Regional Water CycleSocietySoil Erosion & ContaminationStructure

Civilization’s Foundation Eroding

by Lester R. Brown, Earth Policy Institute


Photo © Craig Mackintosh

The thin layer of topsoil that covers the planet’s land surface is the foundation of civilization. This soil, typically 6 inches or so deep, was formed over long stretches of geological time as new soil formation exceeded the natural rate of erosion. But sometime within the last century, as human and livestock populations expanded, soil erosion began to exceed new soil formation over large areas.

This is not new. In 1938, Walter Lowdermilk, a senior official in the Soil Conservation Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, traveled abroad to look at lands that had been cultivated for thousands of years, seeking to learn how these older civilizations had coped with soil erosion. He found that some had managed their land well, maintaining its fertility over long stretches of history, and were thriving. Others had failed to do so and left only remnants of their illustrious pasts.

In a section of his report entitled "The Hundred Dead Cities," he described a site in northern Syria, near Aleppo, where ancient buildings were still standing in stark isolated relief, but they were on bare rock. During the seventh century, the thriving region had been invaded, initially by a Persian army and later by nomads out of the Arabian Desert. In the process, soil and water conservation practices used for centuries were abandoned. Lowdermilk noted, "Here erosion had done its worst….if the soils had remained, even though the cities were destroyed and the populations dispersed, the area might be re-peopled again and the cities rebuilt, but now that the soils are gone, all is gone."

Wind and water erosion take a toll. The latter can be seen in the silting of reservoirs and in satellite photographs of muddy, silt-laden rivers flowing into the sea. Pakistan’s two large reservoirs, Mangla and Tarbela, which store Indus River water for the country’s vast irrigation network, are losing roughly 1 percent of their storage capacity each year as they fill with silt from deforested watersheds.

Ethiopia, a mountainous country with highly erodible soils, is losing close to 2 billion tons of topsoil a year, washed away by rain. This is one reason Ethiopia always seems to be on the verge of famine, never able to accumulate enough grain reserves to provide meaningful food security.

Soil erosion from the deterioration of grasslands is widespread. The world’s steadily growing herds of cattle and flocks of sheep and goats forage on the two fifths of the earth’s land surface that is too dry, too steeply sloping, or not fertile enough to sustain crop production. This area supports most of the world’s 3.3 billion cattle, sheep, and goats, all ruminants with complex digestive systems that enable them to digest roughage, converting it into beef, mutton, and milk.

An estimated 200 million people make their living as pastoralists, tending cattle, sheep, and goats. Since most land is held in common in pastoral societies, overgrazing is difficult to control. As a result, half of the world’s grasslands are degraded. The problem is highly visible throughout Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and northwest China, where the growth in livestock numbers tracks that in human numbers. In 1950, Africa was home to 227 million people and 273 million livestock. By 2007, there were 965 million people and 824 million livestock.

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, is losing 351,000 hectares (867,000 acres) of rangeland and cropland to desertification each year. While Nigeria’s human population was growing from 37 million in 1950 to 148 million in 2007, a fourfold expansion, its livestock population grew from roughly 6 million to 102 million, a 17-fold jump. With the forage needs of Nigeria’s 16 million cattle and 86 million sheep and goats exceeding the sustainable yield of grasslands, the northern part of the country is slowly turning to desert. If Nigeria continues toward its projected 289 million people by 2050, the deterioration will only accelerate.

Iran, with 73 million people, illustrates the pressures facing the Middle East. With 8 million cattle and 79 million sheep and goats—the source of wool for its fabled rug-making industry—Iran’s rangelands are deteriorating from overstocking. In the southeastern province of Sistan-Balochistan, sand storms have buried 124 villages, forcing their abandonment. Drifting sands have covered grazing areas—starving livestock and depriving villagers of their livelihood.

Neighboring Afghanistan is faced with a similar situation. The Registan Desert is migrating westward, encroaching on agricultural areas. A U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) team reports that "up to 100 villages have been submerged by windblown dust and sand." In the country’s northwest, sand dunes are moving onto agricultural land in the upper reaches of the Amu Darya basin, their path cleared by the loss of stabilizing vegetation from firewood gathering and overgrazing. The UNEP team observed sand dunes 15 meters high blocking roads, forcing residents to establish new routes.

China faces similarly difficult challenges. After the economic reforms in 1978 that shifted the responsibility for farming from large state-organized production teams to farm families, China’s cattle, sheep, and goat populations spiraled upward. While the United States, a country with comparable grazing capacity, has 97 million cattle, China has a slightly smaller herd of 82 million. But while the United States has only 9 million sheep and goats, China has 284 million. Concentrated in China’s western and northern provinces, sheep and goats are destroying the land’s protective vegetation. The wind then does the rest, removing the soil and converting productive rangeland into desert.

China’s desertification may be the worst in the world. Wang Tao, one of the world’s leading desert scholars, reports that from 1950 to 1975 an average of 600 square miles turned to desert each year. By century’s end, nearly 1,400 square miles (3,600 square kilometers) were going to desert annually. Over the last half-century, some 24,000 villages in northern and western China have been entirely or partly abandoned as a result of being overrun by drifting sand.

China is now at war. It is not invading armies that are claiming its territory, but expanding deserts. Old deserts are advancing and new ones are forming like guerrilla forces striking unexpectedly, forcing Beijing to fight on several fronts.

Soil erosion often results from the demand-driven expansion of cultivation onto marginal land. Over the last century or so there were massive cropland expansions in two countries—the United States and the Soviet Union—and both ended in disaster.

During the late nineteenth century, millions of Americans pushed westward, homesteading on the Great Plains, plowing vast areas of grassland to produce wheat. Much of this land—highly erodible when plowed—should have remained in grass. This overexpansion culminated in the 1930s Dust Bowl, a traumatic period chronicled in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath. In a crash program to save its soils, the United States returned large areas of eroded cropland to grass, adopted strip-cropping, and planted thousands of miles of tree shelterbelts.

The second major expansion came in the Soviet Union beginning in the mid-1950s. In an all-out effort to expand grain production, the Soviets plowed an area of grassland larger than the wheat area of Australia and Canada combined. The result, as Soviet agronomists had predicted, was an ecological disaster—another Dust Bowl. Kazakhstan, where the plowing was concentrated, has abandoned 40 percent of its grainland since 1980. On the remaining cultivated land, the wheat yield per acre is one sixth of that in France, Western Europe’s leading wheat producer.

A third massive cropland expansion is now taking place in the Brazilian Amazon Basin and in the cerrado, a savannah-like region bordering the basin on its south side. Land in the cerrado, like that in the U.S. and Soviet expansion, is vulnerable to soil erosion. This cropland expansion is pushing cattle ranchers into the Amazon forests, where ecologists are convinced that continuing to clear the area of trees will end in disaster. Reporter Geoffrey Lean, summarizing the findings of a 2006 Brazilian scientific symposium in London’s Independent, notes that the alternative to a rainforest in the Amazon would be "dry savannah at best, desert at worst."

Civilization depends on fertile soils. Ultimately, the health of the people cannot be separated from the health of the land. Conserving and rebuilding soils will be covered in the next Plan B 4.0 Book Byte.

17 Comments

  1. If society hasn’t adopted Plan B 1, 2, 3 how many more Plan B’s should Lester write before he realizes we’re well into a dystopian path of no return?

    Plan B 10.0 – Quick Long Pork Recipes For “the Road”?

  2. “Hey Doomsday. Do you see any hope? If you’re peddling, I could be interested.”

    Yes, highly qualified hope.

    What bothers me about Lester’s approach is this sense (rightly or wrongly) that all he has to do is keep stacking more and more herculean top-down mitigation strategies into his laundry list in order to deliver us to our promised green utopia of “happily ever after”.

    This seems to ignore that:

    a) Nobody’s really picked up and run with anything from his prior volumes. While there is something to be said for persistence, the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”. Plan B has been about as effective as Lindsay Lohan’s stints in rehab.

    and

    b) Ecological collapse is accelerating in a way that makes it harder and harder, intellectually speaking, to envision a way for us to engineer our way out of some of the worst impacts. Lester needs a more realistic vision of a best-case scenario, as depressing as that may be to accept.

    To address a), look at how Richard Heinberg has changed his focus since Climategate. Richard has pretty much given up hope in top-down mitigation and has thrown his hat in with Transition. He’s still trying to talk to TPTP out of principle, but with a sense of defeatism.

    To address b), look at Bill McKibben’s Eaarth. Bill also has a top-down strategy, but what Bill is adding to the debate is the much-needed call for realistic objectives in the face of runaway climate change. A certain level of acceptance of the hard data is sorely needed. We are never going to restore the planet we used to have. It’s going to get worse before it gets better for many generations. All we can do is try to preserve more than we’d wind up with in a BAU descent, and the amount of difference we can make through positive action shrinks with each passing year.

    I think both of these are important paradigm shifts that activism needs to pass through in order to reflect the current reality, not the way things were back 5-6 years ago when Lester Brown, Heinberg, and others first started writing out their bold prescriptions for humanity.

  3. BTW, Craig, just to appeal to a permaculture guru–consult David Holmgren’s Future scenarios.

    Ponder the notion that we’re already starting up the “Brown Tech” curve and that by doing so, we’re locking ourselves into a “civilization-triage” outcome such that changing gears so late in the game may have an increasingly marginal effect.

  4. Craig,

    I’d tend to agree with Ed in the sense that one of the most urgent questions now is to get an idea about what sort of effort is effective and what is not. Copenhagen was a big failure many people still struggle to stomach. Coping strategies include retreating to one’s cave and licking wounds, as well as “let’s just do what we did before and hope it will be more effective in the future”. But is all that appropriate?

    Considering in particular Copenhagen, I don’t actually see it as a failure, but rather as a revelation. Very briefly, the mask came off and the true deeper nature of the problems which we are facing became visible. So, preciesly the most painful point which so many would want to wish away is what we have to study very closely, because it can give us a more realistic and hence more appropriate model of the actual problems that prevent the change that is so desperately needed. The only thing I really regret about Copenhagen is that it took so long for such a deep revelation to happen.

    “Hope” actually is a very treacherous emotion. What is the value of “hope” to a cancer patient who refuses treatment, hoping to get well without? I’d prefer to give people something better than just an illusion along the lines of “at least you had an opportunity to hope till the bitter end”.

    So, the only question that counts now is: what can we do that really has an impact?

  5. Hi Ed – I don’t disagree with you at all. Actually, I only really run Lester’s stuff because they have good access to pertinent data (soil loss, aquifer depletion, demographics, etc.). By running his articles (and I only run selected articles) I’m not at all trying to state that I agree with all Lester writes or proposes. Same often goes for other articles I put up. But usually any article I publish has some degree of truth to it, and/or facts worth incorporating into the filing cabinet of our minds, so as to help us flesh out our own strategies based on as much pertinent info as we can get our minds around.

    I’ve actually endeavoured to express to the Earth Policy Institute a few times that they need to take a closer look at permaculture, and to encourage it through their publications. But, sadly, I get brushed off with the statement that ‘permaculture systems won’t produce enough food to feed everyone’, which is, as we know, total rubbish – well, total rubbish as long as we can get more people onto the land. This more-people-onto-the-land aspect is a painful one, but peak oil will make it a necessity. No longer will we be able to have <1% of the people farming millions of hectares while the rest of us are squeezed into sardine can apartments with no land to work.

    The sooner we transition to biodiverse polycultures, in a cooperative, planned fashion – rather than go through this in a reactionary fashion (think revolution and death) – the better our chances of decreasing suffering.

    Hence my often talking about politics and economics, as without incentived change, we’ll end up with enforced change, or major unrest combined with oppressive fascist responses.

    Thomas – yes, completely agree there too. Read an article I wrote back in the beginning of 2008, where I clearly outline my belief that these climate negotiations are not only a waste of space, they’re also putting people into that ‘but wait’ mode, where they don’t do anything because they’re expecting TPTB to ‘sort it’:

    https://www.celsias.com/article/kyoto-pushing-the-snooze-button-on-climate-change/

    See updates:

    https://www.permaculturenews.org/2009/12/13/carbon-trading/

    https://www.permaculturenews.org/2010/06/01/carbon-trading-under-scrutiny/

    Re what can we do that really has an impact. One thing, which I seek to do, is ‘educate, educate, educate’. We will get nowhere if people don’t understand the issues. The only way we’ll extract ourselves from rapid descent into darkness is if people all start to turn around, and cooperate with each other as they seek to head in another direction. They won’t do this if they can’t clearly see the destination of their present trajectory.

    Imagine community halls worldwide full of an ever-more-lucid citizenry starting to take back control of their futures, and over the governments who are meant to serve them – with these meetings themselves full of people who’ve walked over from other community halls where they were presented with the facts about Peak Everything, continued economic collapse, holistic solutions, etc.

    Will it happen? Perhaps not, but I don’t see any other solution. There are no silver bullets, no quick fixes. It’s going to be hard work.

    I work on this site in the hope of helping people to see reality, whilst demonstrating solutions where I can find them. Hopefully some of those people will take what they’re learning on board sufficiently at actually start to do something where they are. Indeed, people are. I hope this worldwide permaculture network I’m working on will help showcase the solutions in particular.

  6. By the way guys, even TPTB may be finally waking up to the fact that they really can’t solve this:

    https://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2010/09/24/figueres-big-bang/

    Their essentially saying “okay, we’ve kept you all waiting for a decade and a half – and guess what, we’ve decided not to decide anything” reminds me of hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy, where they spent centuries building a super computer to tell them the answer to ‘the meaning of life, the universe and everything’, and then their civilisation waited millions of years until the computer, fed on all the facts of the universe they could enter into it, finally spat out an answer – 42.

    I think we’re in a similar situation. The computer told them they couldn’t get the Ultimate Answer, because they didn’t have the Ultimate Question. The question the economists and politicians are asking is just plain wrong – “how can we continue with business as usual while simultaneously healing the planet”.

    This should be a clarion call for action by everyone.

  7. Hi Craig,

    Ad “Imagine community halls worldwide full of an ever-more-lucid citizenry starting to take back control of their futures”: I think the problem even runs deeper – it’s not just control over their futures.

    I think the following statement by John Maynard Keynes shows the problem best: “The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.”

    The point is, as soon as one adopts the philosophy of “In the long run we are all dead”, one already is. Because this means cutting all ties with humanity, with being part of something greater that extends in time much further than a single human lifespan. What I find so bizarre about the idea of “in the long run, we are all dead” is that everybody of course accepts that their existence is about much more than just the tenth-of-a-cubic-meter of space occupied by their body. Now, if our existence clearly extends in space far beyond our physical presence, how can anyone be so foolish to just assume the opposite about our existence in time. I wonder who of those “In the long run I’m dead” guys would agree with being buried on a waste disposal site…

    Let me re-iterate the point that as soon as one adopts the philosophy of “In the long run we are all dead”, one already is. This is not about people reclaiming control over their future – it is about people reclaiming control over their life. It is about de-zombification.

  8. Thomas, that’s why the longer I mull over these issues the more it kind of becomes a psychological/philosophical/spiritual crisis more than anything else.

    Even a best-case future is going to be so jarring to us that we need to reevaluate the human condition and the meaning of life (see Hitch-hiker’s guide).

    The fact that most people’s eyes roll at the idea of being at all introspective, this is actually the hardest thing to do. It’s much easier to talk about windmills and solar panels.

    That’s one of the reasons I’m not much of a fan of bright-green activism (of which Lester Brown belongs). It’s better than nothing, but it’s a flawed agenda.

    If we’re presented not with a problem but a dilemma, then we have to learn to accept the minimum consequences that are already baked into the cake even if we straighten up and fly right today. Lots of people would react to that by saying “Well, if I can’t have the BAU lifestyle to which I’ve become accustomed, then why should I make any sacrifices at all? I’ll just enjoy life while I can.”

    So there is a profound need to enter into deeper discussions about why we value what we do, and what we’re losing that might not be so bad, and what we might be able to recapture that BAU has squelched. Not that the future should be seen as a utopia in disguise at all, but to kind of make lemons into lemonade. This is the fine line that the Transition Town movement tries to walk.

    But as long as we continue to see things in classic environmental terms of greenwashing BAU, then society really is not being best served. It’s just setting people up to be woefully disappointed by the law of diminishing returns, after which they will likely proceed to all the usual dysfunctional coping behaviors which is standard fare for doomer-nightmares.

  9. Ed,

    I arrived at the conclusion that our problem actually is an internal one a long time ago. And I think, so did Gandhi. As I keep on re-iterating, for example: in what sense could Peak Oil be a problem of the oil? It’s just a problem of our attitudes towards it, having mistaken it for a resource that can be plundered at will without any bad side effects.

    I agree with Craig that education is a key issue. But equally, we must spend some effort on having clarity whether or not we “work where it counts most”. And on that, I agree with Bill Mollison, you unfortunately can only expect a small part of the population to be able to skillfully handle challenging situations. So, this
    means we have to focus on working with people who have the potential to make substantial contributions. Also, it will be easier to bring about true change via a “nucleation strategy”, i.e. first focus on working with groups of people who both know how to handle difficult problems and also can and will set something up in their domain of influence. And focus on getting them to a point where they can make progress on their own and no longer need to be pushed.

    If we accept that our problems are more about our attitudes and expectations than about specific tech, then that immediately tells us something about what to focus on. The general situation in science, for example, is an interesting one, for there are a number of clever folks around who know how to get things done. But that does not mean that scientists would in any sense be “better citizens” than others. (In particular, I would not expect the fraction of scientists with quite questionable moral standards to differ much from the rest of the population. Also, there are lots of myopic people in science, techno-religious believers which kind-of are the equivalent of other religious fundamentalists, and so on — so, there are many scientists of which one wouldn’t expect much when it comes to bringing about change – for a thousand different reasons.) But equally, there are a number of good – and knowledgeable – folks in science. Taking specifically climate science as an example, one question which I am pondering a lot is: why don’t more (non-climate) scientists speak up against foul play when “invented reasons” enter the climate discussion – or when smear campaigns against colleagues are launched? I think the answer may often be: because they have not yet pondered the question how important it is for them to take a stand against such foul play.

  10. that’s why the longer I mull over these issues the more it kind of becomes a psychological/philosophical/spiritual crisis more than anything else.

    Wholly agreed. This is a point I try to drive home endlessly. An example:

    https://www.permaculturenews.org/2009/07/11/our-moral-dilemma-because-we-dont-live-on-an-inflatable-earth/

    You’ll have noticed I get a bit… er… pissed with certain commenters who divebomb us with simplistic magic cures for a very complex situation. Their ‘cure’ is based on market forces and complete ‘freedom’. But the issues we face are right inside of us, all of us – specifically in regards to “how do we choose to use our freedom?” On a day by day basis it’s almost universally used to increase our own personal comfort. That’s what we’ve been educated to do. And, it’s what comes naturally to us from the day we were born.

    As I see it, our exercising our self-interested freedom brings injustice, resource depletion (and personal dissatisfaction as it happens). But as the ultimate consequences threaten environmental, and with it social, disintegration, the supposed ‘freedom’ will get removed as the doomer-nightmare hits – as TPTB take increasing hard-lined control over the situation. Our abusing our ‘freedom’ walks us right into the riot lines and fascist resurgences.

    Or, and a big ‘OR’ here, we become, as you’ve expressed, collectively introspective – and determine the best, fastest, most holistic escape route, and proceed to agree, collectively, to make the necessary sacrifices it will take to proceed, cooperatively, in that direction.

    The every man for himself mindset won’t consider this need. For them, magical, simplistic silver bullet solutions are their best psychological fallback/salve.

    We don’t have an environmental dilemma, we have a moral dilemma. And, as with governments enforcing ‘peace’ upon unrest, we will no doubt ultimately see organised religion seeking to enforce (their subjective version of) morality upon our armageddon-inviting recklessness.

    By chasing a skewed, morally disconnected, individualistic, self-interested version of ‘freedom’, we’re walking ourselves into captivity – simply because our misuse of freedom will ultimately have to be contained.

    As I expressed in another post:

    Wouldn’t it be better if we could avoid both scenarios – environmental destruction or draconian controls – by doing instead by free will what we will otherwise eventually plead governments to force us to do?

    My bid is to get people aware of where we’re heading – so they might exercise their freedom to actually determine to limit their own freedom, their lifestyles, and to thirst for voluntary simplicity. King Solomon is quoted as saying: “a little with quietness is better than abundance with strife.”

    But, as you say, if we move into a yurt and start eating wildflowers – just to turn and notice we’re out there doing it on our own, with everyone else in the ‘eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die’ mindset, then it, for practical purposes (if we ignore for a moment our own sense of satisfaction for doing the right thing and simultaneously giving the big finger to mainstream stupidity) our efforts amount to little in the grand scheme of things.

    What to do? As well as move into the yurt, we can seek to influence others, and get them to, in turn, influence their community, their local government, and so on. We need to find ways to dump a reality check, and a great big pile of holistic solutions, upon the lap of mainstream society.

    Or, we can pretend that a little less bad is going to cut it, and that we’ll have enough resources to cover every desert and ocean with solar panels and every cliff and ridgeline with turbines – and that we’ll quickly evolve the ability to digest rocks.

  11. Craig, your blog is simply unique! Not only because of the high quality pictures, illustrations and lay out, but also because the diversity, both in topics and contributors. Here you find both autodidacts and amateurs like me, and highly educated experts like Lester Brown. Hence, everybody finds something to read, and everyone find someone to identify with. Keeps it going!

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