Oil, if you wait long enough, is a renewable resource. Take dirt. On the other hand, please don’t. Dirt, in theory, is renewable, too, if you are sufficiently patient. Moreover, it is just as strategic a resource as petroleum.
We all know about soil erosion. There is even a “peak dirt” movement. Awareness is high, but the record remains abysmal, and it does matter. The history of dirt suggests that the way people deal with their arable soil can dictate the lifespan of civilizations. “With just a couple of feet of soil standing between prosperity and desolation,” writes geologist David R. Montgomery in Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, “civilizations that plow through their soil vanish.” A civilization that treats its dirt like dirt, in other words, will ultimately fail.
How much soil are we losing? The world has three major regions containing truly Grade A topsoil: Northern Europe, Northern China, and the American Midwest. The dynamics of dirt making are the straightforward result of a balance between the forces of weathering, which produces new dirt, and the processes of erosion, which take it away. Most soil profiles are one to three feet in depth, and most of the world’s soil is only marginally fit for farming.
There is nothing new about losing soil. George Washington called the agriculture of his time “as unproductive to the practitioners as it is ruinous to the landholders,” according to Montgomery. Jefferson also took up the complaint. The problem for agricultural states was that it was always easier to colonize new fields than to laboriously manure and care for the old ones.
George Perkins Marsh, a prominent 19th Century proto-environmentalist, argued that Rome, among other empires, died for lack of dirt. “Territory larger than all Europe,” he wrote, “the abundance of which sustained in bygone centuries a population scarcely inferior to that of the whole Christian world at the present day, has been entirely withdrawn from human use...”
In the U.S., a report by the Commissioner of Patents in 1849 tried to quantify the picture: “One thousand millions of dollars, judiciously expended, will hardly restore the one hundred million acres of partially exhausted lands.”
Montgomery even makes the argument that soil erosion in Southern states may have helped set off the Civil War, since it virtually assured that slavery was required for profitable agriculture.
Article comments
1 - Irene Wagner
Urban farming does hold a lot of promise. For city-dwellers, composting vegetable and fruit scraps with newspaper shreddings might one day be as familiar a practice as recycling bottles and cans is today. Participation in the process of transforming smelly garbage into "black gold" may be attended by a popular awareness of and even affection for "dirt."
2 - Bliffle
Excellent article, and an important point.
A few months ago, watching "Taiwan Report" on "MHZ Worldview" network (instead of the OReilly drivel on FOX that most BC auditors pollute their empty minds with) there was an interesting interview with a German farmer who had moved to Taiwan some years ago and had started making "black gold" from the available, ummm, 'materials' in the towns and was making good money selling "black gold" to Taiwanese farmers.
He was living so well he even showed Taiwanese how to do the same thing. He said that they need as many people doing this as possible since the naturally fertile areas of Taiwan were very limited.
3 - Dirk Hanson
Yes, there's a huge fortune to be made in China in the, uh, human waste fertilizer industry...
4 - Irene Wagner
So, there's one more thing not to get from China, their pathogen-riddled compost. No poo from any carnivore or omnivore should EVER go into compost--not even from pet cats or dogs, let alone humans.
I forgot to thank you for the article, Dirk Hanson. It was just the right length and packed with information, with a wisp of hope at the end.