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 istartedi on Saturday December 17 2016, @12:22AM
If the mere eating of a meal depleted topsoil, there would be
no such thing as topsoil since all the myriad lifeforms on Earth
and all the meals they've eaten over time would have long since
depleted it. So. What the article really means is that some farmers
are currently engaging in unsustainable practices that deplete the
topsoil. They need to stop that; but the headline is pure Henny-Penny,
and I'm not going to bother reading anything that leads off like that.
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