absorb less water, which increases runoff and soil loss.  Light soils like loess are more likely to disappear than dense heavy soils.  Sloped land is most prone to erosion.  Some regions of Europe typically receive gentle rains, while some locations in the U.S. often receive heavy cloudbursts that cause rapid runoff.  Of course, wild grasslands and forests excel at absorbing moisture, building humus, and retaining soil. 

When forest is cleared, or grassland is plowed, the soil is exposed to incoming sunlight.  As the soil warms up, microbial activity is stimulated, which accelerates the oxidation of the carbon-rich humus.  Precious carbon built up over the passage of years is dispersed into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.  Soil fertility declines, and will not be promptly restored, if ever. 

All tilling, to varying degrees, degrades or destroys soil.  The healthy green blanket of natural vegetation that protects the precious topsoil is entirely stripped off the face of the land.  This leaves the defenseless, viciously pulverized, bare naked soil exposed to the merciless abuse of dangerous control freaks.  The soil dries out, hardens, and absorbs less precipitation, which accelerates runoff.  This increases the chances of sheet erosion, gullying, landslides, and flooding.  It can sometimes take centuries for nature to replace the unprotected topsoil lost in a stormy hour. 

Long ago, the Mediterranean basin became a hotbed of civilizations as agriculture spread westward out of Mesopotamia.  The Mediterranean climate provided heavy winter rains, making it a suitable place to grow wheat and barley.  Much of the basin was sloped land, which was extensively deforested over time, driven by growing demand for lumber and firewood. 

Flocks of sheep and goats roaming on the clear-cut hillsides overgrazed, encouraged erosion, and prevented forest recovery.  By and by, the rains leached out the nutrients, and washed much of the fertile soil off the hillsides.  In many locations, bare bedrock now basks in the warm sunshine, where ancient forests once thrived in ancient soils.

Vernon Gill Carter noted that, in the good old days, the Mediterranean used to be among the most prosperous and progressive regions in the world.  But when he wrote in 1955, most of the formerly successful civilizations had become backward.  Many had just a half or a third of their former populations.  Most of their citizens were reduced to a low standard of living, compared to affluent societies.

Montgomery noted that these ancient civilizations often enjoyed a few centuries of prosperity, as they nuked their ecosystems.  Sadly, the soils of the Mediterranean basin were largely destroyed by 2,000 years ago, and they remain wrecked today.  They are quite likely to remain wrecked for many, many thousands of years.  Much of the region that once fed millions is a desert today.

I never learned any of this in school.  Instead, this region was celebrated as the glorious birthplace of civilization, democracy, and science.  It had incredible architecture and dazzling artwork.  It was home to brilliant writers and philosophers (no mention of slaves).  Many of our public buildings today, with their ornate marble columns, pay homage to this era when we first got really good at living way too hard.

Of course, progress never sleeps.  J. R. McNeill wrote a fascinating (and sobering) book on the environmental history of the twentieth century, when cultures blind drunk on gushers of cheap oil spurred a population explosion that probably caused the most destruction to Earth since the Chicxulub asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs.  (Will the twenty-first century be even worse?)

For example, he noted that in the world, about 430 million hectares (seven times the size of Texas) has been irreversibly destroyed by accelerated erosion.  “Between 1945 and 1975, farmland area equivalent to Nebraska or the United Kingdom was paved over.”  By 1978, erosion had caused the abandonment of 31 percent of all arable land in China.  His book is 360 pages of relentless full dose reality that is guaranteed to bring bliss ninnies and hope fiends down from their fluffy clouds in dreamland.  It will inspire adults who are still capable to critical thinking to reexamine our culture’s myths of wondrous progress and technological brilliance.

Organic Fertilizer

Our lives are dependent on plant life.  Plant life is dependent on sunbeams, air, water, and soil nutrients.  In healthy wild ecosystems, these nutrients are continuously recycled, century after century.  Plants acquire nutrients from the soil, which are passed on to the deer, maybe passed on to the mountain lion, and finally returned to the soil again — a happy living merry go round that never stops. 

It’s a different story with agriculture.  The crops absorb the soil nutrients, their edible parts are harvested, and hauled away.  The nutrients in the exported food are never returned to the soil.  Harvest by harvest, soil fertility is depleted, and the nutrient content in the harvested food declines.  Attentive farmers in ancient Greece and Rome were pained to observe that with each passing year, crop growth was less robust, and the harvests were smaller.  This was not a path with a future.

For several thousand years, this hemorrhage of nutrients was slowed a bit by holding livestock in confined pastures, collecting their manure, and spreading it on the tilled fields.  Critical thinkers will instantly recognize that moving the nutrient-rich poop from the pasture to the field depletes the nutrients in the pasture’s soil — a downward spiral.  No free lunch.  Farmers in many regions tried many different ways of keeping soil fertility on life support, by applying sewage, manure, ashes, lime, bone meal, seaweed, compost, peat moss, and other stuff.  In China, human wastes have been used as fertilizers for 5,000 years.

There are three absolutely must-have nutrients for all plant and animal life (including us), for which there are no substitutes — nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K).  Modern synthetic fertilizers include portions of each in their NPK products.  Humans acquire these three nutrients by eating animal foods and/or plants. 

Phosphorus and potassium are elements in mineral compounds that plant roots extract from the topsoil they grow in.  Nitrogen is 78 percent of the air we breathe, but it is not in a form that living things can use.  Atmospheric nitrogen consists of pairs of nitrogen atoms (N₂).  Luckily, in the soil are nitrogen-fixing bacteria that convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia (NH₃), which can be used by living things.  These bacteria grow on the roots of leguminous plants, which include peas, beans, clover, and vetch. 

While livestock acquire nitrogen from the grass they eat, they retain a third of it.  So, their manure did not replace all of the nitrogen extracted from the soil by the grass.  To maintain the nitrogen content in the soil, farmers had to invest time and labor to regularly plant cover crops of legumes.  Please take a moment to appreciate how wild ecosystems automatically and elegantly recycle nitrogen, while the process in control freak cultures requires an investment of time and labor.

For the corn-growing civilizations of Mesoamerica, livestock was not an option, so they carefully gathered the precious nutrients excreted by humans, and returned them to the cropland from whence they originated.  This must have been an endlessly fun-filled process in the city of Tenochtitlán (now Mexico City), home to 200,000 folks who had no wheeled carts or (nonhuman) beasts of burden. 

In 1909, Franklin Hiram King visited Kyoto, Japan.  One morning, he observed several processions of carts, each bearing six 10-gallon (38 l) receptacles of city wastes out to farms.  In the five hour period he watched, these caravans moved at least 90 tons of waste — and this was just on one road.  Other roads had similar traffic — day after day.  Humans did not evolve for city living.

The waters off the coast of Peru are home to lots of phytoplankton (wee plants), which are consumed by lots of anchovies, which are consumed by lots birds, who excrete a magnificent fertilizer called guano.  It is exceptionally rich in nitrogen, containing from 8 to 21 percent by mass.  Farmers used it during the Incan Empire to fertilize their fields.  Over the course of thousands of years, seabirds deposited guano on offshore desert islands.  Guano deposits in wetter climates are far less potent, because rain leaches out the precious nutrients.  Some Peruvian deposits were over 200 feet (61 m) high. 

By the 1840s, agricultural productivity in North America and Europe was wheezing, due to declining soil fertility.  Traditional farming methods were setting limits on the number of people who could be fed.  Guano was a potent nitrogen-rich medicine, and a guano gold rush commenced, which led to the War of the Pacific (1879-1884).  Farmers who used guano no longer had to regularly recharge their soil by planting cover crops of nitrogen-fixing legumes.  This enabled them to produce more food.  Guano production peaked around 1870, as attention was shifting to the saltpeter (sodium nitrate) deposits in the deserts of Chile.

Inorganic Fertilizer

While fertilizers like guano and saltpeter provided nitrogen, phosphorus was more challenging.  Applying ground up bones was not especially effective.  The need for a potent source of phosphate inspired the development of a synthetic fertilizer — superphosphate.  Beginning in 1848, crushed phosphate-bearing minerals were treated with sulfuric acid, and a star was born.  Of the three most essential nutrients (NPK), phosphorus is the most worrisome.  Some say that the production of phosphate minerals peaked in 1989.  It can be recycled from sources like compost, urine, bones, and sewage, but not on an industrial scale.  Eventually, shortages can be expected to retard the human juggernaut.

The potassium component of NPK is provided by a variety of minerals rich in potash (K₂O) that are found in the salt beds of ancient seas and lakes.  These minerals are fairly abundant, so far, but not forever.

J. R. McNeill noted that by 1900, German farmers were highly dependent on imported guano.  Without it, they would not be able to successfully feed Germany.  In 1909, chemist Fritz Haber discovered a process that could extract nitrogen from the air (N₂), mix it with methane (CH₄), and embed it in ammonia (NH₃), via an energy-guzzling process of high heat and pressure.  Then, Karl Bosch figured out how to perform this process on an industrial scale. 

In 1911, Germans began the commercial production of synthetic ammonia, which contained nitrogen in the plant-friendly form, bypassing the ancient dependence on soil bacteria, and reducing agriculture’s addiction to livestock manure.  The Haber-Bosch process also provided nitrates used to make high explosives, as the world was moving toward the First World War.  Today, about 80 percent of synthetic ammonia is made using a natural gas feedstock — a finite nonrenewable resource.

Writing in 2001, when the population was a mere six billion humans, nitrogen expert Vaclav Smil estimated that 40 percent of the people alive in 2000 existed only because of the intensive use of synthetic ammonia fertilizer.  It had (temporarily) pushed back the limits on population size.  The population explosion was also accelerated by the Green Revolution, discussed later.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the production of various synthetic NPK fertilizers skyrocketed: 4 million tons in 1940, 40 million tons in 1965, and 150 million tons in 1990.  Far more food was produced, and the human population soared.  Today, the benefits of these fertilizers are maxing out — applying more of it to a field no longer increases the size of the harvest.

Richard Manning noted that when farmers apply synthetic fertilizer on a field, less than half of it reaches its intended target, the crop plants.  Some of it dissolves and moves into groundwater, and lots of it runs off into waterways.  Much of the U.S. Corn Belt drains into the Mississippi River, which is an ecological catastrophe.  Nitrogen stimulates algae blooms that deplete the oxygen content of the water (anoxia), which can cause everything to die (eutrophication).  The river flows into the Gulf of Mexico, where it has created a dead zone the size of New Jersey.  About half of U.S. lakes have low oxygen content, and the number of dead zones in the world continues growing (over 400 in 2008).

And so, dear reader, this is a brief peek at how agriculture has impacted the planet, from the perspective of soils.  The full story is much longer, more complex, and far worse.  Human cleverness is like a wildfire in a bone dry forest on a very windy day — nothing can stop it, it just keeps destroying.  This provides a profound lesson on the incredible elegance of the healthy wild ecosystems that Big Mama Nature nurtured for eons, prior to domestication.  Natural time-proven wild sustainability is essentially perfect, a masterpiece.  Honor it with respect and reverence.

Wild Free and Happy Sample 33

[Note: This is the thirty-third sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while.  My blog is home to reviews of 202 books, and you are very welcome to explore them.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or subjects.] 

The Monster Mash

Mesopotamia was one section of an ancient region known as the Fertile Crescent.  The Fertile Crescent has misty borders, and no two maps agree, but it’s blob-shaped.  [MAP]  One finger pokes westward toward Turkey.  Another spreads down along the east coast of the Mediterranean and plunges deep into Egypt.  Another heads south toward the Persian Gulf.  The Fertile Crescent was a ground zero location for the emergence of plant and animal domestication.  Eventually, it became the birthplace of a ridiculously unsustainable culture known as Western Civilization. 

For uncertain reasons, domestication independently emerged in at least eight regions, following the end of the last ice age.  Population pressure (growing resource scarcity) must have been a primary factor.  Backbreaking farm labor was not something that folks indulged in for fun or kinky pleasure.  Domestication wasn’t a brilliant innovation, it was more like a graveyard headstone for the very long era of hominin wildness and freedom, a sharp turn for the worse.

As the last ice age gradually rode off into the sunset, the Fertile Crescent ecosystem inhaled a deep breath of fresh springtime breezes, opened its eyes, smiled, and felt the power of new life surging within it.  Generous winter rains nurtured abundant greenery.  Ancient myths describe a Garden of Eden.  Large areas were clothed with wild cereals, like wheat (emmer and spelt), and barley.  There were also fruit and nut trees.

Someone estimated that there are about 200,000 species of plants in the world.  Of those, only a bit more than 100 have been domesticated.  Preference has been given to plants that are easy to grow and produce lots of food — especially food that is storable and/or high in nutrients.  Jared Diamond pointed out that, of the twelve biggest crop plants today, five of them are cereals — wheat, corn, rice, barley, and sorghum.  Cereals provide half of the calories that humans eat today.  Pulses (peas and beans) provide protein.  A diet based primarily cereals and pulses is not guaranteed to be nutritionally complete.

Diamond noted that only 14 large herbivore species have been domesticated, and that they were not evenly distributed around the world.  For example, North America had none, and Europe had one (reindeer).  Neither sub-Saharan Africa nor Australia were home to native plants or herbivores that were suitable for domestication.  In these regions, the Aborigines, San, Pygmies, and many others did just fine with wild plant and animal foods.  They lived lightly, built no cities, had no bosses or rulers, did not hoard personal belongings, and maintained a respectful and intimate relationship with their ecosystems.  Imagine that!

The Fertile Crescent, on the other hand, was very different.  It had wheat, barley, and pulses.  Also, in addition to huge herds of delicious wild gazelles, the Crescent was unique because it was home to four species of large herbivores that were suitable for domestication — goats, sheep, pigs, and cattle.  Obsidian was common too, an excellent stone for making cutting blades and sharp weapon points. 

At first, I wrote “the Fertile Crescent was cursed with riches,” a tantalizing booby trap of treasures that entranced naïve tropical primates.  The abundance triggered terrible hallucinations that inspired them to chop down forests, build ghastly cities, and develop impressive world-class wastelands.  But I realized my mistake and deleted those words. 

In fact, the original ecosystem itself was perfectly OK — wild, free, happy, healthy, and beautiful.  Its problems didn’t begin until tropical primate refugees wandered in.  They were homeless vagabonds who had strayed far from their ancestral roots in Mother Africa, and they were cursed with being a bit too smart for their britches — and quite a bit lacking in wisdom and foresight.

Peter Ungar wrote that our wild ancestors were a part of nature, but domestication drove them apart from it.  As the control freak hysteria bloomed, an abusive relationship was born, and over time became deeply rooted and dangerous.  Over time, the one-two punch of plant and animal domestication conjured a furious host of monsters into existence, an ever growing tsunami of ecological devastation. 

Like all other animals, tropical primates are mostly focused on the here and now.  We instantly pay acute attention to immediate risks like lions, tornados, or rattlesnakes.  Risks that take decades or generations to snowball into terrific destruction are of little or no concern to us.  They might seem like theoretical abstractions, farts in the bathtub.  Since few of us have a competent understanding of environmental history, we may not even recognize the presence of powerful trends, directly in front of our eyes, which will eventually hurl our civilization off the cliff.

Since I got up this morning, I have experienced no jarring evidence of the growing global climate catastrophe.  If I wasn’t devoted to regularly paying close attention to a narrow fringe of the info stream from the outer world, the climate crisis would seem insignificant, and easy to sweep under the rug.  Just another hoax.  La-de-dah!  In the mainstream mindset, ecological sustainability is simply not a matter for primary concern, or a proper subject for polite conversation.  If nice people on TV tell us that electric cars are sustainable, then… << SHAZAM! >> …they are!

Eco-History Heroes

“The sky is falling!  The sky is falling!”  Shut up Chicken Little!  You’re nothing but a messed up negativity bomb, a batshit crazy doom pervert.  What’s wrong with you?  Can’t you see that everything is beautiful, and the best is yet to come?  Get a life!  Jeez!  Well, in the old folk tale, Chicken Little had a long and annoying habit of screaming fake warnings of danger.  Then, one day, when genuine danger was actually rushing toward the village, nobody believed Chicken Little, and what happened next was not happy.

With regard to the ecological impacts of plant and animal domestication, a substantial portion of the Chicken Little warnings have not been hysterical false alarms.  They are very often accurate and serious.  Every farmer understands that tilling leads to erosion, that the precious topsoil is nonrenewable, and when it’s gone, game over.  When many irrigation pumps are working to empty an ancient fossil aquifer, everyone knows that this water is nonrenewable.  The aquifer will run dry in a predictable number of years, and the temporary flourish of prosperity will screech to a halt and disintegrate.  Everyone understands the irreparable damage caused by logging and overgrazing over time.  So what?  We will have a nice warm dinner tonight.  All is well.

Unfortunately, many catastrophes take decades or centuries for the hammer to finally drop — like how salinization transformed Mesopotamia’s prosperous agriculture into a lifeless brown wasteland.  If I can probably get away with unsustainable behavior that benefits me, I just might be tempted to do it.  All other animals have figured out how to live sustainably.  Humans are the only critters that ravage ecosystems, often unknowingly, and often selfishly.

(Sigh!)  The memorable meme of the week is, “common sense is a punishment.”  Making a commitment to being present in full dose reality is a mind altering experience.  It can overwhelm you with righteous rage, or reduce you to a flaccid puddle of despair.  It can make you quietly laugh at the absurdity of it all, the unbelievable comedy of errors, the fantastic power of ignorance.

Anyway, for me here at the keyboard, the task of presenting a thorough and well-organized analysis of the consequences of plant and animal domestication is challenging.  The impacts have been huge, complex, and all tangled together — not easy to sort into neat and tidy subject packets.  So I won’t.  My fuzzy plan here is to intuitively meander where the muse inspires, jabber about stuff that feels important to say, and let my dear readers fill in the blanks.  I don’t want this document to end up being 30,000 pages long, and neither do you.

And now, at last, I shall get to the point of this heading.  Throughout the centuries, wizards have appeared who had the amazing ability to perceive reality, to actually see big juju that was happening right in front of their eyes.  They had something like Superman’s x-ray vision, allowing them to see what others could not — the total insanity of their culture, the staggering irreparable damage to the ecosystem, the complete disregard for the generations yet to be born. 

Of the mountains of stuff that we acquire and discard in life, almost all of it is silly crap that no healthy animal needs — cars, TVs, cell phones, etc.  Food is different.  Food matters.  It’s a powerful addiction for which death is the only release.  Domestication has a lot to do with food.  Domestication has also created countless highly destructive unintended consequences.  Environmental history books are packed with these horror stories.  Who reads them?  Most folks seem to be floating on a comfortable cloud of blissful ignorance and childlike magical thinking.  Things will turn out OK.

Since you have managed to make it this far in my long and windy word dance, there’s a fair chance that you might be a bit interested in this realm of knowledge.  While I still have your attention, I’d like to recommend a few of my favorite sources of high quality brain food.  Most are free downloads (ask Google), and others require a visit to your friendly local library.  If you develop an intimate relationship with this knowledge, you may get up one morning, look in the mirror, and see that there is a brand new Chicken Little in the world.  Hooray!  Let’s take a quick stroll through a gallery of some important Chicken Little heroes.

Man and Nature

Twenty-five years ago, a wise guy recommended that I read Man and Nature, by George Perkins Marsh, published in 1864.  (The second edition in 1874 was titled The Earth as Modified by Human Action.)  He was a visionary who helped set the stage for the modern ecology movement, and the study of environmental history.  You’ve heard of him, haven’t you?  Probably not.  His book was not a bestseller, but it sold fairly well over time.  It did not succeed in derailing the self-destructive juggernaut of industrial civilization, but it was a noble effort, and its message is still valid and important.

Long ago at school, I learned all about the glories of Greek and Roman civilization.  Marsh was probably taught a similar load of pretentious doo-doo.  As the U.S. ambassador to Italy and Turkey, he had been able to actually visit regions that were once the realm of thriving civilizations.  What he observed gave him a powerful dope slap.  One way or another, each had been reduced to an ecological train wreck.

Ancient forest mining in the watersheds of Italy’s Po and Adige rivers resulted in devastating erosion over the centuries, and huge volumes of silt spread down the coastline of the Adriatic Sea.  Marsh wrote, “Ravenna, forty miles south of the principal mouth of the Po, was built like Venice, in a lagoon, and the Adriatic still washed its walls at the commencement of the Christian era.  The mud of the Po has filled up the lagoon, and Ravenna is now four miles from the sea.  The town of Adria, which lies between the Po and the Adige, at the distance of some four or five miles from each, was once a harbor famous enough to have given its name to the Adriatic sea, and it was still a seaport in the time of Augustus.  The combined action of the two rivers has so advanced the coast line that Adria is now about fourteen miles inland, and, in other places, the deposits made within the same period by these and other neighboring streams have a width of twenty miles.”

It’s a plump book loaded with fascinating revelations, but it is written in an obsolete academic style that some bookworms may find rather tedious and difficult.  Apparently, at the time of writing, there was a serious shortage of periods in the U.S., which forced Marsh to write sentences as long as 230+ words.  (My next recommendation is much easier to read, and equally important.)  There are several ways of downloading Man and Nature.

Free Kindle version from Amazon is HERE

Scanned PDF of book (giant file) is HERE

EPUB, MOBI, TXT, and HTML versions are HERE

Topsoil and Civilization

In 1955, Tom Dale and Vernon Gill Carter published Topsoil and Civilization.  Readers are taken on a neat journey, during which they discover how a number of ancient civilizations destroyed themselves.  Stops include the Nile, Mesopotamia, Crete, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Greece, North Africa, Italy, and more.  Attentive folks will discover that these ecological disaster areas had many factors in common — a long list of fatal mistakes that civilizations remain committed to repeating, up to today.

Tom and Vern were not ditzy cheerleaders for civilization.  They wrote, “The very achievements of civilized man have been the most important factors in the downfall of civilizations.”  Civilized man had the tools and intelligence needed “to domesticate or destroy a great part of the plant and animal life around him.”  Unfortunately, “His chief troubles came from his delusions that his temporary mastership was permanent.  He thought of himself as ‘master of the world,’ while failing to understand fully the laws of nature.”

When reputable scholars make great efforts to describe serious challenges, it is obligatory to provide a happy ending, where they reveal their brilliant silver bullet solutions.  Today, there are hordes of hucksters selling magic cures for every environmental malady, and most of their elixirs have a pungent aroma of hopium and bull excrement.  Tom and Vern’s cure was soil conservation, a fantasy of permanent agriculture that could feed a gradually growing crowd for the next 10,000 years.  Yeah, right.

At the same time, they were painfully aware that humankind was ravaging the land.  “The fact is that there has probably been more man-induced erosion over the world as a whole during the past century than during any preceding thousand-year period.  There are many reasons for the recent rapid acceleration of erosion, but the principal reasons are that the world has more people and the people are more civilized and hence are capable of destroying the land faster.”  The book is a bit bipolar, but most of it, the historical passages, are excellent.  Great stuff!

Free PDF is HERE.  It is not available in some countries, for copyright reasons, but I saw a pirate copy on Google yesterday.

Gilgamesh, Plato, and Ovid

It’s interesting but sad that the Chicken Little movement is very old.  Folks have been jumping up and down and shouting their pain for a very long time, but civilization is a merciless steam roller. 

The Epic of Gilgamesh was written in about 2700 B.C.  It described the creation of the city of Uruk, along the Euphrates River.  The process involved massive deforestation along the valley, which unleashed immense erosion and flooding.  Humbaba was the sacred defender of the forest.  Gilgamesh whacked his head off, and proceeded to cut trees like there was no tomorrow.  Rains then washed the soil off the mountains, down to bedrock.  And so, whenever the floods blast down the river, the noise of destruction is referred to as “Humbaba’s roar.”

The Greek philosopher Plato wrote Critias in about 360 B.C.  In the dialog, the speaker laments how the land has deteriorated over time.  The forests were almost gone, and so was the rich soil on the mountains and plains.  Rains quickly run off the bare earth, and springs no longer flow.  The land is drying out.  Compared to the better days of years past, only a skeleton of the earlier land remained. 

Many years later, not long before the time of Jesus, the Roman poet Ovid wrote a similar poem in the third book of his Amores collection.  It also expressed sadness for the dark times of his day.  Long ago, wild crops were abundant.  The land was not divided into parcels, and no plows tore into the ground.  “Clever human nature, victim of your inventions, disastrously creative, why cordon cities with towered walls?  Why arm for war?”

Conquest of the Land Through Seven Thousand Years

In the 1940s, Walter Lowdermilk created the short, quick, and easy primer on the ravages of early civilizations.  In the 1920s, he visited the Yellow River (Hwang Ho) basin in China.  Floods and famines had been hammering the Yellow River for 4,000 years, sweeping away millions of lives.  The basin is covered with a deep blanket of yellowish, nutrient-rich loess soil, dumped there by winds during the ice age.  Prior to the expansion of agriculture and population, ancient forests held the upland loess in place.  After the forests were eliminated, rain runoff increased, erosion increased, and the long era of catastrophic floods was born.  The Yellow River has long had a fitting nickname: China’s Sorrow.  Lowdermilk discovered a surreal nightmare world of enormous erosion gullies up to 600 feet (183 m) deep.

In 1938 and 1939, he was sent to Western Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, to make observations, and report on his findings.  He visited many of the ancient sites mentioned by George Perkins Marsh — and he took a camera with him.  He saw many devastated wastelands, some reduced to bare bedrock, which had once been prosperous, densely populated regions.  This wasn’t about climate change.  Common causes included deforestation, overgrazing, soil salinization, planting on sloped land, and failure to maintain irrigation canals and hillside terraces.

Lowdermilk boiled the core story down to a booklet.  More than a million copies have been printed.  His photos are shocking testimonials to the unintended consequences of domestication and civilization.  The booklet can be read in one sitting.

The text bounces from disaster to disaster, providing a brief description of each.  In Tunisia, he observed the site of Cuicul, a magnificent city in Roman times, which had been entirely buried, except for three feet (1 m) of one column poking out of the soil.  It took 20 years of digging to expose the remarkable ruins.  Today, the land can support only a few inhabitants.  Likewise, the Minoan city of Jerash, a village of 3,000 people, was once home to 250,000.  In Syria, he observed a million acres (404,685 ha) of manmade desert, dotted with a hundred dead villages.

I don’t want to spoil the excitement of your reading experience by summarizing most of the subjects.  Keep in mind that the stories he tells are the result of good old-fashioned muscle-powered organic farming, and organic grass-fed herding.  The harms were the result of human actions inspired by ignorance or tradition, not the fickle whims of nature.  Compared to modern industrial agriculture, the early farmers and herders were childlike amateurs at ecocide.  We have, unfortunately, become champions.

Free PDF is HERE

Against the Grain

James C. Scott teaches political science and anthropology at Yale.  He’s a smooth writer and a deep thinker.  In Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, he focused his discussion on southern Mesopotamia, because it was the birthplace of the earliest genuine states.  What are states?  They are hierarchical societies, with rulers and tax collectors, rooted in a mix of farming and herding.  The primary food of almost every early Old World state was wheat, barley, or rice.  Taxes were paid with grain, which was easier to harvest, transport, and store.  States often had armies, defensive walls, palaces or ritual centers, slaves, and maybe a king or queen.

The root of “domestication” is “domus” (the household).  In early Mesopotamia, “the domus was a unique and unprecedented concentration of tilled fields, seed and grain stores, people, and domestic animals, all coevolving with consequences no one could have possibly foreseen.”  As a result of living on the domus, animals (including humans) were changed, both physically and behaviorally.  Over time, some wild species became “fully domesticated” — genetically altered, entirely dependent on humans for their survival.  Domestication was also about deliberate control over reproduction, which “applied not only to fire, plants, and animals but also to slaves, state subjects, and women in the patriarchal family.”

Domesticated sheep have brains 24 percent smaller than their wild ancestors.  Pig brains are a third smaller.  Protected from predators, regularly fed, with restricted freedom of movement, the process of domestication made livestock less alert, less anxious, less aggressive — pudgy passive dimwit meatballs.  They reached reproductive age sooner, and produced far more offspring.

“The multispecies resettlement camp was, then, not only a historic assemblage of mammals in numbers and proximity never previously known, but it was also an assembly of all the bacteria, protozoa, helminthes, and viruses that fed on them.”  The domus was a magnet for uninvited guests: fleas, ticks, leeches, mosquitoes, lice, and mites.  Unnatural crowds of animals spent their lives walking around in poop, and drinking dirty water.  It was a devilishly brilliant incubator for infectious diseases.

Dense monocultures of plants also begged for trouble.  “Crops not only are threatened, as are humans, with bacterial, fungal, and viral diseases, but they face a host of predators large and small — snails, slugs, insects, birds, rodents, and other mammals, as well as a large variety of evolving weeds that compete with the cultivar for nutrition, water, light, and space.”  Once harvested and stored in the granary, grain could be lost to weevils, rodents, and fungi.  The biggest vulnerability of states was that they were almost entirely dependent on a single annual harvest of one or two staple grains.  Crops could be wiped out by drought, flood, pests, storm damage, or crop diseases.

Anyway, the book is fascinating.  Readers also learn about the tax game, the vital slave industry, trade networks, deforestation, erosion, soil salinization, irrigation, looting and raiding, mass escapes of workers, the challenges and benefits of being surrounded by large numbers of aggressive nomadic herders, and on and on.  It’s an outstanding book!

Free PDF is HERE

Great, But Not Free

A Forest Journey by John Perlin is a fabulous history of forest mining.  In the era of domestication, forests were cleared to create cropland and pastures.  Trees were cut to make lumber.  Wood was like the petroleum of earlier times, a source of both energy and wealth.  It was used for heating buildings, glassmaking, ceramics, smelting, casting, brickmaking, and so on.  Trees were a form of treasure, and treeless societies might be willing to take your trees by bloody force (and often did).

Against the Grain by Richard Manning presents a rigorous critique of agriculture in an easy to read format.  He slings snappy lines like: “There is no such thing as sustainable agriculture.  It does not exist.”  Or, “The domestication of wheat was humankind’s greatest mistake.”  Agriculture is one of humankind’s most troublesome experiments, and it is now hopelessly in debt.  It has borrowed soil, water, and energy that it can never repay, and never intended to repay — burning up tomorrow to feed today.  We know it, we keep doing it, and we have dark hallucinations about feeding billions more.  Agriculture has become civilization’s tar baby. 

Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by geologist David Montgomery provides a fascinating discussion about an extremely precious substance that we can’t live without, but treat like dirt.  He begins with an intimate explanation of what dirt is, how it’s formed, and how it’s destroyed — in plain, simple English.  Then, he proceeds to lead us on an around-the-world tour, spanning many centuries, to examine the various methods that societies have devised for mining their soils, and sabotaging their future via agriculture.

He concludes, “Continued for generations, till-based agriculture will strip soil right off the land as it did in ancient Europe and the Middle East.  With current agricultural technology though, we can do it a lot faster.”  Nature is far smarter.  “Mother earth never attempts to farm without livestock; she always raises mixed crops; great pains are taken to preserve the soil and to prevent erosion; the mixed vegetable and animals wastes are converted into humus; there is no waste; the process of growth and the process of decay balance one another.”