2015 has marked the International Year of Soils, an event that many members of the public missed — but they shouldn’t have, because soil is vitally important for human survival. Ominously, a study from the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures indicates that in the last 40 years, humans have chewed through 33 percent of the Earth’s topsoil, thanks to development and harmful farming practices. The grim findings are a bad sign for the future, as we rely on soil not just for sustenance, but also as a carbon trap, key component of nearly every ecosystem on Earth, and breeding ground for organisms with tremendous commercial and humanitarian applications, such as bacteria that could contribute to the development of cutting edge pharmaceuticals. We should be worshiping the ground we walk on, and this study indicates that we’ve been doing just the opposite.
Soil depletion is often far off on the minds of members of the public because they’re not intimately connected with farms and other settings where soil plays a vital role. When they think about soil damage, they might imagine the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, caused by unsustainable farming practices and then-unusual farming conditions, and they may not be aware of the extent of desertification, soil salination, and other problems rendering once vibrant farmland unusable. In the United States alone, 50 acres of farm and ranchland alone fall to the developer’s backhoe every hour, and that soil loss doesn’t account for damage caused by poor farming practices, a problem across the United States as commercial farms attempt to eke as much as possible out of the land.
Heavy ploughing disrupts the soil, making it impossible for microorganisms to survive. When that soil is further treated with fertilizers, fungicides, pesticides and specially treated herbicides, it adds to the problem. Other land is overgrazed, or subjected to aggressive harvesting practices that strip trees and shrubs which normally act to hold the soil in place with their tough networks of roots. The damaged, dry, crumbling soil can’t sustain life unless it’s shocked with even more fertilizers, compounding the problem, and it washes away in rains and floods, rushing out into the ocean and carrying a burden of agricultural chemicals with it — like the fertilizers causing algae blooms that disrupt marine environments, illustrating the chain effect caused by disruption of soil ecosystems.
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Farmland image via Shutterstock.