We’re treating soil like dirt. It’s a fatal mistake, because all human life depends on it | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian
Imagine a wonderful world, a planet on which there was no threat of
climate breakdown, no loss of freshwater, no antibiotic resistance, no
obesity crisis, no terrorism, no war. Surely, then, we would be out of
major danger? Sorry. Even if everything else were miraculously fixed,
we’re finished if we don’t address an issue considered so marginal and
irrelevant that you can go for months without seeing it in a newspaper.
It’s literally and – it seems – metaphorically, beneath us. To judge
by its absence from the media, most journalists consider it unworthy of
consideration. But all human life depends on it. We knew this long ago,
but somehow it has been forgotten. As a Sanskrit text written
in about 1500BC noted: “Upon this handful of soil our survival depends.
Husband it and it will grow our food, our fuel and our shelter and
surround us with beauty. Abuse it and the soil will collapse and die,
taking humanity with it.”
The issue hasn’t changed, but we have. Landowners around the world
are now engaged in an orgy of soil destruction so intense that,
according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, the world on
average has just 60 more years of growing crops.
Even in Britain, which is spared the tropical downpours that so quickly
strip exposed soil from the land, Farmers Weekly reports, we have “only 100 harvests left”.
To keep up with global food demand, the UN estimates, 6m hectares (14.8m acres) of new farmland will be needed every year. Instead, 12m hectares a year are lost through soil degradation.
We wreck it, then move on, trashing rainforests and other precious
habitats as we go. Soil is an almost magical substance, a living system
that transforms the materials it encounters, making them available to
plants. That handful the Vedic master showed his disciples contains more micro-organisms than all the people who have ever lived on Earth. Yet we treat it like, well, dirt.
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