John Jeavons is saving the planet one scoop of applesauce at a
time. Jeavons stands at the front of the classroom at Ecology
Action, the experimental farm he founded on the side of a
mountain above Willits, in Northern California's Mendocino
County. For every tablespoon of food he sucks down his gullet,
he scoops up six spoonfuls of dirt, one at a time for dramatic
effect, and dumps them into another bowl. It's a stark message
he's trying to get across to the 35 people who have come from
around the country to get a tour of his farm -- simplified, to
be sure, but comprehensible: For every unit of food we consume,
using the conventional agricultural methods employed in the
U.S., six times that amount of topsoil is lost. Since, according
to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the average person
eats a ton of food each year, that works out to 12,000 pounds
(5,443 kilograms) of topsoil. John Jeavons estimates that using
current farming practices we have 40 to 80 years of arable soil
left.
If you don't already know the bad news, I'll make it quick and
dirty: We're running out of soil. As with other prominent
resources that have accumulated over millions of years, we, the
people of planet Earth, have been churning through the stuff
that feeds us since the first Neolithic farmer broke the ground
with his crude plow. The rate varies, the methods vary, but the
results are eventually the same. Books like Jared Diamond's
Collapse and David Montgomery's Dirt: The Erosion of
Civilizations lay out in painful detail the historic connections
between soil depletion and the demise of those societies that
undermined the ground beneath their feet.
According to the International Soil Reference and Information
Centre (ISRIC), as of 1991, human activity has brought about the
degradation of 7.5 million square miles (19.5 million square
kilometers) of land, the equivalent of Europe twice over. The
Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. has estimated that
the value of lost soil nutrition in South Asia amounts to some
$10 billion a year. Each year, says Montgomery, the world loses
83 billion tons of soil.
Still, these abstract facts have a way of eluding our
comprehension. When we put a human face on them they begin to
sink home. The U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD)
has estimated that desertification in Sub-Saharan Africa will
drive 60 million people from their homes in the next 20 years.
While agriculture has thus far been able to keep pace with
growing demand, it has done so by borrowing soil fertility from
the future. But whether a global crisis is 20, 50 or 200 years
away, the point remains the same: We as a species would be wise
to take better care of our dirt.