Exclusive Book Excerpt: Environmental Escape Plan Explores the Crisis Beneath Our Feet
Few people think about soil—yet it’s disappearing at an alarming rate. We have farmed, built, paved, and eroded away much of the world’s fertile topsoil, and we’re running out. Some scientists warn that at our current rate, we may only have 60 years of farmable topsoil left.
What happens when we no longer have the soil to grow our food? What if we’ve already begun engineering our own food crisis?
In his upcoming book, Environmental Escape Plan, John Thompson (pictured above) unpacks how consumer choices shape environmental preservation—and what we can do before it’s too late. These exclusive excerpts from the chapter on soil explore the history of topsoil loss, the rise of industrial agriculture, and what happens when we ignore soil health.
Copyright Notice: The following excerpt is copyrighted material from Environmental Escape Plan by John Thompson. It is shared here with permission and may not be copied, reproduced, or distributed without authorization.
Excerpts from Chapter 5: Soil Destruction
Next time you are out in the woods with real unkempt ground beneath your feet, reach down and scrape-up some of the soil. Hold it in your hand. Find someplace to sit down. Get comfortable. Put aside a couple of minutes. Open your hand and ponder that soil. What are you looking at? If it’s natural, untainted, healthy topsoil, you are looking at one of the fundamental reasons you exist.
Homo Sapiens Sapiens have been able to live and flourish on this planet for hundreds-of-thousands of years for a long list of remarkable reasons, few more vital than what’s in your hand.
Topsoil is a rich mix of elemental chemistry, including nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, magnesium, carbon, zinc, and iron, plus proteins, vitamins and moisture. Alive and thriving in good topsoil are entire ecosystems of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, pupae, earthworms and more. In a mere teaspoon of healthy topsoil live millions of microbial species you never noticed.
Without knowing the scientific details, a close observer of soil wrote this in Sanskrit 1,500 years before the common era (BC): “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.”
Dirt History
It takes 500-to-several-thousand years for nature to make an inch of topsoil. It’s not everywhere, and nature is slow to make it. For all practical purposes, the substance in your hand is a non-renewable resource. It is, according to Popular Science magazine, “an incredibly complex recipe requiring an intricate mix of just the right chemistry, biology and physics.” And there has always been a relatively small supply of fertile soil.
It doesn’t form on steep, rocky slopes at high altitude, for example, and close to 20 percent of the planet’s land area is steep mountainous terrain. Broad fields of workable topsoil don’t develop on porous layers of glacial rock and gravel left behind from the last ice age, and much of terra firma is like that, including extensive stretches of Canada, Scandinavia and Russia. Hot deserts exceed 20 percent of Earth’s land area. Another 20 percent is so arid, topsoil nears the state of lifeless sand and dust. Frozen land totals about six million square miles. No available topsoil there.
Cold mountain deserts like the Tibetan Plateau are another several million square miles of marginally productive topsoil. And millions of acres of rich topsoil simply wash into the ocean with rainfall runoff every year.
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Seats of Civilization
All that aside, there was a great abundance of fertile soil for mankind at the start of the species journey through the ages. Slowly and innocently, that began to change, however.
Logically, early man was smart enough to settle upon the flattest, easiest, most fertile soil in the habitable regions. Eons later, that exacerbated the problem of latter-day soil loss around the world. Where local water supply held out, population centers grew and grew, covering over or otherwise destroying the best, richest, most productive topsoil in existence.
Mexico City today sprawls across 367,000 acres of once robust ground and wetlands. Tokyo Japan sits atop 542,000 acres of formerly healthy real estate. The New York City metropolitan area lay over 8,524,000 acres of ground once so rich pioneers choose to call it home. With desert and near-desert all around, Los Vegas covers 87,000 acres of once healthy soil, or people wouldn’t have settled there.
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Existing urban/suburban centers occupy about 475,000,000 acres of habitable land, an area three times the geography of France. Beneath it all was once a great deal of fertile ground. In the U.S. alone, expanding population centers engulf more than a million acres of land every year, according to Paul Bogard, author of The Ground Beneath Us (Little, Brown, 2017).
Feeding Civilization
Agriculture started in earnest about 8,000 years ago, and every farm field created came at the expense of a patch of forest, deep-rooted grasses or other healthy plant-life. With the fields went the great sponges of dense root systems and vast colonies of microbial diversity that occupied them.
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Without the sponge to retain water and foliage to shelter the ground, soils in new agricultural regions began to dry and erode from wind and rain. Fragile microbes designed for subterranean life couldn’t tolerate the exposure to direct sunlight, winter cold and summer heat that came with every seasonal plowing.
Every crop grown absorbed the nutrients and minerals the ground provided, and farmers hauled the harvested nourishment to market far from the fields. Thus were the nutrients and minerals of the ground diminished with every growing season.
Replanting the same crop season-after-season accelerated the losses. Soon enough, once vibrant, lifegiving soil began to decline. Productivity per field fell. Unbeknownst to consumers of the food, its nutritional value declined with every harvest. And bad things happened.
In modern times, there was the devastating Chinese famines of the early 1900s, the American Dust Bowl of the 1920s, the desertification of the Aral Sea drainage basin starting in the 1960s, the spread of the Sahara Desert in Africa and the transformation of the American Southwest as this sentence is written.
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