Sacred Headwaters #3: Dirt
Exploring the broad impacts of agriculture on planetary boundaries and the opportunities to use food growth for regeneration
Sacred Headwaters is a bi-weekly newsletter that aims to guide a co-learning process about the existential issues and planetary limitations facing humanity and about how we can reorient civilization in a way that will enable us to thrive for centuries to come. If you’re new here, I’d encourage you to start with the first issue. The newsletters are not strictly sequential, but this exploration is meant to build on knowledge and understanding over time.
Sacred Headwaters #3: Dirt
In the last issue, we learned about the planetary boundaries framework. Now, we’re going to explore how agriculture impacts nearly every planetary boundary and how global food production is on track to fully deplete the world’s soil resources — without even accounting for the effects of climate change — within the next half century. On a brighter note, we’re also going to look briefly at how changing agricultural practices and modalities could regenerate soil, restore land, and sequester carbon; a more in depth dive into regenerative agriculture will come in a future newsletter. These topics are quite broad, so the headline material in this issue will be pretty high-level, but I’d recommend perusing some of the additional resources linked throughout if you have time.
This graphic is from the UN Global Environment Outlook 6 (GEO-6) that was published last year. It’s a long report but if you’re interested, it’s very good reading that presents the human and ecological impacts of our global civilization together — something many sources fail to do — while embedding recommendations about how to move forward throughout. A few highlights:
Chapter 8: Land and Soil - specific to this newsletter’s topic
GEO-6 key messages - a short and high level summary of the important findings, both descriptive and proscriptive, of the report
Summary for Policymakers - summarizes the findings and recommendations of the report and includes many valuable infographics (like the one above).
Chapter 21: Future Developments Without Targeted Policies - a realistic look at what the world is on track for if we don’t take immediate and transformative action.
Agriculture production as a major driver of the Earth system exceeding planetary boundaries (30 minutes)
This paper from Ecology and Society uses the planetary boundaries framework as a guide for assessing the impacts of global agricultural production. In short, agriculture is the main driver of our transgression of four planetary boundaries and a significant driver of a fifth (climate change), and despite that, we are failing to appropriately provide nutrients to more than half the global population. Which, of course, is projected to grow to 9 billion by 2050. Recall from Issue #2 that biogeochemical flows (aka the nitrogen/phosphorous cycles) and biosphere integrity (biodiversity) are the two planetary boundaries we’ve transgressed the furthest (not climate): industrial agriculture is the principal driver for both of those.
There are two important messages here. First, agriculture as it stands is pushing us rapidly beyond the planet’s ability to sustain us and that has to change. But second, as Kate Raworth would point out, even in its current unsustainable state, our agricultural system is failing to provide for humanity. So it has to change for both of those reasons, and it needs to change in such a way that it can work to regenerate earth systems while providing for the growing global community.
The Union of Concerned Scientists put out a short article (5 minutes) that’s more specifically focused on the human costs of industrial agriculture (and predated the creation of the planetary boundaries framework) that’s worth a read as well.
Third of Earth's soil is acutely degraded due to agriculture (5 minutes)
Many of the planetary boundaries discussed in the previous article impact crop productivity — freshwater availability, land use, chemical pollution, and even climate — but there are additional issues that the article doesn’t get into. Monoculture, over-fertilization and pesticide use, and industrial processes like tilling are rapidly causing soil degradation and erosion to the point where — even without feedback cycles from planetary boundaries like climate change — we will be unable to feed the world within sixty years if we continue with our current practices.
One quick note on this article: the links to the UN Global Land Outlook are broken. Use this link instead: https://knowledge.unccd.int/glo/GLO_first_edition.
Dirt Poor: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious? (5 minutes)
Soil degradation is a global capacity problem, but it’s also a nutritional quality problem that impacts all of us, even in the developed world. Studies have documented a steady and reliable decline in nutrient values for crops over the last half century. It’s another feedback cycle that makes it harder and harder for industrial agriculture processes — as they currently stand — to feed the world.
World Atlas of Desertification (10+ minutes)
This isn’t an article, but it’s an informative visual tool created by the European Commission that uses remote sensing to assess desertification and other important agricultural variables on a global scale. I’d encourage you to peruse it on your own time as there are a number of interesting visualizations and articles here, but I’ll link to a few of my favourites that I’ve found so far:
“Convergence of Global Change Issues” - a global map of the impacts of issues like aridity, water stress, fires, and more
“Soil Organic Carbon” - this is a map of soil carbon and an informative article about soil’s role in global carbon cycles. You’ll notice that northern latitudes are by far the most carbon-rich region, hence the concerns about melting permafrost, ensuing erosion, and aerosolization of that carbon.
Can farmers and ranchers pull one trillion tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere? (15 minutes)
In the same way that soil degradation directly impacts climate change, soil regeneration helps mitigate it. We read about this in Project Drawdown (Issue #1) and this article goes a bit deeper, talking about how enhancing soil carbon helps fight climate change and improve productivity and food security. It’s easy to hear the term “regenerative agriculture” and think, “Oh, that’s nice, my uncle does that on a farm in Hawaii but it’s totally unrealistic for the global food supply,” which is why it’s encouraging to see companies like IndigoAg (the authors of this article) pursuing a global scale business model predicated on sequestering carbon through agriculture — while simultaneously enhancing food production. As always, read everything with a grain of salt — especially when it’s written by a company to sell its own business model — but this article is well-cited, and what we’re seeing in the world of regenerative agriculture is really encouraging. It’s a critical step towards sustainability on both the human and earth system levels.
We have at least one person subscribed to this newsletter who works at IndigoAg, so if you’re curious to hear more about them, let me know and I can put you in touch.
Book Recommendation: Dirt, David Montgomery
Dirt is a historical look at the relationship between civilizations and soil. Montgomery draws connections between industrial-scale agriculture, soil degradation, and civilization collapse, hoping to outline lessons from the past that we can apply today to avoid the same fate. He ultimately lands on regenerative agricultural practices as the solution, something his later book Growing a Revolution goes into moredepth on. Another recommended book in this vein is One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka. One Straw Revolution is both a practical and philosophical look at agricultural practices through the lens of a microbiologist-turned-farmer in 20th century Japan and its deep lessons are intertwined within a pragmatic story of growing rice and grain.
Note: this newsletter is as much for my learning as it is for yours. In some cases, I won’t have read the books before recommending them. This is one of those cases (which is also why I’ve recommended a couple). If you choose to read the books recommended here, I’d love to hear from you and discuss them, so feel free to reach out, or to hijack one of the bi-weekly discussion threads to specifically discuss a book.
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