Soiled

“We overcrowd the world. The elements can hardly support us. Our wants increase and our demands are keener, while Nature cannot bear us.”

Sound familiar? It sounds like it was stripped from today’s headlines, in the midst of a U.N. conference in Japan (where they’re eating dolphins, whales, and blue fin tuna to death) on biodiversity, but it’s actually Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, a.k.a. Tertullian, who was writing about 1800 years ago. The distance in years might make you laugh at the folly of nay-sayers, but you shouldn’t. For the thing is, when you consider the world he was talking about, Tertullian was right: Rome was doomed. Surveying Rome’s North African holdings, which had once been the empire’s breadbasket, Tertullian saw the desolation of what David R. Montgomery in Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations calls the “mining of soil.” It’s a dirt’s-eye-view of human history and it’s dirty fascinating.

The Romans knew about the hazards of erosion, and ways to enrich the soil, but like many a farmer – or, more typically, absent landowner – since, they didn’t look to the long term. Carthage was, indeed, destroyed… again.

Bison bison seen this past summer in Haverhill, MA, which is not their traditional habitat. These shaggy beasts were great fertilizers of the prairies.

My mother was born in Oklahoma two decades after the former Indian Territory became a U.S. state (in yet another betrayal of the indigenous peoples). Her parents had struck out west from southern Illinois to try their hand at farming. Big mistake. The region was semi-arid, sold by speculators who claimed “rain would follow the plow.” It didn’t. Once the native grasses, whose root system anchored the soil, had been plowed over, the topsoil started running faster than Sooners in a land rush. The prairies are made of a fertile soil type called loess, a rich mould (as they used to call it) that also supports the breadbaskets of Eurasia. The stuff originated further north and was deposited over millennia via the wind. But loess is loose; what the wind gives the wind also takes away. The Dust Bowl didn’t send my maternal grandparents to California, but they did retreat back east. (Whew! No relatives to blame for OK’s Coburn and Inhofe, two of the most reprehensible Senators today, although the new crop of crazies will give them some competition for the title.)

I live in Brooklyn, which in the mid 19th century was still an enormous producer of food. The glacial till of the outwash plain (I’m talkin’ ’bout you, Flatbush) had been much depleted by then, after three hundred years of farming, but every wagonload of food sent into the city returned piled high with natural fertilizer. The city was then literally horse-powered — in two ways, although we usually forget the second. Horses convert grass into energy, and manure, and that manure was then converted into vegetables. Today, of course, most ag, for all the organic revolution, is addicted to fossil fuels. (Indeed, some 30% of oil use goes to agribusiness; additionally, natural gas is converted into fertilizer.) The old Brooklyn farmers also used night soil (such a poetic euphemism), or, for the less bashful, human shit. It was an amazing recycling system.

Add nitrogen-fixing cover crops and other polyculture techniques, and you’re on our way to agriculture, baby, — which, seven thousand years after Mesopotamia, is still the basis of civilization, and perhaps, the beginning of the end.