Thursday, March 31, 2011

Peak Dirt (and yours truly on the radio)

BUT FIRST: I’ll be on the (internets) radio today (March 31) at 2:00 EST to shill my new novel, Darker Shade of Green and you can pre-order that book right now. Thanks…

We now return to our regularly scheduled wake-up call...

“Peak” is a popular word these days—in particular when used before the word oil. But Peak Dirt? The concept refers to topsoil or, to be more specific, topsoil depletion. “On average,” writes Tom Paulson in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “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,” David Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington, told Paulson. “The estimate is that we are now losing about 1 percent of our topsoil every year to erosion, most of this caused by agriculture.”

It’s been estimated that 75 percent of original US topsoil has already been lost and 4,000,000 acres of US cropland is lost each year to soil erosion (that’s roughly the size of Connecticut). An acre of US trees disappears every eight seconds. Since 85 percent of US topsoil loss is directly associated with livestock raising, there is a good first step we can take to battle Peak Dirt: go vegan.

After that, it’s time get really busy…

P.S. Garden as if your life depended on it (because it will)

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Another of my recent photos:

Another fire in Astoria

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Poem: “haiku defense"


Posted by Mickey Z on 03/31 at 04:13 AM
(12) Comments • Tell-a-Friend