The Problem With Dirt...

I've said before... the man made global warming hoax is causeing people to miss the real environmental problems that are out there.

This article is about one of them. Some people scoff at this idea, but it is a problem, and getting worse.

"Globally, it's clear we are eroding soils at a rate much faster than they can form," said John Reganold, a soils scientist at Washington State University. "It's hard to get people to pay much attention to this because, frankly, most of us take soil for granted."

The National Academy of Sciences has determined that cropland in the U.S. is being eroded at least 10 times faster than the time it takes for lost soil to be replaced.

The United Nations has warned of worldwide soil degradation -- especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where soil loss has contributed to the rapidly increasing number of malnourished people.

Healthy topsoil is a biological matrix, a housing complex for an incredibly diverse community of organisms -- billions of beneficial microbes per handful, nitrogen-fixing fungi, nutrients and earthworms whose digestive tracts transform the fine grains of sterile rock and plant detritus into the fertile excrement that gave rise to the word itself ("drit," in Old Norse).

As such, true living topsoil cannot be made overnight, Montgomery emphasized. Topsoil grows back at a rate of an inch or two over hundreds of years. Very slowly.

There are many problems like this, that go unnoticed, such as overfishing, over irrigation (and under irrigation, both of which contribute to loss of topsoil and loss of good farmland) over deforestation, problems with strip mining and the cleanup that often doesn't happen, over population in some areas (causing problems with water supply and putting more stress on the land) problems with recycling, issues with introduction of non native species that wreak havoc on native plants and animals, and some climate change (which is sometimes caused by combinations of all those factors). There are also a lot of human problems, such as disease, genocide and starvation that are directly attributable to some of those environmental issues.

I would encourage you to read "Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed" by Dr. Jared Diamond to find out more, and to see what you can do.

We need to be good stewards of the earth God gave us.

Dust Storms...

This story is pretty interesting to me. At first glance, you probably said, "so there was a dust storm in Karthoum, who cares?"

It isn't interesting in that way. What is interesting is what causes the storm. You see, everyone out there is getting all upset and worked up over global warming. However, GW isn't the biggest environmental problem out there.

A bigger one is deforestation and over farming. You see, when you cut all the trees down and over farm land, what you end up with is land that won't grow anything. Over farming is quite easy, you just farm the same crops over and over. Eventually the chemicals required for those crops are depleted, and the crop won't grow. This is why farmers rotate crops.

Much of Africa was forested, but is now desert. What does deforestation cause? Well, other than salinization of land (because the plants aren't there to absorb water) and erosion (which can be severe enough to cause the water table to get deeper)... Dust storms! And they take all the soil, much of which is still good for some purposes and can be farmed if the right crops and plants are planted and allowed to rebuild depleted chemicals, and blows the soil into the ocean. When that happens, it is very hard to get the soil back. One major example of this outside Africa is Iceland, which used to be forested and lush looking, but because of a very thin layer of top soil, over farming and grazing, much of the top soil blew off, causing massive erosion and the inhospitable land we see now. The Icelanders are now very careful with their land.

Over farming, deforestation and over grazing are happening all over. If you are interested in reading more, check out Jared Diamond's book "Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed".