"There is no life without soil," said Anne Glover, chief scientific adviser to the European Commission. Soil is becoming endangered. Ploughing, removal of crop residues after harvest, and overgrazing all leave soil naked and vulnerable to wind and rain, resulting in gradual, often unnoticed erosion of soil. Unless given the attention and respect it deserves, catastrophe is only a matter of time.
The dirt beneath our feet is a nearly magical world filled with tiny, wondrous creatures. A mere handful of soil might contain a half million different species including ants, earthworms, fungi, bacteria and other microorganisms. Soil provides nearly all of our food - only one percent of our calories come from the oceans, she said. Soil also gives life to all of the world's plants that supply us with much of our oxygen, another important ecosystem service. Soil cleans water, keeps contaminants out of streams and lakes, and prevents flooding. Soil can also absorb huge amounts of carbon, second only to the oceans.
"It takes half a millennia to build two centimetres of living soil and only seconds to destroy it," Glover said.
Each year, 12 million hectares of land, where 20 million tonnes of grain could have been grown, are lost to land degradation. In the past 40 years, 30 percent of the planet's arable (food-producing) land has become unproductive due to erosion. Unless this trend is reversed soon, feeding the world's growing population will be impossible.
Rattan Lal of Ohio State University also explained erosion also puts carbon into the air where it contributes to climate change. The world's 3.4 billion hectares of rangeland and pastures has the potential to sequester or absorb up to 10 percent of the annual carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels and cement production, estimates Ólafur Arnalds, a soil scientist at the Agricultural University of Iceland. With good agricultural practices such as using seed drills instead of ploughs, planting cover crops and leaving crop residues, soils can go from a carbon source to a carbon solution, said Lal. "Soil can be a safe place where huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere could be sequestered...Healthy soils equals healthy crops, healthy livestock and healthy people."
Iceland was once mostly covered by forests, lush meadows and wetlands when the first settlers arrived nearly 1,000 years ago. By the late 1800s, 96 percent of the forest was gone and half the grasslands destroyed by overgrazing. Iceland became one the world's poorest countries, its people starved and its landscape has been described as Europe's largest desert. Similarly with the Highlands of Scotland. The bleak heather moors are not natural, the Caledonian Forest was.
Socialists often neglect the environmentalist Marx but he understood how nature was central to economics. He argued that the nutrients of the soil were sent to cities in the form of agricultural produce, but these same nutrients, in the form of human and animal waste, were not returned to the land. Thus there was a one-way movement, a "robbing of the soil" in order to maintain the socio-economic reproduction of society. Marx thus linked the crisis of pollution in cities with the crisis of soil depletion. The rift was a result of the antagonistic separation of town and country, and the social-ecological relations of production created by capitalism were ultimately unsustainable.
“Capitalist production collects the population together in great centres, and causes the urban population to achieve an ever-growing preponderance. This has two results. On the one hand it concentrates the historical motive force of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil...But by destroying the circumstances surrounding that metabolism...it compels its systematic restoration as a regulative law of social production, and in a form adequate to the full development of the human race...All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress toward ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility...Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.” - Capital, volume 1, on "Large-scale Industry and Agriculture"
In practical terms Marx talks about the sewage and pollution of London and the inability of capitalism to transform this into fertiliser.
“In London...they can do nothing better with the excrement produced by 4.5 million people than pollute the Thames with it, at monstrous expense". Capital volume 3
The dirt beneath our feet is a nearly magical world filled with tiny, wondrous creatures. A mere handful of soil might contain a half million different species including ants, earthworms, fungi, bacteria and other microorganisms. Soil provides nearly all of our food - only one percent of our calories come from the oceans, she said. Soil also gives life to all of the world's plants that supply us with much of our oxygen, another important ecosystem service. Soil cleans water, keeps contaminants out of streams and lakes, and prevents flooding. Soil can also absorb huge amounts of carbon, second only to the oceans.
"It takes half a millennia to build two centimetres of living soil and only seconds to destroy it," Glover said.
Each year, 12 million hectares of land, where 20 million tonnes of grain could have been grown, are lost to land degradation. In the past 40 years, 30 percent of the planet's arable (food-producing) land has become unproductive due to erosion. Unless this trend is reversed soon, feeding the world's growing population will be impossible.
Rattan Lal of Ohio State University also explained erosion also puts carbon into the air where it contributes to climate change. The world's 3.4 billion hectares of rangeland and pastures has the potential to sequester or absorb up to 10 percent of the annual carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels and cement production, estimates Ólafur Arnalds, a soil scientist at the Agricultural University of Iceland. With good agricultural practices such as using seed drills instead of ploughs, planting cover crops and leaving crop residues, soils can go from a carbon source to a carbon solution, said Lal. "Soil can be a safe place where huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere could be sequestered...Healthy soils equals healthy crops, healthy livestock and healthy people."
Iceland was once mostly covered by forests, lush meadows and wetlands when the first settlers arrived nearly 1,000 years ago. By the late 1800s, 96 percent of the forest was gone and half the grasslands destroyed by overgrazing. Iceland became one the world's poorest countries, its people starved and its landscape has been described as Europe's largest desert. Similarly with the Highlands of Scotland. The bleak heather moors are not natural, the Caledonian Forest was.
Socialists often neglect the environmentalist Marx but he understood how nature was central to economics. He argued that the nutrients of the soil were sent to cities in the form of agricultural produce, but these same nutrients, in the form of human and animal waste, were not returned to the land. Thus there was a one-way movement, a "robbing of the soil" in order to maintain the socio-economic reproduction of society. Marx thus linked the crisis of pollution in cities with the crisis of soil depletion. The rift was a result of the antagonistic separation of town and country, and the social-ecological relations of production created by capitalism were ultimately unsustainable.
“Capitalist production collects the population together in great centres, and causes the urban population to achieve an ever-growing preponderance. This has two results. On the one hand it concentrates the historical motive force of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil...But by destroying the circumstances surrounding that metabolism...it compels its systematic restoration as a regulative law of social production, and in a form adequate to the full development of the human race...All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress toward ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility...Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.” - Capital, volume 1, on "Large-scale Industry and Agriculture"
In practical terms Marx talks about the sewage and pollution of London and the inability of capitalism to transform this into fertiliser.
“In London...they can do nothing better with the excrement produced by 4.5 million people than pollute the Thames with it, at monstrous expense". Capital volume 3
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