The Soil Depletion Crisis: A tragic episode from the 19th century | Hacker News Reader

The Soil Depletion Crisis: A tragic episode from the 19th century

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It's interesting to note that civilisation has been messing up the soil since the beginning. The Sumerian civilisation (i.e. the first civilisation) collapsed in large part because of increased salinity that came about from poor agricultural practices. Here are two sources:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/08/opinion/salt-of-the-earth....

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Sumerian_Civilizat...

I believe, though I can't find a cite, that the Sumerian civilisation recognised the increasing problem of salinity, knew it's source, but was unable to bring themselves them to fix it. Much like the issue with global warming today.

We have soil depletion problems now that we can't do anything about. In fact most problems that we know we have that we will have to pay for later we can't do much about, other than find other better technology to try to fix it. That's the way our civilization and humans in general deal with problems that use of technology creates. With more technology. And as technology progresses it changes the world continuously. In that sense evolution of technology is what drives humans and human civilization. Nothing else. And humans have to cater themselves to their technology. One day soon when general AI is invented humans will serve AI, because humans serve technology, not the other way around. Before technology humans served nature or the environment, so much so that they worshiped it. Now they serve technology.

http://www.worldwildlife.org/threats/soil-erosion-and-degrad...

He's probably right about Global Warming. We "solved" the soil depletion issue by making it irrelevant. Topsoil isn't relevant to large-scale industrial farming. Soil is tested, petro-fertilizers in the appropriate quantities are added, and voilà, massive crops. The dirt is mostly there as a growing medium. Its closer to hydroponics than traditional, topsoil-fed farming.

If we take a similar approach to GW, Magic 8 Ball says Outlook is Dim.

My feeling is that we've conquered poor soil, a pauctiy of trees, bad water, airborne disease and a list of other disasters or near-disasters that would be very long.

If we don't figure a way out of it, then we more or less deserve the outcome. We're simply the most recent apex species. There's no reason to believe we'll stay that way forever.

The guano wars is also covered, along with a lot more, in _1493_ by Charles Mann. This tome looks at the reverberations of the Columbian exchange, and is well worth the read if you are interested in history.

And then, Haber–Bosch process saved the day.

I am in a more mitigation / technical solution camp.

Haber-Bosch is only a partial solution, and only for nitrogen. It is a relatively neat solution, because the entire planet is enveloped in nitrogen, and methane is readily available, for now.

Phosphorus and potassium are still problems. The primary sources for both are mines deep in the ground. We can't pull those out of the air. It looks like phosphorus is going to be a problem earlier,[0] so there are pilot programs to reclaim it from sewage. Those are going to have to scale up quickly. Eventually, potassium will also be a problem.

Technology might solve the problem, but it is not a given. It will take investment and work.

[0]https://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/does-peak-phosp...

It's apparently vaguely commercially viable to extract potassium from seawater right now, so it probably won't be a problem in the future.

(I came across several mentions of it in the course of looking at the state of phosphorus extraction; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brine_mining#Potash talks about mining it from the Dead Sea, but the Ocean concentration is apparently high enough to work)

As far as hydrogen, if we can get energy prices down (solar looks poised to do this), there is plenty of hydrogen available anywhere there is water.

I'd guess you'd get a boost in efficiency if brine mining were to be combined with desalinization, which also looks to be ramping up in the near future.

The article shows a timeline of 40 years - I'd think both those problems tractable in that span of time.

I could be wrong, but my understanding is that more-modern farming methods like no-till leave more silage on the ground, greatly reducing the need for the addition of Ka and P. Bulk stock crops like corn are farmed with methods that are pretty effective at removing only the kernels and leaving the silage.

Critics claim that this simply tied the oxcart to the fossil fuel train.

I'm in the middle. If we can transition beyond fossil fuels then it will work out, but if not that claim will prove true.

Perhaps it's because of seeing James Burke's "Connections" when younger, but that series gives you the feeling that advances like the Haber-Bosch process are more or less required for us to continue as a species. This casts our role as that of innovator, and if the innovation stops, then to an extent, so do we.

This causes me to have to work to understand Apocalyptic stories.

The counterexample is the influence of the Mandarins on China, which created a very stable, unchanging culture that lasted for centuries.

Well, a curious fact is that ancient egyptians mummified cats. And the british took thousands of them and turned them into fertilizer around this time.

All right, we had an ecological crisis in the 19th century, and the collectivist attempt to fix it (i.e. state intervention) gave us wars, inhuman labor conditions, another ecological crisis at the other side of the world, and no solution. The actual solution came from technology (Haber-Bosch a hundred years ago, and phosphorus reclamation from sewage today).

Now we're facing an even bigger crisis, but this time, the proper solution for sure is to have an even bigger collective (all the states) prescribe a solution. So far, it's actually given us expensive and unreliable electricity, useless ethanol fuel that competes with food for arable land, trade in carbon indulgences, and again no solution. Yeah, sounds legit.

The article talks about the period "between 1830 and 1870". Karl Marx was born in 1818, socialism as an idea only began around the 1850s, and actual stable governments on socialist principles didn't happen till the twentieth century.

Attempting to frame this as a socialist vs libertarian issue, as you appear to do, is seriously ahistorical. Furthermore, I'm not sure how a solution arising half a century after the period being talked about it supposed to be useful to the people living during that time. Similarly, if a solution to climate change follows the same timeline and is discovered 50 years after we cross the tipping point, how will that be of any use? The point the article is making is one of short-term vs long-term thinking.

Huh? What's anything I wrote got to do with Marx? I see collectives constantly failing to deliver everywhere. Yes, that includes every single socialist country that ever existed (they were not stable), but also many current capitalist governments (German energy policy comes to mind), the many public-private-partnership projects that always go over budget, and any meeting in a sufficiently big corporation.

Now please don't try to tell me that "collective" applies exclusively to socialism and that I'm reading things that aren't there. I took the word straight out of the article:

> These futures are avoidable, but only if collective international action... happens.

I think the confusion arises from the difference between the words "collectivist" and "collective".

Collectivism is the name of a political philosophy closely related to socialism communism, and a term popular with libertarians. In this context, writing "collectivist attempt to fix it" reads like 1) a suggestion that the British Empire's actions were motivated by a collectivist government and 2) that you're trying to tie failure to tackle global warming into a larger libertarian worldview.

I think it's a valid argument that collective action for long term gain against short-term self interest is very difficult to achieve.

That's a good point, but if you took out the snark and ideological rantiness, your comment would be 10x better. I suspect that's what the downvoters are reacting to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

If you read the article a little more closely you can see that the author is showing that the issues arose from attempting to prolong the status quo instead of fixing the root cause. I'm not certain how you reached the collectivist approach causing problems narrative.

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