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It’s the soil, folks.
On top of everything else we face in the global mess that industrialism has left us — crashing financial markets, ponzi scams passed off as economic theory, peak oil, disappearing forests, ocean dead zones — we also face a global soil crisis. Note these interesting developments regarding food production and arable land:
U.N Agriculture head, Lennart Bage, says, "fertile land with access to water has become a strategic asset." Oh, really? This summer,
Financial analyst Chris Mayer at Daily Wealth, one of those investment sites that advises people how to profit from the crashing economy and depleted ecosystems, says: “Fertile soil may become more important to land values than oil or minerals in the ground.” He calls soil “a strategic asset on par with oil.”
Hello? Is this the economic community waking up? The problem is, these people think you "buy" everything.
"We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect." – Aldo Leopold
Any well-informed, aware person knows that soil and food are fundamental to human life and society, but it is interesting that this is now a global investment issue. The so-called "free market" system that wants to privatize the entire planet still has not learned the fundamental truth that humanity must face: The ecology is the economy.
It’s the soil, folks.
For years, I’ve been advising highschool and college students: If you have dreams of going into international finance, you should probably take some permaculture courses as well. Here are some useful permaculture sites:
Permaculture information and links
Permaculture International, with links, articles, networking
A simple, good permaculture primer.
More good permaculture links.
And remember to save and take out the kitchen compost.
Rex Weyler, Sept 19, 2008
Tags: agriculture, Ecology, permaculture, soil, wealth
This was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 1:03 pm and is filed under Ecology . Feel free to respond, or trackback.
4 Responses to “It’s the soil, folks.”
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João Soares Says:
September 27th, 2008 at 5:15 am
Dear Rex Weyler
Soil has in great proportion many living forms. And you are right saying ecology is economy.
Paz*Peace
Portugal -
Andrea Peloso Says:
September 29th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
Since I am obsessed with attempting to do everything within a small appartment – yes, you can also make soil IN a balcony free condo.
You can have an indoor worm composting kit. Try Cathy’s Crawly Composters to order the worms as they are a special type. It takes a few tries to get the consistency right, then you can use in on your indoor garden or share.
Making soil is about as easy as making garbage. Just don’t send what seems like garbage away.
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Andrea Peloso Says:
September 30th, 2008 at 4:04 am
Since soil is now even being commodified…
I decide to barter, and share as my first form of transaction. Hard as it will be to start…
As Utah Phillips says:
“The profit system follows the path of least resistance (even stupidity) and following the path of least resistance is what makes a river crooked.”
I think on a day after the American People have all been royally screwed over by a system that claims to be the solution is a good day to do this in their honour.
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Miguel Ariza Says:
Dear Mr. Weyler,
Reading about the alarming methane emissions, I would appreciate your comments on the theory which says that we are facing an Ice Era, produced by Sun cycling activity. If I am not wrong, this theory is from a Mexican scientist.
Best Regards
Miguel Ariza
ColombiaRex Weyler response
Earth warming and cooling cycles
Cooling and warming influences constantly converge within the earth climate system, so Earth could move into a cooling period, or regional cooling, regardless of warming caused by human activity. The Earth’s atmosphere has been in a long cooling trend for over 65 million years, since the demise of dinosaurs, and during that trend, we call the extreme cooling dips “ice ages,” but these are small fluctuations in the big picture of Earth temperature over the eons.
Life on earth – the first bacteria – emerged some three billion years ago, and endured through two billion years of fluctuating temperatures. Terrestrial life forms boomed during a million-century warm spell between 600 and 500-million years ago, the warm Cambrian period.
Over the next 300 million years life forms thrived and crashed four times, during both warm and cold cycles that lasted a million centuries each. The most dramatic species crash of all time, the “Permian collapse,” which wiped out 95-percent of all species, happened at the end of a long cool period between 325 – 215 million years ago.
Thereafter, the planet began a long warming as atmospheric carbon dioxide reached 2000 parts per million (ppm; compared to 370 ppm today) and Global Mean Surface Temperature peaked at about 25°C (10°C hotter than today). During this 200-million-year Mesozoic heat wave, reptiles and forests flourished.
A long cooling
The expanding forests cooled the planet by increasing moisture circulation and storing carbon from the atmosphere. An asteroid hit Earth 65 million years ago in the Gulf of Mexico, changed the environment, killed off the large reptiles, and began a cooling trend, supported by the growing forests and eventually grasses and flowering plants.
We remained in this cooling phase, until the expansion of industrial human civilization, the loss of forest cover and the release of CO2 into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels.
Modern warming
Since the earliest human temperature records, about 1860, atmospheric carbon and global average surface temperature have increased. Temperatures have risen by about 0.6°C over the last century, and the rate has accelerated to about 1.0°C per century now. This accelerating rate remains troubling.
Nevertheless, cooling influences remain, even if the warming influences prevail. Regional cooling may appear superimposed over greenhouse warming. One reason this happens is that the warming causes water to evaporate in the tropics and fall as rain at high latitudes, toward the poles. Thus, fresh water is lost in the tropics and added into high latitude oceans, where it dilutes the salt content, changing ocean current patterns. As North Atlantic warm currents are slowed, Europe and North America may experience colder winters. Nevertheless, the heat gained due to greenhouse gas in the atmosphere remains in Earth’s climate system.
Other geophysical cooling forces can include the tilt of Earth’s rotational axis and the orientation of our elliptical orbit around the sun, causing the well known “precession of the equinox” (a 23,000 year cycle through the zodiac: Taurus, Aries, Pisces, Aquarius, etc.). These orbital changes contribute to warming and cooling cycles.
Human warming impact prevails
Nevertheless, the impacts of human activity, reduction of forest cover and emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases appears now dominant over the natural cooling trends, as confirmed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the US National Academy of Sciences, and other climate observers. Nevertheless, there remain many climate forces, and the Earth’s climate can change rapidly, as it has in the past, and could again in the future.
Recent data indicate deep ocean heating (to 3000 meters deep). This sequestering of heat in the deep ocean might mitigate global warming of the atmosphere, but we now know that the deep, sub-sea permafrost is melting, releasing ancient methane back into the atmosphere, which in turn will cause more heating of the earth. This recent discovery of deep methane releases remains extremely unsettling, and could signal the beginning of run-away warming.
So yes, cooling and warming influences continue simultaneously, but right now in the history of Earth, human-caused warming appears to dominate temperature change.
rw.
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