SOIL AND SOCIETY

Organized, cooperative societies are based on the cultivation of soil. In the earliest civilizations of SW Asia, over 95% of the population worked the land directly and supported the non-farming population responsible for the first cities. Today, the developed world still depends on the farmer, though the dynamic is reversed. Some 98% of us live off the 2% who still farm. The turnaround was made possible by the greatest of all agricultural subsidies, the fossil energy we inherit from the ancient biosphere. Because of cheap energy and the exponential growth of the human population since the Neolithic, we have created an environmental impact of the order of 10⁹ ha of arable land and pasture, within which we move 10¹⁵ Kg of soil per year. This massive ecological footprint on the biosphere, accounts for the fact that we are the only 'big fierce animal' exponentially increasing in numbers. It also aggravates problems arising from the natural tendencies for soil to erode or to become acidified, saline, or hydromorphic (depending on factors such as climate, texture and drainage). Since the twentieth century, such problems have been magnified and exaggerated into pathological states all the way from the Aral Sea to California. The fact that in industrialised societies, cheap energy has enabled us to buy our way out of trouble in the short term, has produced the dangerous belief that economy always trumps ecology where environmental problems are concerned. Modern high input / high output agriculture is fundamentally unsustainable, depending to a large degree on limited and diminishing resources. Much ingenuity has been expended on solving problems associated with the input side of farming, especially by the management of water resources and soil fertility, and more controversially, by genetic engineering, but a truly sustainable agriculture remains elusive. With a long term conservation ethic, we could achieve sustainability based on renewable resources - on energy obtained from contemporary sunlight, on the careful management of soil fertility, water and weeds, and on the exercise of human intelligence - but only for a much smaller population.