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Every meal you eat now costs the planet 10 kilos in lost topsoil.
That's the warning of "Surviving the 21st Century" author Julian Cribb to an international soil science conference in Queenstown, New Zealand on Dec 15, 2016.
"10 kilos of topsoil, 800 litres of water, 1.3 litres of diesel, 0.3g of pesticide and 3.5 kilos of carbon dioxide – that's what it takes to deliver one meal, for just one person," Cribb says.
"When you multiply it by 7 to 10 billion people each eating around a thousand meals a year, you can see why food is fast becoming the challenge of our age."
"The human jawbone is now by far the most destructive implement on the planet. It's wrecking soil and water, clearing forests, emptying oceans of fish and destroying wildlife as never before – but few people realise it because of long industrial food-chains that hide the damage from them," he says.
Do the 10 kg of lost topsoil result in 10 kg of night soil?
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16 2016, @07:29AM
No one said that topsoil is not being replenished. The point is that modern agriculture is consuming it faster than natural processes can replenish it. That is what is meant by “lost”. And since by your own admission you did not read TFA, the author actually proposes the following, rather than mass starvation:
(Score: 3, Interesting) by deimtee on Friday December 16 2016, @11:41AM
Well that's a load of bullshit. The only people more damaging to a wild environment than farmers are indigenous people.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday December 16 2016, @03:15PM
Yeah, that's why when whitey showed up in the New World the whole place was just trashed.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday December 17 2016, @03:02AM
https://fee.org/articles/buffaloed-the-myth-and-reality-of-bison-in-america/ [fee.org]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @03:40PM
Why do you think most primitive people are nomads? Surely if they were "living in harmony with nature" they could just stay there. The truth is they trash an area until it is unlivable, and then move on and do it again. They were just sparse enough that the ecology could mostly recover before they came round again. They still drove many species into extinction.
It's not politically correct to mention it, but all the the Australian megafauna went extinct just after aborigines arrived here.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Friday December 16 2016, @01:17PM
The point is that modern agriculture is consuming it faster than natural processes can replenish it.
I bet older agricultural practices are consuming it faster such as with desertification in Africa and Asia.
Reinventing food will in fact create vast new industries, jobs and opportunities for communities around the world – and the smart ones will be leaders in this, The Age of Food.
I think before we do that, we first implement best current agricultural practices and water management. That's the low lying fruit right there and it probably would solve most of the problem right away.