Soil Fertility is Health, Part 1: 10,000 BC to 1945

The end of the Second World War was a watershed time. The devastation was tallied, the millions of dead were counted, and the gargantuan tasks of reconciliation, reconstruction, and recovery were contemplated and initiated. Two Englishmen saw the end of hostilities as an opportunity to rebuild from the ground up. Guy Theodore Wrench wrote 'Reconstruction by Way of the Soil, A History of Humanity, Agriculture and the Soil' in 1946, following 'The Wheel of Health' from 1938. Following 'An Agricultural Testament' from 1940, Sir Albert Howard penned his seminal treatise 'The Soil and Health, A Study of Organic Agriculture' in 1947.

Chinese farming, practised continuously for two thousand years

Looking back, Sir Albert Howard remarked that China: "... is indeed the classic example of a nation which has conserved the fertility of its soil. Other nations have done the same, but none over so long a period or on so vast an area. Is it legitimate to interpret the history of the nation by the way in which they have made use of the land which chance or their own valour assigned to them?" 

Guy Wrench refers to a golden age for agriculture (over a thousand years ago) as described in 1904 by S. Scott in his 'History of the Moorish Empire in Spain': "... the most complex, the most scientific, the most perfect, ever devised by the ingenuity of man. Its principles were derived from the extreme Orient, from the plains of Mesopotamia, and from the valley of the Nile - those gardens of the ancient world where, centuries before the dawn of modern history, the cultivation of the earth had been carried to a state of extraordinary excellence."

For more than twenty thousand years, trees and greenery largely girded the Earth. In their wake, they left the perfect peaty rich humus to support the panoply of plants multiplying by wind dispersal, cross-fertilization, pollination by synergistic insects. Vegetation grew wildly, profusely, of Nature's accord. Then, some ten thousand years ago, mankind began to effect enhanced, concentrated, controlled growth by trans-planting, seed-saving, and complementary soil building. Food was provided in predictable, plannable fashion, and so nomadic hunter-gatherers became farmers settled in small communities. For forty six consecutive centuries, the Chinese have grown crops in the same soil by continuously using fertility to grow food and returning fertility to the soil in what Guy Wrench calls 'The Wheel of Life'. Adhering to the rule of return, plants were grown and harvested here and elsewhere, with their cast-offs returned at the end of every growing season to the soil to replenish for the next cycle of growing and harvesting. Cultivation was concentrated in pockets of fertility, fields of plenty, according to the annual cycle of seasons. Animals like goats, sheep, chickens, ducks, cows, pigs were domesticated to provide food for all and manure for the land.

Civilizations sprouted in China, Mesopotamia's Fertile Crescent, Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Americas. As these empires expanded, pressures on the soil grew, as did a burgeoning population. With trade came tools and travel by horse, mule, camel, and llama over vast distances, across civilizations. With exchange came the spreading of ideas and religions, cultures and traditions. With empires came money, power, control and the move away from sound traditional maintenance of soil and fertility. The rule of return became overlooked, and empires were shaken by volatility. Ecological adversity, wars and conquest in multiple forms would tip an empire over the edge into collapse or oblivion. Land stewardship was snatched from indigenous peoples and tribes by conquering invaders, colonizers claiming ownership. Traditional methods of nurturing the soil were buried as fast profit, efficiency of production, and maximum rate of return became paramount. The crucial measure of Nature's rule of return was abandoned, with the result that soils deteriorated, lands were rendered infertile, and further pressures placed on maintaining sustenance, law and order.

Great civilizations were built, then after a few centuries of fabulous wealth, prosperity, trade and expansion (built mostly on the backs of slaves), they imploded and collapsed, top-heavy and unable to sustain their growing populace. They ignored the soil at their peril. Lord Ernle wrote in 1912 in his 'English Farming, Past and Present': "In Roman Italy, after the Punic Wars, the deterioration in fertility of the soil led to the substitution of family-owned farming with large estates, the *latifundia*, and large landowners. In Tudor England the same substitution of *latifundia* for small family farming also took place. In post-Punic Italy, acquisitive men seized the lands of weakened farmers with complete disregard of the law". And so it is that in England, agricultural methods generally followed the Roman way.

Long before Tudor times, the Conqueror, William of Normandy (1066 and all that) had already transformed the farming landscape by confirming the subordinate position of the English farmers by giving them foreign conquerors as their lords. Land became the property of the King, who rewarded his followers and bound their interests to his through gifts of land. Guy Wrench writes: "In addition to farming by the manor system, the most educated section of the population - the monks of the Church - contributed to the farming culture of the nation the benefits of their devotion, learning, and art... To their practical farming, the monks brought the help of the classic writers of Rome - Cato, Varro, Columella and others - whose works in Latin they were able to read. They were *cultured* farmers, to whom the spiritual side of creation appealed with special significance... It was they who built roads and bridges, and opened their monasteries as places of temporary rest and hospitality to all travellers, rich or poor; they who drained marshes, reclaimed wastes, and improved livestock. It was they who sustained a soil-based civilization by giving it the vision of religion, the art of the temple, and the culture of studentship. They also defended, as far as they could, the independence of the peasants, and supported them in their efforts to rise out of serfdom." The grand edifice of communal farming came crashing down with the advent of the new money economy. The acquisitive new aristocracy of Tudor England was attracted by the price that British wool fetched on the Continent: "It was this opportunity for more wealth that made them seize the land of the small farmers and monasteries, and with the expenditure of their capital turn it into sheep farms (the enclosures).... From that time onwards, the proletariat and poverty became familiar parts of English society." The Industrial Revolution hastened the hollowing-out of William Blake's "England's green and pleasant Land", as able-bodied men, women, and children were conscripted and sent flocking to "those dark Satanic mills".

In the early nineteenth century, great herds of buffalo, more appropriately called American bison, roamed the Great Plains. Then over 50 million buffalo existed (perhaps as many of 75 million). Numbers decreased by 1872 to 7 million. The decimation of the great buffalo herds heralded the transition of the extensive grasslands into agricultural production. The fertile soil of the prairie itself eventually disappeared as the plow opened up the land to erosion. Severe drought and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent the wind erosion caused The Dust Bowl, which came in three waves of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930.

With insufficient understanding of the ecology of the plains, newly-mechanized farming methods had conducted extensive deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains during the previous decade; this had displaced the native, deep-rooted grasses that normally trapped soil and moisture even during periods of drought and high winds. This rapid mechanization of farm equipment, especially small gasoline tractors, and widespread use of the combine harvester contributed to farmers' decisions to convert arid grassland (much of which received no more than 10 inches of precipitation per year) to cultivated cropland. During the drought of the 1930s, the unanchored soil turned to dust, which the prevailing winds blew away in huge clouds that sometimes blackened the sky. These choking billows of dust – named "black blizzards" or "black rollers" – travelled across the country, reaching as far as the East Coast and striking such cities as New York City and Washington, D.C.

Sir Albert Howard writes: "The net result of a century's mismanagement in the United States was summed up in 1937 as either the complete or partial destruction of the fertility of over 250 million acres, i.e. 61 per cent of the total area under drops: three-fifths of the original agricultural capital of his great country has been forfeited in less than a century."

At the end of the Second World War in 1945, the future of farming was contested. Sir Albert Howard and the Organic movement advocated an approach based purely on the natural health of the soil.However, they faced a fearsome, powerful opponent - chemical agriculture as sanctioned by large corporations and governments held in their thrall. Like those mustard gases left over in 1918 after the First World War, what use could they put all those munitions to in 1945? When the nitrogen was no longer needed for bombs, what were they going to do with all this capacity? Their answer was, use the nitrogen-rich ammonia for fertilizing the nation's crops.

Keep Your Eyes On The Road Ahead

We are collectively complicit in electing governments and sanctioning corporate behemoths that are assaulting Nature with such vehemence, such violence, such force, such wilfulness that whole ecosystems are suffering and even dying off. Rainforests, oceans, rivers, glaciers, minerals, soils, the air we breathe, the water we drink are being packaged, poisoned, and picked off, never to return to their pure, pristine, natural state or volume. We watch on as Nature is abused.

Now, under cover of COVID-19, as the people cower and keep apart compliantly in thrall to the daily infection toll, corporations race to harvest the pickings with impunity, pumping up the fossil fuels to float the boats, fly the planes, and drive the cars. They even have the gall to suck up the bail-out funds glad-handed by governments, deepening monetary and ecological debt and exarcerbating human misery by cheating the general public.

We close our eyes to the rape and pillage, distracted by our immediate precarity. We fear a virus that is, nonetheless, well on the wane in most countries. We have come a long way by flattening the curve and seeing deaths from the virus slow to a trickle, doing as mandated by our governments. Sensible stratified risk management responding to data and not outlandish modelling projections should be de rigueur, rather than the insatiable get-rich schemes foisted on us by merciless pharmaceutical leeches. They divide and conquer us with smoke-and-mirror obfuscation and demonization of common-sense rationales.

And so.... the wildfires burn, the hurricanes and cyclones intensify, the oceans heat up, the floods and droughts become more extreme, the temperatures become unbearable, unable to support life, the soils become sterile, poisoned with toxins, biodiversity crashes, and our bodies struggle to adapt to an unnatural diet of GMOs, glyphosate, synthetic additives, antibiotics, steroids, endocrine-disrupting substances. Paralysed, we fret and fluster over an orange monster and a novel virus and novel vaccine to counter with, fiddling as Rome burns, arguing back and forth and flip-flopping over appropriate measures. We mask our faces and look away as if we dare not look at the carnage as we keep our distance from our fellow human beings.

We must focus our undivided attention on a road ahead that must lead to full restoration and whole recovery of the patient; ourselves, family, friends, all humans, plants, the eco-systems that in their true essence sustain us. This is the only way to save the world we have inflicted so much damage upon, particularly in the last hundred years or so of accelerated overshoot when we had the tools to have known better. We have the knowledge and the technology. Where is the vision and courage to use them to build a future that sustains us all? 

Kudos to all those who are using every fibre of their being, sometimes to their last breath on this planet, to help bring it about. They are everywhere in small pockets dotted around the world, planting and saving seeds, nurturing soils, growing food, and helping others to eat, drink, play, sing, dance, create, write, vote, and get involved with acting on our innate intuition that our current political system is broken and needs fixing. May a new generation of fierce young doers rise up in a spirit of renaissance. And may fierce, bold women and wise elders continue to lead the way.

Shhhh!

Open your mind to what you don't know, instead of regurgitating what you think you know.

As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass:

"Ignorance makes it all too easy to jump to conclusions about what we don't understand."

The Mark of a Civil Society

"No man is an island entire of itself; every man 

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; 

if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe 

is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as 

well as any manner of thy friends or of thine 

own were; any man's death diminishes me, 

because I am involved in mankind. 

And therefore never send to know for whom 

the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

(John Donne, 1624)

The mark of a civil society is how it responds to existential crisis. And there is no question that we find ourselves collectively challenged in an unprecedented way.

Here, in Canada, where I live, life as we know it has been transformed in recent days. And now, in most countries of the world, the same situation applies, with self-isolation, social distancing, closure of public spaces and private social venues the norm. How surreal this must be for most people, particularly urbanites and participants in large organizations. Our world is suddenly condensed within the walls of our abodes and shelters. Fresh air and provisioning are reserved for occasional forays to the outside world beyond our home and family compounds. Some of us are more fortunate than others with the level and quality of space and comfort we enjoy. How strange to witness the silencing of human-derived sound; how odd to see deserted meeting places. How long can we stand this enforced new reality without losing our marbles and coming into brute competition for food and sustenance, for very survival?

We have many long-latent measures in our toolkit to guide us in this. The main thing to realize and confirm every single day is the unambiguous truth that we are all in this together. In sticking together  in our resolve to get beyond the tunnel we find ourselves darkened by, and out into the bright fresh air of a new day bathed in sunshine, light, warmth that only we living ones can. With common resilience, most of us will get to complete this journey; some we will lose along the way, but we will fight tooth and nail to keep them alongside us for as long as possible. We will not abandon them, for this is the mark of a civil society.

Already, stresses are beginning to show. Most nations are stepping up to the plate in mutual solidarity by taking the long view. The priority is to help all levels of society, especially those less able and equipped to fend for themselves, like the elderly, the poor, the marginalized, the health-compromised, the virus-infected. Some nations have been negligent, unfocused, slow to adapt to the clear unfolding crisis, meaning the collective affliction will be greater and longer. Some nations are already seeing the light of day as their infection curve flattens and begins to drop off. They have done this precisely by coming together, working all-out together, in common cause. The nations that will suffer most are those that drift and veer away from the vision of the common good. Already, irresponsible libertarian, morally superior exceptionalism is rearing its ugly head as national leaders of an authoritarian, self-indulgent, narcissistic bent are beginning to play their sacrificial card. Already, the socially disadvantaged, age- and health-compromised are beginning to be thrown under the bus, judged to be expendable, sacrificable by a callous, negligent 'leadership'. This is absolutely not the mark of a civil society. Shame on these leaders, ministers and thinkers who cannot see beyond their own vanity to empathize with the crisis engulfing the citizens they claim to represent. 

What is imperative is that we all, personally and collectively, follow sensible guidelines to distance and, eventually, overcome this unleashed virus and help all those around us (both as extended family and community) every step of the way towards the light at the end of the tunnel. Our current physical isolation is a surreal temporary exception to the norm, to be endured in good heart. This has enabled us to connect more on spiritual and psychical levels. For no man is an island...

Dichotomy

There is a tragic human dichotomy now playing out at flashpoints of the climate emergency, one between those personally traumatized by the calamity playing out, and those far removed who continue to preach Business As Usual, as if actual events are hyped-up conspiracies, mere figments of radical imaginations. The former are experiencing a living hell, losing house, home, land, possessions both material and mental, pets, animals, livelihoods, and even lives; the latter shutter themselves in their privileged enclaves and make blithe pronouncements from their ivory towers.

Voices of the Zeitgeist

Painting of Bob Dylan, by Richard Day

"We were born before the wind

Also younger than the sun

Ere the bonnie boat was won as we sailed into the mystic

Hark, now hear the sailors cry

Smell the sea and feel the sky

Let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic"

Born before the wind, we sailed into the mystic. We were enchanted by the music that played its timeless sounds and rhythms, rocked by a raucous sea, and by the sparkling, jangling words of poetry and myth.

"And every one of them words rang true

And glowed like burning coal

Pouring off of every page

Like it was written in my soul

From me to you

Tangled up in blue"

"And take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind

Down the foggy ruins of time

Far past the frozen leaves

The haunted, frightened trees

Out to the windy beach

Far from the twisted reach

Of crazy sorrow

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free

Silhouetted by the sea

Circled by the circus sands

With all memory and fate

Driven deep beneath the waves

Let me forget about today

Until tomorrow"

The poet musicians transported us to a place of solace, a haven of wonder, a sanctuary of peace, an oasis of deep love. And yet, they also haunted us with visions of terror, upheaval, dystopia, calamity and chaos. Before the deluge, all along the watchtower, a hard rain's a gonna fall. All these decades later, that same music and poetry still ring true. They stand testament to a time of youthful exuberance and primal innocence seeking an end to wars and civil strife. Our spirit is weathered and worn, remaining intact in pockets of resilience. Collectively, as a generation, we feel blessed by the awakening and traumatized by its evanescence as a zeitgeist, a political and very personal philosophy, a template for living. Not that it failed us, but that we failed it.

We are stardust

We are golden

And we've got to get ourselves

Back to the garden 

There was a fanfare blowing to the sun

That was floating on the breeze.

Look at Mother Nature on the run

In the nineteen seventies.

Woodstock was a music festival held August 15–18, 1969, which attracted an audience of more than 400,000. Billed as "an Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music", it was held at Max Yasgur's 600-acre dairy farm in Bethel, New York, 43 miles southwest of Woodstock. Woodstock was a seminal happening now fifty years ago - half a century in historical terms. A heady mix of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Canned Heat, the Grateful Dead, Santana, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, The Who and, oh, so much more, the event now encapsulates that wild Zeitgeist. My generation. Won't get fooled again.

Years later, the generational shift morphed:

Some of them were dreamers

And some of them were fools

Who were making plans and thinking of the future

With the energy of the innocent

They were gathering the tools

They would need to make their journey back to nature...

All the people we used to know

They're an illusion to me now

Some are mathematicians

Some are carpenter's wives

Don't know how it all got started

I don't know what they do with their lives

Things are going to slide, slide in all directions 

Won't be nothing 

Nothing you can measure anymore 

The blizzard, the blizzard of the world 

has crossed the threshold 

and it has overturned 

the order of the soul

... I've seen the future, baby

It is murder

And what'll you do now?...

I'll walk to the depths of the deepest dark forest

Where the people are many and their hands are all empty

Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters

Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison

And the executioner's face is always well hidden

Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten

Where black is the color, where none is the number

... And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard

It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

Where are the present-day voices, the reflective and explosive words to rock us through the night, herald the dawn, and help us negotiate the breaking waves, the jagged and disintegrating reefs of our time? After all, we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.

 

As a fresh young generation finds its voice:

... and you of tender years

Can't know the fears

That your elders grew by

And so please help

Them with your youth

They seek the truth

Before they can die

Teach your parents well

The children's hell

Will slowly go by

And feed them on your dreams

The one they pick

The one you'll know by

Don't you ever ask them why

If they told you, you would cry

So just look at them and sigh

And know they love you

The Strawberry Blond Clowns

So, with these clowns ruling over us, what could possibly go wrong?

We have three hideous narcissists who don't give a hoot for common folk that we, the people, have collectively chosen to lead and represent us. You couldn't get more buffoonish than President Donald Trump, newly party-endorsed-only Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and Premier Doug Ford. They seem crude caricatures in an absurdist play of politically motivated megalomaniacs. Strawberry blond, chubby, and nutty as fruitcakes, none of them show a shred of empathy, besotted as they are with their own image and standing. Like spoiled brats throwing a tantrum in a private nursery, they are all ripping up the playbook, decimating social institutions, promoting the corporatocracy, ripping up the regulatory framework, defiling the ecosystem. They are out of control with those crooked appointees beholden to them abdicating all responsibility to keep them in check. Pence, Bolton and Pompeo are loose cannons themselves. The whole lot of them are allowing the military, law enforcement, financial, pharmaceutical, agriculture, extractive, food industries to ride roughshod over the health and safety of people and planet. With utter impunity, these vested elite interests line their pockets with obscene profits and income at the expense of the "other" 90 - 99 per cent. (Settle on the number meeting your measure of extreme inequality).

I assume we have got here - the democratic election of these autocratic posers - by having got suckered in. They have, after all, dealt us a hand based on a pack of lies, lies which they trot off freely and only meekly opposed with every word, tweet, and interview. Truth is a victim tossed out of the window, thrown under the bus, just as George Orwell predicted it would be all those years ago in "1984". Propaganda, doublethink, Big Brother rule.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.” 

In the autocrat's world, in his feeble little mind

“War is peace. 

Freedom is slavery. 

Ignorance is strength.” 

We were suckered in by a political system that rewards the wealthy and empowered, suckered in by base values of fear, insecurity, intolerance, prejudice, religiosity, ignorance. Misogyny, nationalism, racism, privilege all played their part and these leaders have certainly played on these foibles in their vicious scorched-earth, divide-and-conquer diatribes. They have rallied the troops of tyranny. The opposition is in disarray, fragmented, bewildered, and disenfranchised.

These leaders lord over us from on high. And yet, they will not prevail for ever. They will foist misery upon their fiefdoms only until the day the pendulum swings back from chaos and calamity towards sanity and awakening. History is replete with cycles and change. The time this process will take is hard to gauge but we have to be in it for the long haul. Otherwise they have us. "We won't get fooled again, no, no... "