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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: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday December 16 2016, @01:54PM
I agree that panicking on this is bad, and that the media dramatizes things all the time. But that does not make genuine problems any less genuine. What are the facts? We have to know the facts, or we can't tell whether warnings are just hysteria, or something more. Climate alarmism, you say? What's alarming is denial. Deliberately ignoring facts, and worse, suppressing them. On Climate Disruption, the facts lead to only one conclusion: yes. Yes, it's real. Yes, mankind is causing it by burning fossil fuels. Yes, it's bad for civilization. We can stop the worst, and doing so will stimulate the economy. The alternative of doing nothing is much riskier. Pretty good odds that Greenland and Antarctica will melt, 1/3 of the world population will have to move to higher ground (or drown), and crop failures will cause hunger and lead to war, even nuclear war.
The article didn't say what was causing the loss of topsoil, though it must mean erosion. Farmers are very aware of erosion. Farming techniques have changed dramatically in recent decades, in response to erosion among other problems. Such as, they used to plow. Used to plow straight rows regardless of terrain, then they moved to contour farming. Now, no-till farming is in. Yeah. the article is fearmongering. Didn't have the words "erode" or "erosion" anywhere, just LOSS! Something is being LOST! Did you know that your head LOSES over 100 hairs per day? Better buy some medicine for baldness! Voter fraud is rampant, better require photo ID at the polls!