If I may, a wonderful book called “The Alchemy of Air” by Thomas Hager is a very enlightening book on this very same issue during the late 1800s.
EDIT: I was mobile earlier but wanted to throw a bit of a teaser in here. This book (along with Hager's "The Demon Under the Microscope) are excellent reads and I high recommend them.
Essentially, there were many "doomsday scenarios" wherein the context of the late 1800s was that vast supplies of natural fertilizer were used up and people were very worried about food supplies. Long story short, the "fixing" of nitrogen from the air not only alleviated the short term issues but also had a huge influence in wars and who was in power in the early 20th Century.
Consequently, this books ends with some pretty questions surrounding the impact of what all of this extraneous nitrogen might do long term—the impacts of which are already seen in rivers and streams... but the ocean and other areas as well.
> Essentially, there were many "doomsday scenarios" wherein the context of the late 1800s was that vast supplies of natural fertilizer were used up and people were very worried about food supplies.
Assuming scientists will come up with a new technology is a bad survival strategy. At this rate, we expect our children to find a way around climate change, ocean acidification and soil erosion. Mankind is one fat dude who'd rather dream about diet pills than stop eating.
I don't think we really expect our children to do that. It's just there aren't any good options right now. The world is so dependent on hydrocarbons and large scale agriculture that there is no viable alternative.
Not viable? Just depends on who you ask or what your definition of viable is. We need to rip that bandage off now and reduce our standard of living by however much it takes to get into a sustainable symbiosis with our planet.
Fossil fuel companies: bankrupt
Cheap Chinese goods: gone
Meat in every meal: nope
Cheap processed foods: gone
It would be a huge lifestyle change for everyone on the planet. Difficult, but certainly viable.
Fossil fuel companies being bankrupt is not viable. Fossil fuels allow the modern world to function. How are you going to get food distributed across the country without fossil fuels? How are you going to make sure critical infrastructure continues to run?
Edit: I'm not saying fossil fuel dependency is a good thing, but it's a fact of life, and any realistic proposal for moving away from fossil fuels needs to start with accurately understanding just how important they are.
None of those problems are difficult to solve if we actually care. If we want to move off fossil fuels, we could do so in a couple decades.
Also, maybe the fact that we have to distribute food across the country is part of the problem. If food prices in areas that can't grow food nearby go up 100x then people will move.
Hmmmm, I mostly agree. Except I think our definitions of difficult are different. People are complaining about how hard it is to move out of the Bay Area, which they can't afford to live in. Imagine how much more difficult it would be to move millions of people so they can live closer to food sources. Those people also need jobs so they can afford food, and it's hard or impossible to move industries that are capital intensive or depend on natural resources.
It's pretty obvious that eventually we'll have to deal with these problems, but I don't see how society will start the process voluntarily. It's too disruptive and there is no financial incentive to do so. (And even if one country decides to, then they lose out relative to every country that decides not to, so it really has to be an everyone or no one thing).
There's no financial incentive to fix things? It's almost like we need some kind of revolution to upend the existing system and replace it with one that addresses people's needs directly rather than blindly maximizing financial gains. I feel like I read something about this once...
Obviously, the first step would be to repeal the second amendment. Since that train ain't leaving the station, the threatened tyranny, while lovely to dream about, isn't so likely.
I missed the context of your context switch. It reads as if you are saying that 'we' need to repeal the second so that 'we' can be loaded up and forcibly moved by our societal masters (with little resistance)
I could have been writing ironically... if so it would have been to highlight the silliness of grandparent's "when I am king everyone will do the right thing also that will have no side effects I'm neglecting to consider right now" scenario. Really, someone ought to do that for all such scenarios.
> Really, someone ought to do that for all such scenarios.
Agreed. I had a lawyer-gf at one point in my past, and she executed some variant of this on me every time a vacuous proposal left my mouth. Any proposal at all, really.
But, I did not understand the intent behind what you were writing. Can you restate this for those of us slower members of your audience?
Well, this whole thread is a glob of implausible proposals justified by implausible assumptions. "We'll eat no more meat or bananas!" "Because we won't burn any more oil!" "Because oil will be illegal!" "Because sustainability!"
This is all just silly. Credit to 'workthrowaway27 for responding in reasoned fashion, but that hasn't dissuaded any of the silly folk in their silliness. They suggest catastrophic changes to the lives of everyone on earth, and the reasons they offer are transparently based on personal psychological idiosyncrasies rather than on a practical understanding of reality. All of this tyrannical bullshit won't happen, not only because it shouldn't happen, but also because it can't possibly happen. One does admit it to be a lovely dream, because one understands that lots of people dream of denying the agency of other humans. This is an impulse to indulge in daydreams, not in the political sphere.
Everything here is hypothetical responding to anecdote. And vice-versa. I have enough life experience to build a rich (and often sorrow-ful) anecdote, but that's all it is.
I'm not saying fossil fuel dependency is a good thing, but it's a fact of life
It's easy to believe they are utterly indispensable. They are just so convenient, and we love to convince ourselves convenience is really necessity. But would the world truly collapse into the dark ages if fossil fuels petered out in the next decade, and we no longer had that option?
How are you going to transport food? You ignore that food was shipped around a long time before fossil fuels. More of a pain, of course, but we did it all the same.
Yes, but society was structured under different assumptions then. I live in a city in the desert. There wouldn't be cities in the desert (with modern living standards) if we didn't have fossil fuels to get food, building supplies, electrical wiring, etc. out here.
Yes, society can function without fossil fuels, but probably not with the same number of people, and certainly not with the same standard of living.
Sure, we could go back oxen and agriculture without fertilizer or pesticides. How many billion people are you willing to see starve to make that happen?
As many as it takes to have a sustainable culture.
If we wait until there is no topsoil left, even more billions will die, and it won't be in a controlled and purposeful way like it would be if we do it now. Hell, maybe even no one has to die from starvation. Maybe just limiting births would do the trick. Or any other number of ideas that don't involve mass murder or mass starvation or going back to 200 year old farming methods.
So it's idealist to want a sustainable society that doesn't destroy the planet a short couple hundred years after discovering fossil fuels and industrial food production? How is that idealist? Idealism is thinking that the current situation is somehow salvageable without extreme overhauls.
And plus, no one is saying to go back to oxen and carts. That is fairly ridiculous so my response was equally ridiculous.
>As many as it takes to have a sustainable culture.
People were advocating for much the same thing in the '70s when Erlich's The Population Bomb came out, and thank God we ignored them. And yet a single hectare of land produces multiples of what it produced then, allowing enough food for everyone (though it doesn't always get to the people who need it, admittedly).
If I had to bet I'd say in 100 years we'll be producing even more food per person, so I consider any plan that would have people starving forced to limit reproduction to be off the table.
Is organic farming all that much better? Are there any concrete numbers that indicate how that timeline of 60 years might be extended with different farming practices?
It seems to me like we might have to make a big push towards solar-powered hydroponics or something of that nature.
How depressing. Maybe soylent green is more of a realistic future than we thought...
In my personal experience, organic farming causes much more soil loss than conventional farming.
Organic dryland cereal farming depends on tillage for weed & pest control. Not only is the land plowed during planting and after harvest, every third year the land is left fallow. While left fallow it is plowed monthly.
Conventional farmers have substantially reduced their usage of tillage increasing their chemical usage instead. Those chemicals may be not be good for the ecosystem, but they result in orders of magnitude less soil loss.
Speaking as someone who grew up on a grain farm and has owned a farm, this is correct. Obviously it is hard to generalize but low or no tillage farming has vastly lower soil erosion compared to conventional or organic tillage practices. For some reason, people have the set idea that organic practice must be good because its what our forefathers did. In reality, little we do regarding farming is actually sustainable. You are hauling tonnes of material away from the field every year. Those things are not going back, whether you are organic or conventional.
Also, it is a matter of relative severity of problems. Soil loss is much worse than depletion of soil nutrients. As said, organic is potentially much worse for soil loss (although different practices like intensive use of cover crops can help).
no-till is incompatible with organic farming? Hadn't heard about that, a shame if true. I'm not a farmer, but I had heard there were a variety of strategies that would qualify as organic, e.g. cover crops that choke out the weeds, or plastic sheeting over the ground to bake the weeds & pests.
I couldn't get through any of the paywalls, but there are articles out there that suggest that it is.
A lot of other factors are important too. Good rotation, being careful about what strains are used (many crops have been bred/modified for high yields, but that yield often comes at the expense of the soil).
This is very much a solvable problem. The 1000 year number in the article is how long it can take under just normal circumstances, but that can be sped up a LOT using various techniques including proper tillage, animal grazing, etc.
The big "problem" is that all of these things will make crops more expensive, but any other solution is going to quickly become even pricier than that so it should still be done.
> It seems to me like we might have to make a big push towards solar-powered hydroponics or something of that nature.
Right now the costs (particularly start-up costs) are too high for this to be totally viable, but I think it will become a much more significant method of growing food down the line.
Nah, that's just employee of Organic™ industry hopped on a train and added some lame ads to the topic.
But in reality the faster people realize that genetically modified products are more nutritious and less harming to nature, the better are our chances of survival.
You merely have to spend a brief time in California's Central Valley to realize that it's an extractive industry (consuming topsoil, water from a non-renewable aquifer, and oil) no different from mining. When you see orchards plowed up for replanting not only the old trees are removed but all the topsoil too.
If you like to eat fruit and vegetables in the winter then you need to thank California. It has 6 growing seasons feeding a lot of the USA all year around with fresh produce.
California has lots of water resources. Just a little bit better management and all those orchards can get watered. Nuts are high value in dollars, nutrition, and taste. We need something the Chinese want to trade for iPhones.
Really? It's a labor intensive process despite the level of automation (5 years ago there were at least manual steps; don't know today). More importantly: IIRC Apple makes about $150 in profit per phone while Foxconn makes under $5/unit. Seems like the cost differential would be much more than $5/unit.
> not only the old trees are removed but all the topsoil too
Not sure what you mean by this. In the past old trees were burned on the spot; today they are chipped and the chips taken for use as mulch or other things. Neither process involves removing topsoil.
My great worry about us (and capitalism) is that we are good at short term allocation, bad at long run planning. Is there a way around this soil problem, or some way in which the stat is misleading?
Including capitalism on there seems gratuitous. USSR was no better at land stewardship than us. Cuba, N Korea, the same.
It's more about human nature than capitalism or any economic system in particular. If anything capitalism is capable of including externalities, if we choose to. If we don't, eventually, we will face the issue, as many others. Not the ideal way to dal with issues which are decades in the future. Classical example is national debt and of course, climactic change.
In my understanding Cuba has shown remarkable development in it's land stewardship after the collapse of their trade with the the USSR. They developed local and sustainable food distribution systems that don't rely on industrially produced herbicides and fertilizers.
It's funny that you mention Cuba because they actually do take care of preserving their soils, unlike most of the Caribbean which has completely degraded soild due to centuries of sugarcane plantations with no regards to the environment whatsoever.
Thanks for pointing that out. Do you know when they began with the program to better manage their soil?
I still feel land management / mismanagement is independent of economic system. One does not intrinsically offer to protect natural resources over another, but i could be wrong.
After the Special Period in Cuba which began in 1989 with the collapse of the soviet union Cuba was forced to become substantially more self-sustaining. Previously they were able to farm in much more extractive ways and offset their agrictultural output from trade with the USSR. Once the USSR disappeared it was extremely difficult to import agricultural chemicals and import food. Food in Cuba isn't great today, but it's pretty sustainably created.
I would argue that an economic system that concentrates power has the ability to create and enforce a monopoly on land usage. Political or economic systems that allow for a minority control of usable land are much more inclined to use that land for the benefit of the controlling minority, and so far that seems maximizing profits in the short term. When we speak of land management what do we mean? The best "returns"? What is being returned to us? I'm inclined to agree that the values used inland management _can_ be independent of economic system, but an economic system that brings with it a predefined value-set based around extracting profit via exploitation is going to manage the land according to those values. Until we have values that supersede the values of the economic system then the econmic's system's values with be the dominating ones.
Communism is bad at short term and long term allocation. I should have explicitly said that; my comment was misleading without it. (Cuban exception aside: they are indeed good at soil management, but they were more or less forced into learning to be good due to total economic collapse + lack of inputs required for intensive/destructive agriculture. In general communism was an ecological disaster)
I'm actually not sure we can easily include some externalities in capitalism, and I've worried it's an achilles heel of the system. I say this as a capitalist.
Specifically, the transaction costs of including small externalities are too high. By small, I mean that if I burn a litre of gasoline, I have harmed every human on the planet by an incredibly small margin. Too small to properly charge.
In that specific example, a carbon tax could fix it. But, there are many such externalities. Many harder to measure than carbon burning (which is hard in itself).
Other things equal, if it is cheaper to ignore an externality, the system will gravitate to those solutions. And with computers, globalization and cheap container shipping, it has become much easier and much faster to optimize the system. Such optimizations are mostly excellent (I am a capitalist), but we're also optimizing the system in ways which produce negative externalities as well.
The number they have for topsoil generation is how long it takes if you don't try to stimulate it. There are lots of ways to increase the rate of topsoil development. So that bit is a tiny bit misleading, because while some of what they are kind of implying is permanent can be reversed.
That said, the situation is very bad. Ways around could possibly include non-traditional agriculture (hydroponics et al) or other less palatable things, like dietary changes or increased farming regulation.
Yeah, I replied to another comment to say that I didn't think capitalism is worse than communism. I think the opposite is probably true. I should have explicitly stated that I think capitalism is generally great, but that externalities may be its achilles heel. (As in, communism was bad, including externalities. Capitalism is good, but it does have a critical weaknses which is growing in size as we optimize our global capitalist system.)
Semedo, head of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, claims in the linked article that "generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years."
But the organization says of topsoil formation on its own web site:
The rate of topsoil formation can vary from < 0.25 mm/year in dry and cold environments to > 1.5 mm/year in humid and warm environments (Hammer 1981; Hudson 1981). Topsoil formation at the rate of 1 mm/year is equivalent to an annual addition of 12 t/ha. Therefore, the rate of topsoil formation has been considered as a factor in the model in assessing loss of productivity and tolerable soil losses.
1 mm/year means 30 years to generate 3 cm of topsoil, not 1000 years. And human intervention can increase productive topsoil rather than deplete it, when the incentives are properly aligned.
I don't know if the 1000 years figure is a mistake, based on newer, more pessimistic measurements of soil formation rates, or something else.
I can tell you the units you supplied are off. You need at least 2 more dimensions to get a volume of topsoil, otherwise it's a meaningless number. do they mean 3cm^3 of topsoil, because I guarantee that doesn't take 1000 years. Is it 3cm*earth_surface_area in a thousand years. Maybe... but my understanding is topsoil by erosion is the slowest way to get topsoil. I read a paper some years ago on biopurturbatuon, which changed my thoughts on topsoil mining. Basically worms, root structures, and other organisms are very good at creating topsoil. So you could very much produce huge amounts of the stuff in human time spans if the economic incentives were there.
It was an interesting paper, and I wonder if it didn't gain much traction, or was heavily refuted. If I was more cynical, I'd think Semedo was purposely ignoring it for political reasons.
If someone can come up with an adequate filter for pharmaceuticals, it seems that the recapture of human waste is our best path forward. Yes, there is a logistics problem for transferring it, potentially, dehydration is the best method, but we consume the output of our farms, and it seems that on a conservation of mass basis, we should be sending it back to the farms when we're done with it.
Or you can just account for not collecting waste of people that take drugs from a list ... you could have people that are part of the program and get some kind of crypto token for truning in their grade-A poo.
Well I don't think you'd collect waste at the individual level, that seems absurdly arduous. Most developed nations already have an excellent pipeline (literally) for collecting and centralizing human waste. It would probably make more sense to collect it somewhere along the line at sewage treatment facilities. There would still be many other challenges with that.
If by waste you mean excrement then this is not a good idea in the slightest. First you have bacteria, viruses, and parasites that must be killed off. If it isn't properly treated, you end up with a situation similar to that of what we saw in the recent North Korean refugee who suffered from parasites. After that, as you mentioned, there are pharmaceuticals which are notoriously hard to filter out. Next on the list is heavy metals that can become concentrated in excrement. Even after addressing these concerns, if the process to treat the waste is too costly, then there goes the benefit.
I would compare some of the challenges this faces to those that are faced when turning salt water into fresh water through desalination (probably not a direct comparison).
I encourage you to do a little more research on this. Bad and good bacteria exists in this world regardless of how Human's try to control it. Waste processing plants use a combination of bacteria and UV to treat wastewater. That process is very similar to what nature does with animal and human waste.
However, moving human waste is a tough problem and requires substantial resources (fossil fuels, infrastructure, electricity, etc...) and the act of moving it is usually the source of contamination.
I think it's completely valid and beneficial to compost human waste, but that needs to be done on a local/individual scale.
Well, the problem with that is that we ought to be doing the filtering anyways, prior to dumping our excrement to the environment. So, if we are going to get serious about that, creating a viable business model seems like the obvious first step.
The alternative is to keep replenishing organic matter in the soil with non-renewables; keep trying and failing, at great financial cost, to clean up our waste before dumping it back to the environment; and end up with damaged farmland and screwed waterways anyways.
Most of the mass in plants comes from the air, and most of the mass of soil loss is from erosion and runoff, so this wouldn't avert loss, just reconnect mass flows for the process for natural soil generation, while not altering the processes that lead to the unnatural rates of loss in the first place.
It is worth noting that not all crops absorb toxic metals in the soil, and some crops/plants sequester certain metals extremely well - (Kale/Thorium, Garlic/Selenium). Possibly we could use certain crops to ameliorate certain metal toxins.
DC's water treatment plant does this. Solid waste goes into a biodigester which produces methane which is used to create electricity to help run the plant. The other product is "biosolids" which are rated safe for use on food crops.
The numbers are way off. It took around 10 years to get 4" of topsoil on my 80 acres of timber soil (clay). Not 1000 years.
And we have 111ft of that kind of soil here in Iowa. It going to take a hell of a long time to go through that. Its been farmed since the early 1800's. And not all gone, not by far.
I didn't read any further after that, maybe the article does have something to say. But I doubt it.
Sorry, but I'm leaning towards trusting the FAO as opposed to anonymous anecdotal evidence.
I will give you the benefit of the doubt and believe that you may be on the top end of the world-wide average, but how does your 80 acres of usable soil help the rest of the world when push comes to shove?
Really? With the numbers so absolutely at odds, it only takes a single sample to disprove outrageous claims.
So don't believe me if you like (though I could go dig a hole and take a picture of the black line that separates topsoil from subsoil), but its probably more outrageous to cling to the idea that somehow Iowa is at the top end of a curve that goes from 10 years to 1000 years.
The context for that quote was missing I think (that is, missing from the original article, not your comment), but it makes more sense if they're talking about turning rock into fertile soil.
You would have had a whole succession of different types of plants to slowly work the rock surface. Then humans show up, rip out all the trees that kept that hard-won top soil in place, and it all runs off out to sea in no time. Basically it's about places like Iceland, not Iowa, I guess.
When I was younger, my parents moved out into the country and they bought a lot that had been intensively overgrazed and over farmed. Our neighbor farmed hay / alfalfa for the nearby dairy farms and he told us it would be centuries until the land could support a crop.
The 'dirt' was dust, rocks, and fossilized manure. Within 3 years of being let alone it recovered enough to support the hardier plants and weeds, that winter we planted barley and rye to add organic matter, compete with the weeds, and put some roots in the soil to stop erosion. After that, it came back with a vengeance. 7 years after our neighbor said it'd be centuries until we could grow anything on it, he bought the rights to plant alfalfa on some of the lot.
I have no doubt that people could manage the soil better, but things return to nature pretty quick especially if you can help nature do what it's trying to do.
I've been reading topsoil doomsday stories since the seventies. I've seen them written from the thirties. They completely ignore modern farming. We don't rely on topsoil, or care. Modern farming, especially since the fifties, is chemistry. The soil is merely a growing medium. We test it and add whatever is needed via petrochemical fertilizers. Better soil is better for the farmer, but far from necessary.
And whomever says a millennium to make 30mm of topsoil knows nothing about the subject. I've seen nature make that much in less than a decade many times.
Ground-up rock dust works wonders: https://remineralize.org/
"Through our education and outreach, projects, research, and advocacy, Remineralize the Earth facilitates a worldwide movement that brings together gardeners and farmers, scientists and policymakers and the public to create better soils, better food, and a better planet. ... “Remineralization is one of the most important missions on the planet at this time. Together, we can remineralize gardens, farms, landscapes, and forests. We can grow nutrient-dense food and improve the nutrition and well-being of all life. And in the larger picture, it’s a key strategy to stabilize the climate!”"
interesting, because the mineral content of food is a matter of chance usually. For example certain plants accumulate certain minerals more than others (e.g. brazil-nuts:selenium, cocoa:nickel) but the soil they're grown in may have more or less of those minerals, so it's hard to control one's intake
And where petrochemicals come from? From oil, which happens to be running out as well.
What our grandparents did was to "fix" our reliance in an overexploited renewable resource making use of processes that consume a non-renewable resource and accelerate the destruction of the renewable resource at the same time, all this while artificially inflating the output of the original process and creating demand that cannot and will not be met in the future.
Good job, Science!!! That's what happens when you fixate on wether things can possibly be done, but never consider if they should be done.
> We don't rely on topsoil, or care. Modern farming, especially since the fifties, is chemistry. The soil is merely a growing medium. We test it and add whatever is needed via petrochemical fertilizers. Better soil is better for the farmer, but far from necessary.
I agree the article is hyperbolic, but there's a wealth of research showing that this approach has long-term negative consequences on soil health and the crops themselves, leading to long-term declines in yields.
Not to mention the contamination of rivers and underground aquifers with nitrogen and potassium leading to widespread algal blooms deoxygenating rivers and leading to mass deaths in (literally) downstream aquatic ecosystems.
One thing the industrial approach ignores entirely is the community of bacteria that live in symbiosis with plants. This includes both nitrogen-fixing bacteria (which presumably we bypass by just adding nitrogen directly).
The better approach is to understand farming as part of greater ecosystem flows, and to work with the soil and not treat it as a barren Petri Dish.
Maybe its missing bacteria, fungi and other important life, this is one of the biggest reason of the rise of vitamin b12 deficiency in the world, even cattle and sheep need to take shots in some places. But if we focus on build soil instead of the plant we end up working far less in the future and without any need to buy or import things to grow food
The soil is not supposed to be a growing medium. The soil is supposed to be a microbiome.
Sure, nearly-dead soil can work fine for growing plants. But it results in less healthy plants and runoff, which then has a cyclical effect. The byproducts of petro-fertilizers end up in the environment, which then ends back up in animals and plants. By not relying on healthy bacteria and fungi to naturally infuse plant roots with the nutrients and water they need, we are only getting short term benefits of reliable production. In the long term we will end up slowly poisoning the ecology that we absolutely need to keep agriculture sustainable.
Apparently this same story has been circulating since at least 2014, using the same quotes from the same people and organizations, from some menial Googling. So far no sources for any claims in the article, though an agronomy student on Reddit appeared to back up the 30% number.
If you're interested in looking deeply at alternative agricultural practices, I recommend "Restoration Agriculture". [1] It's rooted in permaculture, but more broadly about restoring biomes that are naturally abundant and diverse.
The central hypothesis is that we've become far too invested in annual plants. They require and enormous amount of labor and petrochemicals to sustain. The book presents alternative methods that, like permaculture in general, look to harness natural processes and perennial trees and shrubs to great effect.
Farming will be obsolete well within 60 years. Direct manufacture of foodstuffs will arrive before that. Already folks build machines that take in water and electricity and some organic components, and produce food. How long before a nano machine sews together C,H,O and N into carbohydrate chains on command? Then, electricity will equal food.
Topsoil, climate will soon become irrelevant to producing foodstuffs.
Don't know about the expensive part. But it also requires farmland, soil, chemicals. The idea is, dispense with all that, including transportation, and create starch, sugar etc at the point of consumption directly. Or baby steps in that direction. Heck, even 'organic' farming can be seen as working in this direction if it wasn't so expensive otherwise.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadEDIT: I was mobile earlier but wanted to throw a bit of a teaser in here. This book (along with Hager's "The Demon Under the Microscope) are excellent reads and I high recommend them.
Essentially, there were many "doomsday scenarios" wherein the context of the late 1800s was that vast supplies of natural fertilizer were used up and people were very worried about food supplies. Long story short, the "fixing" of nitrogen from the air not only alleviated the short term issues but also had a huge influence in wars and who was in power in the early 20th Century.
Consequently, this books ends with some pretty questions surrounding the impact of what all of this extraneous nitrogen might do long term—the impacts of which are already seen in rivers and streams... but the ocean and other areas as well.
Assuming scientists will come up with a new technology is a bad survival strategy. At this rate, we expect our children to find a way around climate change, ocean acidification and soil erosion. Mankind is one fat dude who'd rather dream about diet pills than stop eating.
Fossil fuel companies: bankrupt
Cheap Chinese goods: gone
Meat in every meal: nope
Cheap processed foods: gone
It would be a huge lifestyle change for everyone on the planet. Difficult, but certainly viable.
Edit: I'm not saying fossil fuel dependency is a good thing, but it's a fact of life, and any realistic proposal for moving away from fossil fuels needs to start with accurately understanding just how important they are.
Also, maybe the fact that we have to distribute food across the country is part of the problem. If food prices in areas that can't grow food nearby go up 100x then people will move.
It's pretty obvious that eventually we'll have to deal with these problems, but I don't see how society will start the process voluntarily. It's too disruptive and there is no financial incentive to do so. (And even if one country decides to, then they lose out relative to every country that decides not to, so it really has to be an everyone or no one thing).
You would distribute less and source more locally. No more bananas or mangoes. That was the idea behind the "reduce our standard of living" phrase.
It's way harder to de-industrialize than to industrialize. A lot of our cities are only viable because of the dividend from fossil fuels.
Is that correct?
Agreed. I had a lawyer-gf at one point in my past, and she executed some variant of this on me every time a vacuous proposal left my mouth. Any proposal at all, really.
But, I did not understand the intent behind what you were writing. Can you restate this for those of us slower members of your audience?
This is all just silly. Credit to 'workthrowaway27 for responding in reasoned fashion, but that hasn't dissuaded any of the silly folk in their silliness. They suggest catastrophic changes to the lives of everyone on earth, and the reasons they offer are transparently based on personal psychological idiosyncrasies rather than on a practical understanding of reality. All of this tyrannical bullshit won't happen, not only because it shouldn't happen, but also because it can't possibly happen. One does admit it to be a lovely dream, because one understands that lots of people dream of denying the agency of other humans. This is an impulse to indulge in daydreams, not in the political sphere.
Thank you.
It's easy to believe they are utterly indispensable. They are just so convenient, and we love to convince ourselves convenience is really necessity. But would the world truly collapse into the dark ages if fossil fuels petered out in the next decade, and we no longer had that option?
How are you going to transport food? You ignore that food was shipped around a long time before fossil fuels. More of a pain, of course, but we did it all the same.
Yes, society can function without fossil fuels, but probably not with the same number of people, and certainly not with the same standard of living.
If we wait until there is no topsoil left, even more billions will die, and it won't be in a controlled and purposeful way like it would be if we do it now. Hell, maybe even no one has to die from starvation. Maybe just limiting births would do the trick. Or any other number of ideas that don't involve mass murder or mass starvation or going back to 200 year old farming methods.
So it's idealist to want a sustainable society that doesn't destroy the planet a short couple hundred years after discovering fossil fuels and industrial food production? How is that idealist? Idealism is thinking that the current situation is somehow salvageable without extreme overhauls.
And plus, no one is saying to go back to oxen and carts. That is fairly ridiculous so my response was equally ridiculous.
People were advocating for much the same thing in the '70s when Erlich's The Population Bomb came out, and thank God we ignored them. And yet a single hectare of land produces multiples of what it produced then, allowing enough food for everyone (though it doesn't always get to the people who need it, admittedly).
If I had to bet I'd say in 100 years we'll be producing even more food per person, so I consider any plan that would have people starving forced to limit reproduction to be off the table.
It seems to me like we might have to make a big push towards solar-powered hydroponics or something of that nature.
How depressing. Maybe soylent green is more of a realistic future than we thought...
Organic dryland cereal farming depends on tillage for weed & pest control. Not only is the land plowed during planting and after harvest, every third year the land is left fallow. While left fallow it is plowed monthly.
Conventional farmers have substantially reduced their usage of tillage increasing their chemical usage instead. Those chemicals may be not be good for the ecosystem, but they result in orders of magnitude less soil loss.
Also, it is a matter of relative severity of problems. Soil loss is much worse than depletion of soil nutrients. As said, organic is potentially much worse for soil loss (although different practices like intensive use of cover crops can help).
I couldn't get through any of the paywalls, but there are articles out there that suggest that it is.
A lot of other factors are important too. Good rotation, being careful about what strains are used (many crops have been bred/modified for high yields, but that yield often comes at the expense of the soil).
This is very much a solvable problem. The 1000 year number in the article is how long it can take under just normal circumstances, but that can be sped up a LOT using various techniques including proper tillage, animal grazing, etc.
The big "problem" is that all of these things will make crops more expensive, but any other solution is going to quickly become even pricier than that so it should still be done.
> It seems to me like we might have to make a big push towards solar-powered hydroponics or something of that nature.
Right now the costs (particularly start-up costs) are too high for this to be totally viable, but I think it will become a much more significant method of growing food down the line.
But in reality the faster people realize that genetically modified products are more nutritious and less harming to nature, the better are our chances of survival.
Robots are our only hope.
On the other hand you could fill an office full of programmers in North Dakota.
It is the breadbasket of North America.
Not sure what you mean by this. In the past old trees were burned on the spot; today they are chipped and the chips taken for use as mulch or other things. Neither process involves removing topsoil.
Tobe fair I do not know the practice in other regions / other crops.
My great worry about us (and capitalism) is that we are good at short term allocation, bad at long run planning. Is there a way around this soil problem, or some way in which the stat is misleading?
It's more about human nature than capitalism or any economic system in particular. If anything capitalism is capable of including externalities, if we choose to. If we don't, eventually, we will face the issue, as many others. Not the ideal way to dal with issues which are decades in the future. Classical example is national debt and of course, climactic change.
http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/08/sustainable-technologies-safe...
I still feel land management / mismanagement is independent of economic system. One does not intrinsically offer to protect natural resources over another, but i could be wrong.
I would argue that an economic system that concentrates power has the ability to create and enforce a monopoly on land usage. Political or economic systems that allow for a minority control of usable land are much more inclined to use that land for the benefit of the controlling minority, and so far that seems maximizing profits in the short term. When we speak of land management what do we mean? The best "returns"? What is being returned to us? I'm inclined to agree that the values used inland management _can_ be independent of economic system, but an economic system that brings with it a predefined value-set based around extracting profit via exploitation is going to manage the land according to those values. Until we have values that supersede the values of the economic system then the econmic's system's values with be the dominating ones.
While I find his philosophy a bit lacking, Derrick Jensen has some great writing on how we value and manage land. https://www.amazon.com/Language-Older-Than-Words/dp/19314985...
I'm actually not sure we can easily include some externalities in capitalism, and I've worried it's an achilles heel of the system. I say this as a capitalist.
Specifically, the transaction costs of including small externalities are too high. By small, I mean that if I burn a litre of gasoline, I have harmed every human on the planet by an incredibly small margin. Too small to properly charge.
In that specific example, a carbon tax could fix it. But, there are many such externalities. Many harder to measure than carbon burning (which is hard in itself).
Other things equal, if it is cheaper to ignore an externality, the system will gravitate to those solutions. And with computers, globalization and cheap container shipping, it has become much easier and much faster to optimize the system. Such optimizations are mostly excellent (I am a capitalist), but we're also optimizing the system in ways which produce negative externalities as well.
The number they have for topsoil generation is how long it takes if you don't try to stimulate it. There are lots of ways to increase the rate of topsoil development. So that bit is a tiny bit misleading, because while some of what they are kind of implying is permanent can be reversed.
That said, the situation is very bad. Ways around could possibly include non-traditional agriculture (hydroponics et al) or other less palatable things, like dietary changes or increased farming regulation.
But the organization says of topsoil formation on its own web site:
The rate of topsoil formation can vary from < 0.25 mm/year in dry and cold environments to > 1.5 mm/year in humid and warm environments (Hammer 1981; Hudson 1981). Topsoil formation at the rate of 1 mm/year is equivalent to an annual addition of 12 t/ha. Therefore, the rate of topsoil formation has been considered as a factor in the model in assessing loss of productivity and tolerable soil losses.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/009/t0733e/T0733E06.htm
1 mm/year means 30 years to generate 3 cm of topsoil, not 1000 years. And human intervention can increase productive topsoil rather than deplete it, when the incentives are properly aligned.
I don't know if the 1000 years figure is a mistake, based on newer, more pessimistic measurements of soil formation rates, or something else.
It was an interesting paper, and I wonder if it didn't gain much traction, or was heavily refuted. If I was more cynical, I'd think Semedo was purposely ignoring it for political reasons.
If someone can come up with an adequate filter for pharmaceuticals, it seems that the recapture of human waste is our best path forward. Yes, there is a logistics problem for transferring it, potentially, dehydration is the best method, but we consume the output of our farms, and it seems that on a conservation of mass basis, we should be sending it back to the farms when we're done with it.
Well call them the Elite Shitters
I would compare some of the challenges this faces to those that are faced when turning salt water into fresh water through desalination (probably not a direct comparison).
However, moving human waste is a tough problem and requires substantial resources (fossil fuels, infrastructure, electricity, etc...) and the act of moving it is usually the source of contamination.
I think it's completely valid and beneficial to compost human waste, but that needs to be done on a local/individual scale.
The alternative is to keep replenishing organic matter in the soil with non-renewables; keep trying and failing, at great financial cost, to clean up our waste before dumping it back to the environment; and end up with damaged farmland and screwed waterways anyways.
https://www.epa.gov/biosolids
https://www.dcwater.com/biosolids
This wouldn't be nearly enough though. The amount of human waste is, however, dwarfed by animal waste.
And we have 111ft of that kind of soil here in Iowa. It going to take a hell of a long time to go through that. Its been farmed since the early 1800's. And not all gone, not by far.
I didn't read any further after that, maybe the article does have something to say. But I doubt it.
I will give you the benefit of the doubt and believe that you may be on the top end of the world-wide average, but how does your 80 acres of usable soil help the rest of the world when push comes to shove?
So don't believe me if you like (though I could go dig a hole and take a picture of the black line that separates topsoil from subsoil), but its probably more outrageous to cling to the idea that somehow Iowa is at the top end of a curve that goes from 10 years to 1000 years.
You would have had a whole succession of different types of plants to slowly work the rock surface. Then humans show up, rip out all the trees that kept that hard-won top soil in place, and it all runs off out to sea in no time. Basically it's about places like Iceland, not Iowa, I guess.
When I was younger, my parents moved out into the country and they bought a lot that had been intensively overgrazed and over farmed. Our neighbor farmed hay / alfalfa for the nearby dairy farms and he told us it would be centuries until the land could support a crop.
The 'dirt' was dust, rocks, and fossilized manure. Within 3 years of being let alone it recovered enough to support the hardier plants and weeds, that winter we planted barley and rye to add organic matter, compete with the weeds, and put some roots in the soil to stop erosion. After that, it came back with a vengeance. 7 years after our neighbor said it'd be centuries until we could grow anything on it, he bought the rights to plant alfalfa on some of the lot.
I have no doubt that people could manage the soil better, but things return to nature pretty quick especially if you can help nature do what it's trying to do.
And whomever says a millennium to make 30mm of topsoil knows nothing about the subject. I've seen nature make that much in less than a decade many times.
What our grandparents did was to "fix" our reliance in an overexploited renewable resource making use of processes that consume a non-renewable resource and accelerate the destruction of the renewable resource at the same time, all this while artificially inflating the output of the original process and creating demand that cannot and will not be met in the future.
Good job, Science!!! That's what happens when you fixate on wether things can possibly be done, but never consider if they should be done.
I agree the article is hyperbolic, but there's a wealth of research showing that this approach has long-term negative consequences on soil health and the crops themselves, leading to long-term declines in yields.
Not to mention the contamination of rivers and underground aquifers with nitrogen and potassium leading to widespread algal blooms deoxygenating rivers and leading to mass deaths in (literally) downstream aquatic ecosystems.
One thing the industrial approach ignores entirely is the community of bacteria that live in symbiosis with plants. This includes both nitrogen-fixing bacteria (which presumably we bypass by just adding nitrogen directly).
The better approach is to understand farming as part of greater ecosystem flows, and to work with the soil and not treat it as a barren Petri Dish.
Sure, nearly-dead soil can work fine for growing plants. But it results in less healthy plants and runoff, which then has a cyclical effect. The byproducts of petro-fertilizers end up in the environment, which then ends back up in animals and plants. By not relying on healthy bacteria and fungi to naturally infuse plant roots with the nutrients and water they need, we are only getting short term benefits of reliable production. In the long term we will end up slowly poisoning the ecology that we absolutely need to keep agriculture sustainable.
This seems like clickbait to me.
Edit: This article is from December 5, 2014. https://www.ashlandmass.com/DocumentCenter/Home/View/446
The central hypothesis is that we've become far too invested in annual plants. They require and enormous amount of labor and petrochemicals to sustain. The book presents alternative methods that, like permaculture in general, look to harness natural processes and perennial trees and shrubs to great effect.
1: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16441733-restoration-agr...
Topsoil, climate will soon become irrelevant to producing foodstuffs.
That's why Oil is so expensive while agriculture is universally subsidied.