Wild Free and Happy Sample 61

 

[Note: This is a new section from the rough draft of Wild, Free, & Happy. It’s finally getting into the home stretch, maybe four more to go (or fewer).  These samples start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE (if you happen to have some free time).

Great Acceleration

Readers with gray hair are acutely aware that they have spent their entire lives in a hurricane of explosive change.  I was born in Michigan, and spent my first 18 years in West Bloomfield Township, a suburb of Detroit.  In 1950, it was home to 8,720 people.  In 2020, there were 65,888! 

When my grandparents were born in the late 1800s, there were 1.3 billion people on Earth.  When I was born in 1952, there were 2.6 billion humans.  Today, just during my lifetime, the mob has more than tripled, zooming past eight billion.  We continue growing like a voracious planet eating swarm.

In 2000, J. R. McNeill published Something New Under the Sun, a fascinating (and shocking) book on the environmental history of the twentieth century, when cultures blind drunk on gushers of cheap oil spurred a population explosion.  In his 2014 book, The Great Acceleration, McNeill narrowed his focus to the catastrophic changes that have occurred since 1945 — perhaps the most destructive era since the Chicxulub asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs.

This explosion was propelled by a fossil fuel bonfire that enabled industrial civilization to sharply increase food production.  Look at this mind-blowing graph [Here].  The curve of energy consumption closely corresponds with the curve of population growth. 

William E. Rees, writing in 2023, noted a daunting factoid: “Half the fossil fuels ever consumed have been burned in just the past 30-35 years.”  (As much as 90% of it has been burned since the early 1940s). 

Fossil energy is not renewable, and the remaining reserves are shrinking every day.  Currently, this bonfire has propelled a turbulent joyride of titillating decadence.  Humankind has far exceeded the planet’s carrying capacity in countless ways.

Bill McGuire is a professor emeritus of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College London.  He wrote Hothouse Earth, and was a contributor to the 2012 IPCC report.  McGuire warned that “there is now no chance of dodging a grim future of perilous, all-pervasive, climate breakdown.”  In today’s snowy regions, winters will be brief or go extinct, and summers will get toasty.  We’re gliding toward a world “that would be utterly alien to our grandparents.”

The other night was a full moon.  It stirred some powerful feelings.  Once upon a time, that same moon shined down on the woolly mammoths.  It made Neanderthals smile.  It glowed upon our ancient tree-dwelling ancestors, and on the age of dinosaurs.  It lit the night when there was no life on Earth.  The moon remembers so much.

Global Energy

It’s vital to comprehend the major limitations of renewable energy.  The International Energy Agency (IEA) is an organization that focuses on global energy consumption.  Their 524-page World Energy Outlook 2022 report revealed some daunting statistics.

First, a vocabulary lesson.  “Primary energy consumption” measures total energy demand.  “Final energy consumption” is a subset of primary — it’s just the amount of energy consumed by end users, such as households, industry, and agriculture.  It is the energy which reaches the final consumer’s door and excludes that which is used by the energy sector itself.

With regard to global final energy consumption, 80% of it is provided by fossil energy, and 20% is provided by electricity — and about 95% of this electricity is currently generated with nonrenewable fossil energy.  In addition to this, the GND plan also requires that the global fleet of cars, trucks, trains, etc., must be switched to “clean, green, carbon-free power.”  It can’t.

Vaclav Smil warned us.  “We are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life, and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years.”

It’s absolutely impossible to radically decarbonize our current way of life because electricity can’t provide the power needed for many processes that are fundamental to life as we know it.  The concrete, steel, and other essential components of solar panels, wind turbines, hydro dams, and electric vehicles cannot be made with electricity.

Alice Friedemann discussed critical shortcomings of the renewable energy fantasy.  “All contraptions that produce electricity need high heat in their construction.  They all need cement made at 2600°F (1426°C).”  There is no known way to make cement with electricity.

Making steel for wind turbines requires 3100°F (1700°C).  “Solar panels require 2700° to 3600°F (1500° to 2000°C) of heat to transform silicon dioxide into metallurgical grade silicon.”  Nuke plants still on the drawing board, in theory, might be able to generate 1562°F (850°C), but this is not hot enough for making cement, steel, glass, and lots of other stuff.

Vaclav Smil agreed.  Sharply cutting back, or ending, the use of fossil energy, would blindside our party.  For example, he mentioned cement, steel, plastic, and ammonia.  He calls them “the four material pillars of modern civilization.”  The GND does not explain how the four could be produced solely with renewable electricity.  They also don’t explain how trucking, shipping, rail transport, and flying could largely be carbon-free in a decade or so, if ever.

Smil reminded us that the large-scale production of highly potent synthetic ammonia fertilizer led to a dramatic increase in agricultural yields.  More food could feed more mouths.  Of the eight billion people alive in 2022, he estimated that the existence of 40 to 50 percent of them was only made possible by the bigger harvests enabled by ammonia fertilizer, a product made from natural gas (fossil energy).

The steel industry is dependent on coking coal and natural gas, and its emissions contribute substantial amounts of greenhouse gases.  Smil wrote, “But steel is not the only major material responsible for a significant share of CO₂ emissions: cement is much less energy-intensive, but because its global output is nearly three times that of steel, its production is responsible for a very similar share of emitted carbon.”

Cement is made of limestone and clay.  Concrete is made of cement, water, sand, and rock.  Andrew Logan wrote, “After water, concrete is the most consumed material on Earth.”  Making high-performance concrete requires heating calcium carbonate, a process that releases CO₂.  Additional CO₂ is released by the kiln, which burns fossil fuel to generate a temperature of 2,700°F (1,482°C).  This intense heat cannot be generated by using electricity. 

Jonathan Watts noted that the four biggest causes of CO₂ emissions are coal, oil, gas, and concrete.  He called concrete “the most destructive material on Earth.”  Its global production has increased 25-fold since 1950. 

Smil’s bottom line: “With current technologies, and for the foreseeable future, you simply cannot make cement, steel, plastic, or ammonia absent fossil fuels.”  Fossil energy is essential for making potent fertilizer, manufacturing farm equipment, and operating the machines.  It enables the processing, packaging, refrigeration, and distribution of the nutrients that keep countless folks on life support. 

Nonrenewable Mining

Fossil energy is essential for manufacturing wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, pavement, power transmission grids, and on and on.  All of them are made of materials extracted from the Earth.  The mining, crushing, hauling, and smelting of mineral resources are extremely dependent on fossil powered technology.

Walter Youngquist mentioned an old geologist saying, “If it can’t be grown, it must be mined.”  The GND dream seems to assume that the planet’s reserves of strategic minerals are essentially limitless — a cookie jar that never empties, no matter how fast we eat them, century after century. 

The dream involves an extensive redesign, replacement, and expansion of most of the global infrastructure used for power generation, distribution, and consumption.  The dream envisions that every nation on Earth, from the richest to poorest, will eagerly cooperate to complete the transition within 20 or 30 years.  Seriously?

Frik Els was thrilled by the GND optimism.  He is the editor of Mining.com, a news source for the mining industry.  He praised the efforts of frontline GND proponents Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Greta Thunberg, calling them “mining’s unlikely heroines.”  Why?  Because the GND would be a multi-trillion-dollar godsend for mining and manufacturing corporations, and their lucky stockholders.

Vaclav Smil provided an illuminating example.  A typical lithium car battery weighs about 990 pounds (450 kg), and contains lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, graphite, steel, aluminum, and plastics.  To make just one battery, extracting those ingredients would require crushing and refining 40 tons of specific ores.  To access and fetch those 40 tons of ore-bearing rock, 225 tons of worthless rock would first have to be moved out of the way.  Folks, that’s one battery for one car! 

In 2021, Simon Michaux wrote a 1,000-page report for the Geological Survey of Finland, a government bureaucracy.  It documented the results of a study done to determine if it was possible to replace fossil energy with electricity generated by renewable methods, on a global scale. 

In 2019, the global transport fleet included about 1.41 billion cars, trucks, buses, and motorcycles, of which 1.39 billion used Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) technology.  To shift the fleet to Electric Vehicle (EV) technology would require 1.39 billion batteries to store their electricity.  Also, the world’s gas stations would need to be replaced with charging stations that can deliver renewable energy. 

As mentioned, making batteries requires enormous amounts of mineral resources.  The Geological Survey of Finland wondered if there were adequate mineral resources on Earth to make 1.39 billion batteries for vehicles (282.6 million tons of batteries).  Their study concluded: “No, not even close.” 

Batteries typically have a working lifespan of only 5 to 15 years.  Michaux warns that current mining production, and existing mineral reserves, are insufficient to manufacture even the first generation of renewable technology.  “What are the theoretical options for running industrial systems on renewable energy?  The geologists can’t think of any.”

Christopher Ketchum noted that a full-scale U.S. transition to renewable energy technology would require a massive surge in the production of critical metals.  Estimates predict that this could increase demand for them by 700% to 4,000%.

Alice Friedemann noted the heavy impacts associated with renewable energy.  “Mining consumes 10% of world energy.  Wind, solar, and all other electrical generating machines rely on fossil-fueled mining, manufacturing, and transportation every step of their life cycle.”

Jon Hurdle wrote about recycling solar panels.  “Today, roughly 90 percent of panels in the U.S. that have lost their efficiency due to age, or that are defective, end up in landfills because that option costs a fraction of recycling them.” 

Seibert & Rees noted that renewable energy devices have limited lifespans.  Solar panels and wind turbines last an average of 15 to 30 years, DC inverters last 5 to 8 years, batteries last 5 to 15 years.  Unfortunately, the materials used to create the highly complex physical infrastructure for the entire system are not made of magic fairy dust.  Nor are the bodies, motors, and batteries of electric vehicles.  They have their roots in strip mines, smelters, chemical plants, toxic waste dumps, oil refineries, and on and on. 

Many tons of steel and concrete are needed to manufacture and install each wind turbine.  To make a solar panel, you need stuff like cobalt, gallium, germanium, indium, manganese, tellu­rium, titanium, and zinc.  To create the computer hardware needed to operate the grids, you need to fetch stuff like platinum, rhenium, selenium, gold, strontium, tantalum, gallium, germanium, beryllium, yttrium, and pure silicon.

Another essential component of modern living in a world of eight billion is extensive networks of well-maintained roads.  Walter Youngquist noted that in the U.S., there are more than 2 million miles of paved roads and highways.  About 94% of these miles are asphalt — a material that is 90% crushed rock, and 10% bitumen (a sticky black byproduct of petroleum refining).  “Asphalt is easy to put in place, and far less expensive in terms of energy expended and cost of materials than concrete.” 

In 2007, the American Concrete Pavement Association reported that about 500 million tons of asphalt are placed in the U.S. each year.  Doing this consumed 1.45 billion gallons of diesel fuel (5.488 billion liters).  Asphalt typically needs resurfacing every 8 to 10 years. 

Concrete can last 30 to 40 years before resurfacing, and it’s strong enough to better carry the weight of heavy loads.  About 60% of U.S. interstate highway system pavement is concrete.  Fossil energy is absolutely required for the production of asphalt and concrete.  This energy is nonrenewable, and so is our way of life.

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.