REGEN

Ill fares the land.

“Sick” is the diagnosis of Montgomery with regard to the state of our land—and most of the land beyond that. The fairly obvious reason, the scientist-author says: bad farming practices, from over-tilling to overuse of toxic chemical fertilizers. Bad farming over the past 150 years, for example, has eroded Mississippi soils 20 times faster than they had been eroded since the last ice age. European settlers once described tobacco fields in colonial North Carolina as six to 12 inches of rich “dark chocolate” earth. Now those same lands are “desert khaki.” All told, since European colonization, our soils have lost half their organic matter. This is critically important because, when soil degrades, its carbon is released into the air. Thus, a full third of the global increase in atmospheric carbon since the Industrial Revolution—the increase driving catastrophic climate change—has come from soil degradation. Happily, this particular sickness is curable. Soils can regain their healthy, organic, “regenerative” nature via organic recycling—and the end of over-tilling. Still, we really should have known all this, the author gently chides. Once, support for soil fertility was utterly central to Indigenous communities worldwide. They regularly engaged in “composting, diverse crop rotations, intercropping with [nitrogen-rich] legumes, and allowing livestock to graze off crop stubble, thereby providing manure to fertilize crops….Some societies even regularized returning human waste, or ‘night soil,’ to their fields.” Regardless, many studies confirm that primitive prescriptions like the above, if followed, could “secure civilization’s agricultural foundation on a global scale.”

Offering a sensible—and ancient—solution to a modern climate-change problem.