Erosion threatens all our food

May 31

Our food comes from the Earth, from the soil that is made up of million-year-old rocks and freshly fallen leaves. “Soil is a living material: if you hold a handful of soil, there will be more microorganisms in there than the number of people who have ever lived on the planet.” (1) It is this living material that grows our food. But soil is disappearing worldwide, or rather, it is leaving our landscapes by the tons and ending up in the rivers, the ocean, and the air.

Erosion is a natural function of landscapes, like water flows, so does earth. Through rain, wind, and animal impact, all landscapes are always moving. But the human impact on soil causes erosion on a scale that cannot be compared. In fact, erosion goes hand in hand with development. As cities have been build, fields plowed, mines dug, and forests removed, topsoil has continued to dwindle. (2) Erosion has become a disease on landscapes and it threatens all food and forest cultivation, waterways, and coastlines.

So in the pursuit of food justice, Land must be respected and retained. Land must be returned to its original caretakers. And the gross scale of settler-caused soil loss must be acknowledged.

“In 1862, the Homestead Act was passed, providing settlers with 160 acres of land to farm. Similar programs would follow at the start of the 1900s, leading to a rush of newer, less experienced farmers. In the Plains especially, farmers removed millions of acres of native grassland, replacing it with excessive wheat, corn, and other crops.” (3) This federal decision, used as a tool of settler expansion and Indigenous genocide, led to environmental harm on an extreme scale. The plows and deforestation destroyed the soil. The lure of capitalist gain led to farming well beyond management capacity, and so when a drought-decade came in the 1930s, the continent was devastated.

“The Dust Bowl was the name given to the drought-stricken Southern Plains region of the United States, which suffered severe dust storms during a dry period in the 1930s.... Crops began to fail with the onset of drought in 1931, exposing the bare, over-plowed farmland. Without deep-rooted prairie grasses to hold the soil in place, it began to blow away. Eroding soil led to massive dust storms and economic devastation—especially in the Southern Plains.” (4)

These massive dust storms, also known and black blizzards, were huge clouds of soil that carried topsoil all the way from Texas to D.C., New York, and even onto ships in the Atlantic. “During that time, massive amounts of precious topsoil were eroded. One of the worst dust storms, referred to as “Black Sunday” singlehandedly displaced 300 million tons of topsoil from Oklahoma, Texas, and more.” (3)

Year after year more crops died, less rain fell, and more soil was lost. “By 1934, an estimated 35 million acres of formerly cultivated land had been rendered useless for farming, while another 125 million acres—an area roughly three-quarters the size of Texas—was rapidly losing its topsoil.”(4)

Eventually rainfall came, as well as government programs that helped white settler farmers so that they would not need to plow so heavy. This was followed by decades of conservation work so there might never be another Dust Bowl of that scale.

But the damage is done and that topsoil isn’t coming back. “A rough calculation of current rates of soil degradation suggests we have about 60 years of topsoil left. Some 40% of soil used for agriculture around the world is classed as either degraded or seriously degraded – the latter means that 70% of the topsoil, the layer allowing plants to grow, is gone.” (1) The remaining earth - clay, rock, hardpan soil - doesn’t hold water. It just runs right through the ground and out into the oceans, wasting another precious and limited resource. “A staggering paper was published recently indicating that nearly half of the sea level rise since 1960 is due to irrigation water flowing straight past the crops and washing out to sea.” (1)

And the issue isn’t just on farms. Land degradation is expansive in urban areas as new construction is much more supported than protecting the land we need to live. “Critical...forested watersheds are being cleared in uncontrolled expansion for housing construction, home gardens, crops, and firewood gathering. The effects on vegetation and soil conditions are dramatic and readily visible. Similar impacts are occurring from large-scale infrastructure developments where large buildings and associated roads generate considerable runoff that, when concentrated and poorly managed, create large gullies that threaten human life, critical infrastructure, and natural environments. “ (4)

Two main issues are guaranteed with nearly all modern construction. First the vegetation that holds the soil together will be removed, making the fragile soil vulnerable to wind, rain, sun, and animal impact. Then heavy machinery will compact soil, making it unable to absorb water. And most of the time, the projects are impermeable streets, sidewalks, driveways, parking lots, and roofs that accelerate the velocity of water runoff and its strength in causing erosion (5). “The typical construction site erodes at a rate of up to 100,000 tons per square mile per year. This rate is 200 times greater than erosion from cropland” (2).

What’s more alarming is the impact that all of this rushing water has on the ponds, lakes, and rivers. The small particles of soil that are carried away from urban areas behave like “a magnet to toxicants and trace metals...studies show that pollutants such as DDT, DDE, PCBs, and chlordane whose use has been banned or highly restricted, can still be found at detectable levels in sediment deposited years ago in the bottom of streams and rivers.... This activity decreases oxygen available to support other aquatic life.... It has been demonstrated that urbanization and associated sedimentation reduces the diversity of fish populations in streams as well as the organisms that fish feed on.

One study suggests that onces a watershed becomes 12% impervious, the quality of aquatic life has reached a critical threshold” (5).

The scale of harm cannot be overstated. Erosion caused by water is by far the most severe (5). But while the water from land takes soil with it on its way out to sea, so does the rising sea water return to the land to take more. “California is falling into the sea piece by piece, and coastal conditions will only grow more dire with worsening climate crisis... sea level rise and more extreme storms mean bigger, higher waves washing away beaches and lapping at the bottoms of the cliffs....Nearly three-quarters of California’s coastlines are actively eroding, putting lives, homes, roadways, railways, utilities and other infrastructure in danger.” (6)

This crisis is being felt in every part of the planet. As land is lost in one country, food is affected in another. The arbitrary border lines drawn between nations will become more and more meaningless as things worsen. “If the food supply goes down, then obviously, the price goes up. The crisis points will hit the poorest countries hardest... [Nations with the resources] will have to deal with more refugees fleeing from truly desperate situations. Then there’s the fact that this is happening at a time of economic difficulty in the West, with growing disparities across society and some people already having to resort to charity to feed themselves.” (1) Countries that do not want to acknowledge this crisis and move toward humanitarian aid will instead further militarize their borders and do their best to pump more food out of their own depleted soils.

When land anywhere is stripped of its vegetative cover and left bare, rainfall hits the soil with enough force to break apart the glues that bind the soil together. These fragments wash into soil pores, causing the soil to seal itself and prevent water from infiltrating. So the water will collect on the surface until it becomes streams that take soil away with it. Hills and slopes of any size increase the impact of the entire equation. (7) On flatter land, and especially in hotter times, the soil loss is not just caused by it being taken away, it isalso being leached. Soil particles from the top layers of soil are carried downward to lower layers. This results in the top layer, where plants grow, being left without nutrients, and the lower layers made more compact, preventing plant roots from growing deeply. The issue of leaching increases with rainfall and high temperatures, made possible when soil is left bare (8). These physical changes in soil make natural food production nearly impossible. The response of the U.S. and Europe has been to force crops to grow through chemical fertilizer, but unsurprisingly, this shortcut solution makes the issue worse. “The use of ammonia-based fertilizers, imported to replace nutrients lost by harvest, dramatically accelerates soil acidification.” (9) All of these issues build on each other until fertile land becomes desert.

“Under a business as usual scenario, degraded soil will mean that we will produce 30% less food over the next 20-50 years. This is against a background of projected demand requiring us to grow 50% more food, as the population grows and wealthier people in countries like China and India eat more meat, which takes more land to produce weight-for-weight than, say, rice... Crop breeding is exacerbating this situation. Modern wheat varieties, for example, have half the micronutrients of older strains, and it’s pretty much the same for fruit and vegetables. The focus has been on breeding high-yield crops which can survive on degraded soil, so it’s hardly surprising that 60% of the world’s population is deficient in nutrients like iron. If it’s not in the soil, it’s not in our food.” (1)

Humankind, misled by capitalist imperialist powers and projects, has flown far past the point of reckoning. We are in a point of crisis.

The repairs now need to be made on every front and in every way possible we must halt the loss of our precious soils. All grasses, bushes, trees, and plants shield the soil from the impact of rainfall while their roots hold the soil in place. This also slows down the water on the surface and helps remove water that saturates and leaches the ground (5). As that vegetation ages, it creates organic matter in the forms of leaves and branches. When left in place, this natural mulch adds to the protection, and over time, the nutrition begins to return to the soil.

Just as large infrastructure projects cause destruction through the fast moving water they produce, we need large infrastructure projects that manage, slow, and preserve water so that it does not continue to poison our rivers and raise our oceans. And care must be taken to change our agriculture systems from ones that cause the earth to crumble, into ones that are in line with the ideals of food justice. This includes giving land back to the experienced Indigenous caretakers, and the demilitarization of our food supply chain. We are only able to move as fast as the earth can sustain us. And it is vital to our survival to maintain the land that we have left and invest in its protection and longevity.

Sources:

Steven Casanova

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