Warnings, Warnings, Warnings

It was possibly one of the biggest yawners in recent years when the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned that, globally, mankind had about 60 years of soil fertility remaining. 60 years and most of the productive farmland on our planet would be useless, infertile, incapable of producing crops. And what happened? Sweet Fanny Adams, that's what happened. Within a week the warning was straight down the memory hole.

Let's try that again. This time the warning is coming from Britain's Tory government, environment minister Michael Gove to be exact. He's warning the UK is just thirty to forty years away from "the fundamental eradication of soil fertility" in its farming regions.

“We have encouraged a type of farming which has damaged the earth,” Gove told the parliamentary launch of the Sustainable Soils Alliance (SSA). “Countries can withstand coups d’état, wars and conflict, even leaving the EU, but no country can withstand the loss of its soil and fertility.

“If you have heavy machines churning the soil and impacting it, if you drench it in chemicals that improve yields but in the long term undercut the future fertility of that soil, you can increase yields year on year but ultimately you really are cutting the ground away from beneath your own feet. Farmers know that.”

Of course in Canada we don't discuss such things. Wouldn't be polite. The environment, climate change and all that, why that's for other people.

Maybe you imagine we're not drenching our fields in agri-chemicals - fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides - that cut the ground away from beneath our own feet.  The smoking gun is seen in the algae blooms that beset Lake Winnipeg and Lake Erie and the dead zones along our coasts.

The collapse of farmland is a crisis and it's global. However to frame it as a crisis on its own is to miss the point, a very important point that we fail to comprehend at our certain peril. This is a crisis but it's also a symptom of a far greater problem. We are pushing our planet beyond its limits. We are pushing our planet to its breaking point.

Only yesterday I posted about the existential threat of ocean acidification now underway and nearing the point of no return.  Consider the steadily degrading state of our essential renewable resources: air, water and biomass.  Close to 800 million people lack access to clean water. 2.5 billion don't have access to basic sanitation, toilets.  The air Londoners breathe can now rival that of Beijing's.  We've killed off half of the animal life on Earth, terrestrial and aquatic, in just 40-years.  Insect populations are collapsing.

We turn to on our planet's basic stocks. We fell our forests. We collapse our fisheries. We drain our aquifers. We exhaust our farmland, transforming it into sterile desert. We've put the Earth store into a giant "going out of business" sale. You know it's true. It's visible to the naked eye from space. And, as stocks of so many things run low, we respond with new technologies and systems to make our depredations even more efficient, ever more rapacious.

We know that greenhouse gas emissions pose a threat to humanity as great as opioids to an addict and yet we continue to extract and burn fossil fuels when alternatives exist. In Canada we pimp the world's highest-carbon, toxin-laced ersatz petroleum and we do it with pride.

Visit your legislature or, better yet, our parliament. Look down from the visitors' gallery during Question Period and all you will see are legislators dedicated to pushing our planet beyond its limits because they can't envision anything else.  They don't know that beside that gas pedal is a brake or that they can turn that steering wheel. And they're taking you for a ride.

Bugs Give Monbiot the Willies.

A couple of days ago The Guardian reported on a German study that flying insect populations had declined by 75 per cent over the past 25 years.

Another report for the Dire Warnings file.

Only The Guardian's enviro-scribe, George Monbiot, says don't take this lightly.

Which of these would you name as the world’s most pressing environmental issue? Climate breakdown, air pollution, water loss, plastic waste or urban expansion? My answer is none of the above. Almost incredibly, I believe that climate breakdown takes third place, behind two issues that receive only a fraction of the attention.

This is not to downgrade the danger presented by global heating – on the contrary, it presents an existential threat. It is simply that I have come to realise that two other issues have such huge and immediate impacts that they push even this great predicament into third place.

One is industrial fishing, which, all over the blue planet, is now causing systemic ecological collapse. The other is the erasure of non-human life from the land by farming.

And perhaps not only non-human life. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, at current rates of soil loss, driven largely by poor farming practice, we have just 60 years of harvests left. And this is before the Global Land Outlook report, published in September, found that productivity is already declining on 20% of the world’s cropland.

Monbiot blames industrial agriculture and the pesticide industry for the collapse of insect populations and the knock-on effects that triggers. He suggests a global treaty to regulate pesticides, environmental assessments of the global fishing industry and the agricultural industry, a sharp reduction in land use (yes, he means to take your steak off the grocer's shelves) and an end to the use of land for growing corn for biofuels. 

There's no use in debating the fine points and nuances of Monbiot's solutions. These are things that are simply not going to happen.

Maybe when, like the insects, we've pared the human population by 75 per cent all these problems will be solved. There'll be fresh air, clean water and plenty of delicious filet mignon for everybody. We've still got a way to go before we get there.

Remember, kids. Nature bats last.