Soil: The world beneath our feet

I have found out through my research that replacing invasive species and lawns with native plants and also composting organic waste, leaves, and twigs and returning that to your lawn are two of the best things a single person or group of persons can do to thwart climate change. Organic material decomposing in landfills generates methane, which is 26 times more potent than carbon dioxide in terms of its greenhouse effects. Composting organic material generates much, much less methane, and you can use it to return sustenance back to your soil. Instead of taking twigs and leaves and removing it from your property, you can compost them as well and return it back to the soil or also just leave the leaves in some cases. Planting native plants is a big win all around, from soil conditions, to using less or no water or fertilizer, to improving wildlife and pollinator conditions. Additionally, replacing lawns, which should be viewed as wastelands and green deserts, with plants greatly increases carbon capture. These are things that nearly everyone can do literally right now. I've tried finding research, and my current knowledge is that composting could save as much as 8-10% of global emissions and restoring areas with native plants could save as much as 20-30% of global emissions.

A few specific references that I have been using are Nature's Best Hope by Douglas Tallamy, as well as his other books, and the Monarch Gardens project (https://www.monarchgard.com/) by Benjamin Vogt.

It blows my mind that people keep looking for technocratic solutions when we have solutions right in front of us that could be done right now. Take a look around next time you're driving around and just note all the lawn spaces sitting there and doing literally nothing. They could be replaced with native plants with zero negative impact, and it would do wonders for the local ecosystem.

+ filters contaminants in the groundwater

+ stores water for later use

+ hosts the nutrients for plant growth and therefore human life

+ dampens the effect of massive rainfall events by being porous and soaking up surface runoff

We are doing so many bad things to our soil.

+ We’re leaching all the nutrients out of it without replacement

+ we compact the hell out of it, reducing permeability and the benefits I mentioned above

+ we cover it in concrete, meaning groundwater recharge is decreased and more rainfall becomes surface runoff, resulting in flooding

+ we let it erode due to this higher surface runoff

The erosion rate is higher than the rate at which it is replaced as well. We have a few meters of topsoil at any given point on earth, minus oceans and deserts and now urban centres. We absolutely are not treating this vital part of our life correctly.

It’s easy to write it off as nothing. I did the same until I was forced to learn about soil in so many different contexts as a civil engineer. Luckily curriculum nowadays teaches more sustainable practices in soil hydrology and the design of urban drainage networks. The old ways still linger though, which just treat it as an infinitely available engineering material.

However, the increase in labor needed shouldn't be underestimated. Some automation is likely possible with advanced robots, but this would mean a much larger fraction of the population would be involved in agriculture, perhaps as much as 10X as are currently employed.

In the cited example in the article, apparently one worker has managed 7 hectares using a closed-system model, if we take 'single-handedly' at face value. In contrast, according to wikipedia, in the USA on average one worker can manage 100 hectares (1 square km) with industrial methods (lots of water and fertilizer wastage).

This would be a pretty radical social restructuring, probably not what most people have in mind when they talk about 'postindustrial society'.

It's absolutely insane that Regenerative Agriculture was not mentioned once in this. There are farmers that have figured out ways to make their farmland fertile again. These practices just need to be expanded.

> ... While 1% of the world’s land is used for buildings and infrastructure, crops occupy 12% and grazing, the most extensive kind of farming, uses 28%. Only 15% of land, by contrast, is protected for nature. Yet the meat and milk from animals that rely solely on grazing provide just 1% of the world’s protein.

It's unreal when framing this as the "greatest predicament humankind has ever encountered" and all the stats pointing to intensive animal agriculture as the obvious problem that "eat less meat" isn't entertained as a serious option. We're literally growing food to feed to animals that we bred ourselves, while losing ~90% of the calories in the process instead of eating crops directly when meat isn't required to be healthy. I don't share the high hopes people have with things like lab grown meat either as we've been waiting for years for it to arrive at scale and affordable, and it's not going to replace all the cuts of meat people want.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets "If everyone shifted to a plant-based diet we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops."

"Only 29% of the weight of birds on Earth consists of wild species: the rest is poultry. Just 4% of the world’s mammals, by weight, are wild; humans account for 36%, and livestock for the remaining 60%."

Love the article, but this seems like a straw man. Meat and milk much more than protein. And it's difficult to replace things like butter without sacrificing health - look at margarine.

So many things to think about.

Is that the only way? What if we grow grains that need 50% less water? This article is mind numbingly preachy and ignores that technology can and always has been at the forefront of human progress. Yes, if we wake up one day in 30 years and find that we have made 0 technological progress then we will need 50% more grain.