Dirt: A New Eco-Panic in the Making
Global warming is dying. Mother Gaia keeps refusing to provide the eco-fanatics with the tropical apocalypse that they’ve been dreaming for so long:
- Madison, Wisconsin just finished its second snowiest December on record.
- Temperatures in Siberia are expected to reach -67 degrees Fahrenheit, which is too cold even for that region’s hardy residents.
- And Baghdad saw snow for the first time in decades.
I’m sure that your heart goes out to the many soon-to-be-unemployed doom-mongers. But don’t worry. They’re already working hard to find something new for us to be scared of.
Intrepid Seattle reporter Tom Paulson informs us that we’re running out of dirt:
The planet is getting skinned.
While many worry about the potential consequences of atmospheric warming, a few experts are trying to call attention to another global crisis quietly taking place under our feet.
Call it the thin brown line. Dirt. On average, the planet is covered with little more than 3 feet of topsoil — the shallow skin of nutrient-rich matter that sustains most of our food and appears to play a critical role in supporting life on Earth.
“We’re losing more and more of it every day,” said David Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington. “The estimate is that we are now losing about 1 percent of our topsoil every year to erosion, most of this caused by agriculture.”
. . .
Montgomery has written a popular book, “Dirt,” to call public attention to what he believes is a neglected environmental catastrophe. A geomorphologist who studies how landscapes form, Montgomery describes modern agricultural practices as “soil mining” to emphasize that we are rapidly outstripping the Earth’s natural rate of restoring topsoil.
Try not to laugh, please. Mr. Paulson is only a journalist, and we therefore can’t expect him to know much of anything, nor can we expect him to ask any basic questions that might interfere with his clean narrative.
I don’t want to hear any snide comments about how farmers have closely studied the science of soil quality and erosion for centuries, if not millennia. And you smarty-pants scientists who have spent your lives studying the specific chemicals that give soil its fertility, you genetic engineers who creates new varieties of plants that do an even better job with maintaining soil fertility, you civil engineers who build manmade lakes and design flood plains. You can all just shut up with your facts and figures, because Tom Paulson is a journalist, and his almost completely uninformed opinion on the subject outweighs the views of a thousand actual scientists and engineers.
In a few months, topsoil depletion will be a full-fledged eco-disaster every bit as real and terrifying as global warming. And I really mean that.