June 2007 Book Reviews

 

    Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, by David R. Montgomery, 2007. University of California Press, $24.95 hardcover.

    There's a Hair In My Dirt: A Worm's Story, by Gary Larson, 1998. HarperCollins, $12.99, paperback. For all ages.

    The Citizen-Powered Energy Handbook: Community Solutions to a Global Crisis, by Greg Pahl, 2007. Chelsea Green Publishing Company, $21.95 paper.

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Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, by David R. Montgomery, 2007. University of California Press, $24.95 hardcover.

by Carol Van Strum

 

 

When the banker says he's broke,
And the merchant's up in smoke,
The farmer is the man who feeds them all…"

-- Folk song from 1890s Populist movement

The farmer is the man, but without dirt, the farmer can feed no one.

You've heard of Peak Oil. Now here comes Peak Soil. As if programmed to self-destruct, homo alleged-sapiens has converted millions of years of stored energy into food and food-growing machines, altering global climate in the process. Now we're running out of fossil energy, global warming is irreversibly upon us, and as if those scenarios aren't bad enough, we've also destroyed the soil needed to grow food for our bloated population.

In a review of history that reads like a series of cautionary tales, Montgomery traces the pattern followed by every great civilization from ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, and China to the Aztec and Maya civilizations in the New World and Europe in the Old. As cumulative agricultural innovations enable one person's labor to feed more and more people, cities and cultures flourish and populations increase, always just beyond the limits of supply; forests are stripped to plant more crops, soil productivity declines, water tables fall, irrigation causes salt build-up, and soil erodes in ever-increasing amounts. Inevitably, the hungry, over-extended population must conquer new territories to provide food, which enables even greater population increases, which then lead to new conquests until there is no place left to conquer, no soil left to plant.

This is the story writ in dirt:

"Farming spread from the Middle East into Greece and the Balkans between seven and eight thousand years ago. After moving into central Europe's easily worked loess [soils], agriculture steadily advanced north and west, reaching Scandinavia about three thousand years ago. Consuming Europe's forest soils as it went, agriculture left a record of boom-and-bust cycles associated first with Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures, then Iron Age and Roman society, and most recently the medieval and modern periods when colonial empires began mining soil and sending both produce and profits back to feed Europe's increasingly urban populace - the Industrial Revolution's new class of landless peasants."

Truly, indeed, there is nothing new under the sun. The only civilization that ever endured without destroying its food-producing soil was Egypt, which flourished for thousands of years on the renewable fertility provided by Nile floods -- until the 1950s, when "civilization finally acquired the engineering skill to cripple an almost indestructible land." Thanks to the Aswan dam, salinization, erosion, and dwindling fertility have so depleted Egypt's fabled productivity that today, "for the first time in seven thousand years, Egypt - home of humanity's most durable garden - imports most of its food."

Repeating the errors of ancient Greece and Rome and ignoring the admonishments of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and other worthies, colonial Americans quickly trapped themselves "in an insatiable socioeconomic system that fed on fresh land." Drunk on the illusion of an inexhaustible land of plenty, Americans plundered the soil and moved on, an early intimation of today's disposable society. Erosion caused by reckless cultivation and stripping of forests quickly stripped fertile landscapes to the bone, rapidly silting up rivers, estuaries, and harbors and permanently altering the landscape. "Today the Lincoln Memorial sits on ground where ships sailed in the eighteenth century," Montgomery points out. Sadly, "a similar story unfolds in the Amazon basin, where the Brazilian government has a long history of encouraging peasants to clear rainforest in order to pacify demands for land reform."

Particularly in the southern states, slave-dependent monoculture of tobacco and cotton for European markets quickly exhausted the soil and drove plantation agriculture ever westward. In a stunning analysis of slave economics, Montgomery notes that the Civil War was fought not over slavery per se, but over Lincoln's proposed limits on the spread of slavery to new territories, which would not only halt growth of the plantation economy but also destroy the very lucrative slave-breeding market developed for westward expansion.

The phenomenal growth of mechanized, industrial agriculture has simply accelerated the soil destruction process, replacing slaves with fossil fuel and fossil fertilizers. In example after depressing example, Montgomery documents the results of this folly world-wide: the increasing loss of soil and inability to feed populations swollen by unsustainable fossil agriculture. Just as the South went to war to perpetuate slave-based plantation economies, nations today go to war to perpetuate self-destructive fossil-fueled economies. Meanwhile, the miracles of our Green Revolution, genetically modified crops, and chemical agriculture have succeeded only in destroying soil wherever they are employed, without managing to feed growing populations. "Today the world is living harvest-to-harvest just like Chinese peasants in the 1920s," Montgomery writes, adding wryly, "Now that's progress."

The alternatives to this cycle are not pretty or easy: limit population growth and revitalize labor-based agriculture that constantly renews its soil and food-producing capacity. Either we figure out how to accomplish these on our own, or nature will do it for us in the form of famines, droughts, and plagues. As Montgomery urges, "Many factors may contribute to ending a civilization, but an adequate supply of fertile soil is necessary to sustain one."

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There's a Hair In My Dirt: A Worm's Story, by Gary Larson, 1998. HarperCollins, $12.99, paperback. For all ages.

by Carol Van Strum

 

 

After sailing the globe and igniting public controversy with his theory of evolution, Charles Darwin happily devoted the last years of his life to the terrestrial study of earthworms, recording in exquisite detail every facet of worm biology and behavior. What surprised him even more than their prodigious contribution to England's topsoil was his discovery that worms "possess some degree of intelligence."¹

Gary Larson, belovéd creator of The Far Side, adds his own twisted take on Darwin's discovery with There's a Hair in My Dirt!, a subterranean course in natural history colored by Larson's warped humor and outrageous illustrations.

"I hate being a worm!" a little worm child screams after finding a hair in his lovely plate of dirt. "Dirt for breakfast, dirt for lunch, and dirt for dinner! Dirt, dirt, dirt! And look - now there's even a hair in my dirt! The final insult - I can't stand it any longer!"

"My boy," his father says, "I think it's time I tell you a story."

And what a story! Father Worm tells the tale of Harriet, a beautiful young human maiden, who "loved the magic of Nature, with all its magnificent plants and animals." Strolling along her favorite woodland trail, Harriet is too blinded by sloppy sentiment to see the brutal reality of all that goes on around her. At every turn of path and page, she blithely misinterprets and romanticizes what she sees, accompanied to the inevitable "happy ending" by Father Worm's ironic asides and Larson's inimitable comic inserts ("Look! Down in the ground! It's a root! It's a shoelace! … No! It's WORMBOY!").

Larson's tale laces with humor the realities of life, death, and everything that comes between and afterward - i.e., more life and death. "Life is tough! There is no free lunch, and what one creature consumes, another must provide," writes E.O. Wilson in his delightful Foreword. "Homo sapiens is no exception to this iron rule of Nature. So Professor Larson delivers Ecology 101 … with hilarity, which everyone needs when adjusting to reality."

Children, little ghouls that they are, will have no problem relating to Larson's young worm and his father's life lesson. For adults who have grown out of such realism, There's A Hair In My Dirt! is the perfect antidote to fatal delusions about Nature and our place in - and under - it.

¹ Charles Darwin, "The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms," 1881. http://charles-darwin.classic-literature.co.uk/formation-of-vegetable-mould/ebook-page-21

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The Citizen-Powered Energy Handbook: Community Solutions to a Global Crisis, by Greg Pahl, 2007. Chelsea Green Publishing Company, $21.95 paper.

by Carol Van Strum

 

 

If, like many of us, you feel guilty for every hot shower but haven't a prayer of affording non-polluting energy for your home, shop, or office, here is the answer to that unsaid prayer. What one person can not afford, a group may find not only feasible, but economic as well; this handbook is an indispensable manual for practical, community owned and operated energy systems.

Greg Pahl has compiled a clear, concise guide to current, proven energy strategies to enable both individual homes and communities to survive the end of Big Oil without adding to the problem of global warming. (Current and proven strategies do not include nuclear or hydrogen sources, as neither has been proven to be economically or ecologically feasible.) In detailed, readily comprehensible chapters, he describes the nuts and bolts -- as well as the pros and cons -- of solar energy; wind power; water power (especially small-scale hydropower, and also recent ocean energy projects); biomass; liquid biofuels such as biodiesel and bioethanol; and geothermal energy.

For each energy source, he provides case histories of successful installations adapted to local conditions, with details of costs, funding/investment sources, politics, planning, organization, maintenance, and employment needs. Best of all, The Citizen-Powered Energy Handbook lives up admirably to its title, emphasizing both the need for and the extraordinary benefits of collectively funded and operated local energy installations.

"This local ownership model," Pahl writes, "is increasingly being referred to as community supported energy (CSE), which is similar to community supported agriculture (CSA), except that instead of investing in carrots, tomatoes, or onions, local residents invest in renewable energy projects and a cleaner environment." As Pahl's examples repeatedly demonstrate, the benefits are more than just economic or environmental: local control of energy not only provides jobs and energy security, but also keeps money in the community instead of flowing out to huge, distant corporations.

The time to initiate such projects is now, before the inevitable crunch hits. Towns and cities from California and Minnesota to Vermont, Sweden, and Germany, with their working models of community supported energy projects, are far better poised than the rest of the world to survive energy crises and even the impacts of climate change. Pahl's handbook should be required reading for planners, architects, and elected officials in every town and city, small or large.

"The complex challenges of reinventing our agricultural practices, revitalizing the local business sector, revamping the monetary system, reorganizing transport, and transforming our cities, towns - and ourselves - extend well beyond the scope of this book," Pahl writes. "Nevertheless, these vital tasks will require the same type of courageous, collaborative strategies that I suggest for renewable energy initiatives."

Short of building an ark or two, this sensible, readable handbook offers the best prospects for collective investment in an uncertain future.

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