Is there any counterpoint to this?
My great worry about us (and capitalism) is that we are good at short term allocation, bad at long run planning. Is there a way around this soil problem, or some way in which the stat is misleading?
My great worry about us (and capitalism) is that we are good at short term allocation, bad at long run planning. Is there a way around this soil problem, or some way in which the stat is misleading?
It's more about human nature than capitalism or any economic system in particular. If anything capitalism is capable of including externalities, if we choose to. If we don't, eventually, we will face the issue, as many others. Not the ideal way to dal with issues which are decades in the future. Classical example is national debt and of course, climactic change.
http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/08/sustainable-technologies-safe...
I still feel land management / mismanagement is independent of economic system. One does not intrinsically offer to protect natural resources over another, but i could be wrong.
I would argue that an economic system that concentrates power has the ability to create and enforce a monopoly on land usage. Political or economic systems that allow for a minority control of usable land are much more inclined to use that land for the benefit of the controlling minority, and so far that seems maximizing profits in the short term. When we speak of land management what do we mean? The best "returns"? What is being returned to us? I'm inclined to agree that the values used inland management _can_ be independent of economic system, but an economic system that brings with it a predefined value-set based around extracting profit via exploitation is going to manage the land according to those values. Until we have values that supersede the values of the economic system then the econmic's system's values with be the dominating ones.
While I find his philosophy a bit lacking, Derrick Jensen has some great writing on how we value and manage land. https://www.amazon.com/Language-Older-Than-Words/dp/19314985...
I'm actually not sure we can easily include some externalities in capitalism, and I've worried it's an achilles heel of the system. I say this as a capitalist.
Specifically, the transaction costs of including small externalities are too high. By small, I mean that if I burn a litre of gasoline, I have harmed every human on the planet by an incredibly small margin. Too small to properly charge.
In that specific example, a carbon tax could fix it. But, there are many such externalities. Many harder to measure than carbon burning (which is hard in itself).
Other things equal, if it is cheaper to ignore an externality, the system will gravitate to those solutions. And with computers, globalization and cheap container shipping, it has become much easier and much faster to optimize the system. Such optimizations are mostly excellent (I am a capitalist), but we're also optimizing the system in ways which produce negative externalities as well.
But the organization says of topsoil formation on its own web site:
The rate of topsoil formation can vary from < 0.25 mm/year in dry and cold environments to > 1.5 mm/year in humid and warm environments (Hammer 1981; Hudson 1981). Topsoil formation at the rate of 1 mm/year is equivalent to an annual addition of 12 t/ha. Therefore, the rate of topsoil formation has been considered as a factor in the model in assessing loss of productivity and tolerable soil losses.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/009/t0733e/T0733E06.htm
1 mm/year means 30 years to generate 3 cm of topsoil, not 1000 years. And human intervention can increase productive topsoil rather than deplete it, when the incentives are properly aligned.
I don't know if the 1000 years figure is a mistake, based on newer, more pessimistic measurements of soil formation rates, or something else.
It was an interesting paper, and I wonder if it didn't gain much traction, or was heavily refuted. If I was more cynical, I'd think Semedo was purposely ignoring it for political reasons.
The number they have for topsoil generation is how long it takes if you don't try to stimulate it. There are lots of ways to increase the rate of topsoil development. So that bit is a tiny bit misleading, because while some of what they are kind of implying is permanent can be reversed.
That said, the situation is very bad. Ways around could possibly include non-traditional agriculture (hydroponics et al) or other less palatable things, like dietary changes or increased farming regulation.