A little perspective on living systems, oil, and soil

The Earth in Review:
The Rise, Role, and Fall of the Soil

A quick overview of our planet shows a history that began to get really interesting about 750,000,000 years ago. That is one-sixth of the total age of the earth. The earth spent five-sixths of its time getting set for the explosive emergence of higher life. Some twenty-five of the major phyla around us today appeared then.

For convenience, let us telescope the recent one-sixth into a year, for a quick look at the significant events of this part of the earth’s history. We start on January 1. By the fifteenth of March we can see several marine invertebrates and we think we can even see lichens on land. Some time after mid-June there are scorpions crawling about and these newcomers are joined by the first bog plants later in the month.

The lung fishes appear in early July. By late August early reptiles inhabit a landscape dominated by swamp forests, an as we approach September we can see the cone-bearing plant becoming forest trees. In late September, the Auraucaran forests (Norfolk Island Pine and Monkey Puzzle tree are modern descendents of this group) are quickly followed by other seed plants resembling pines.

Sometime in late October we get our first glimpse of flowering plants. A month later it has become obvious that the dinosaurs are headed for extinction. By December 11 some insignificant little mammals with a larger brain-to-mass ratio than the reptiles have become conspicuous, and by a short week later they are the dominant animal group. The mammals have made it. We are all fascinated as we watch the Miocene uplift that creates a rain shadow east of the Rockies, which in turn gives rise to the great North American grasslands. A few days before Christmas we see extensive grasslands in various parts of the planet.

Creatures best described as ape-men appear right after Christmas, and with about thirty hours left in the year, we see a creature which is decidedly human-like, even though it shows little promise at first.

As we watch these creatures closely, various forms develop, most with no future at all; but with less than three hours of the year’s last day left (or about 200,000 real years), a creature with a brain almost as large as our own is eking out a livelihood in ecosystems not much different from what we find in many parts of the few wild places left today.

An important system was developing literally under the feet of these diverse life forms. The early dust of the earth was mostly cemented together. It gradually became pulverized by the action of wind and water, plant roots and brevity. The bodies of dead plants and animals were added to this powder. A peculiar type of evolution was under way. This entity teemed with small organisms which secreted chemicals into the powder. Small life forms ingested and egested it, buffered it and burrowed in it. It grew in thickness and began to cover a large area with what we might call “ecological capital.” The capital of soil creates “interest” in the form of more soil. This interest then becomes reinvested. Water and wind still carried tons of this capital to the sea to become sedimentary layers, as it always had, but the life forms seemed almost purposefully devoted to retarding this work of gravity. From one point of view, David Brower has humorously suggested, plants and animals were evolved by this soil system to save itself and further its own spread.

A book written in 1905 by Harvard professor Nathaniel Southgate Shaler entitled Man and Earth described the soil and water system as an enveloping membrane or film, a placenta, through which the Earth mother sustains life. All life, including humans, Shaler suggested, draws life from the sun, clouds, air and earth through this living film. If the placenta is not kept healthy or intact, life above suffers. If healthy, it is a rich, throbbing support system. His message was clear enough: protect the placenta and you protect all Nature’s children.

Placenta may not be the best word, for once a birth is complete the placenta is disposed of. And yet Mother Earth is always pregnant with new life and therefore an intact placenta is necessary… Call it what you will, soil is important not just for land life but for life in the ocean around the continental shelves. In fact, the open ocean is a desert. It would seem as if all life forms—except plants—take this system for granted, regarding it much as they would regard gravity. When humans arrived, they, like the other animals, paid it no special respect.

In the early morning of December 31, changes took place on the surface of the earth. Later in the day the human population would explode … The human species, ten minutes before year’s end, was on all major land masses except Antarctica. It was in the next five minutes—from 15,000 to 8,000 years ago—that something critical happened. Gradually, an invisible claw began tearing at the placenta. It wasn’t dramatically ruptured as it had been by the ice; there was just a little scratch which failed to heal in the Middle East, and shortly another like it appeared n middle America. The larger the gash, the larger the concentration of people and their handiwork around it. The placenta itself was being ripped away to build civilization. Within three of those last five minutes, the face of the earth was changed. In some places scarcely anything would grow. Scabs—sterile areas or deserts—increased in size owing to human-directed activity. In the last fifteen seconds of the year, the continent of North America was discovered by the Europeans. The great wildernesses of North America disappeared, and the placenta wasted away faster than it had in any other area of the world.

Nearly half of it disappeared in the year’s last eight seconds.

In the final three seconds, a new stream of oil began to flow throughout the country, and out of it, fossil fuel that had been forming for eight months of our telescoped year, was discovered and was about to be used up in six seconds.

It was now being used not only for transportation, but also as feedstock for chemical fertilizer, in pest control, and in energy for traction in the fields. Clearly a very new thing was happening on earth. Production of living plants was shifting from total dependence on soil to an increasing dependence on fossil fuel. The new reality was clear—agriculture in America was shrinking the placenta, but the decline was obscured by heavy doses of petroleum-based chemical agriculture.

If we were far enough out in space for the planet to seem but the size of an egg, then all the soil, that thin, unique miracle, alive and sustaining life, would, if gathered together in one spot, be barely visible to the naked eye. Built by nature during our telescoped year, half of it lost by mankind, the self-proclaimed wise ones, in a few seconds.

The intensity of the entire agricultural operation can thus be seen as a frantic last attempt to keep alive a rapidly wasting cancer patient. Unless the health of the placenta is restored, a last convulsion will follow, throughout the countryside and around the world.

from New Roots for Agriculture by Wes Jackson
ISBN 0-8032-7562-5
Kansas Land Institute