Preserving and Protecting Arable Farmland
Here’s an article on desertification, in particular, holding the line against the Kubuchi Desert, that contains a message, variations of which I predict you’ll hear a great deal over the coming years: “The top 6 – 8 inches of top soil is all that stands between us and extinction.”
Is this a rash, “the-sky-is-falling” type of statement? I’ll let you be the judge. It is undeniably true that things like reduction in rainfall, mismanagement of agricultural land, and the removal of trees and shrubs for firewood, biomass energy, etc. all conspire to create an ever-widening set of dust bowl conditions on huge swatches of previously fertile land. In fact, Dr. David Doty, one of the people I most admire for his understanding of science, believes that desertification is the largest single threat resulting from climate change.
In the parlance of the article, may we learn to “preserve and protect.”
Sad thing: Chicken Little has become The Boy Who Cried Wolf, and The Wolf actually does arrive, ravenously.
And not just desertification; urban sprawl is contributing to subdivision development in western Montana, turning our pastures, ranches and farms into poorly planned (and sometimes empty) subdivisions. It’s getting harder and harder for remaining ranchers to, for example, purchase hay, since there is less land in agricultural production.
An excellent point is made about cities and urban sprawl.
The city of Los Angeles covers 469 square miles of land that is basically desert and about four million people live within the city. Los Angeles County is 4,083 square miles – also largely developed desert – and has about 10 million people. New York City has about 19 million people distributed over 6,720 square miles, and the Mexico City metropolitan area population is over 21 million people.
As fossil sunlight continues to disrupt our climate and our biosphere, and it becomes rapidly more and more expensive to extract and refine (in both energy and dollars), concentrations of human population like these will soon be completely unworkable.
The only way our major cities – and even our smaller population centers like Chicago and Atlanta – can survive is for our nation to move to harvesting modern sunlight.
The only way that will happen is if we stop the bribery.
Good point about the bribery; it really does come down to undue influence upon our supposed “leaders.”