Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Oh Goody, Another Looming Global Disaster

A few experts are trying to call attention to another global crisis quietly taking place under our feet.

On average, the planet is covered with little more than 3 feet of topsoil -- the shallow skin of nutrient-rich matter that sustains most of our food and appears to play a critical role in supporting life on Earth.
We're losing more and more of it every day," said David Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington. "The estimate is that we are now losing about 1 percent of our topsoil every year to erosion, most of this caused by agriculture.
One percent a year.

To the mathematically challenged amongst us, that means that in 100 years, all our topsoil could be gone.

To those who never made it out of high school, that means no place left to plant our crops.

To those who think milk does not come from cows, but from the grocery store, it means no more veggies, no more animal feed, and no more milk.

Hope you just love fish.

3 comments:

Roci said...

But of course at 1% per year, we should have completely run out of it about a Billion years ago.

craftycorner said...

Compost....

Roci said...

Just one more important use for government bureaucracy...