Dirt is the kind of book that, despite its academic tone and a profusion of dates and historical facts, still manages to scare you. David Montgomery, a geomorphologist and professor of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington, seems to be both fascinated and terrified by his studies of the patterns and changes in the earth beneath our feet. Throughout the book he takes us to Egypt, the Amazon basin, the American Midwest, China and Peru (among others), providing countless examples of civilizations that succeeded or failed due to careful stewardship or careless mining of soil, unquestionably (as I have concluded) our most precious natural resource.
It's simple, see: without fertile soil we can't grow plants. No plants means no food. Without food...well, you get the idea. And we have been mining our soil, using up the natural fertility, and moving on since time immemorial. A repeating pattern of fertility loss, erosion and human migration emerges as, across the world, humans continue to make mistakes. The problem is that soil time is much slower and harder to percieve than human time: these changes take place over hundreds of years. So those farmers who neglected to return nutrients to the soil through manuring and cover crops had little to no perspective on how they were permenantly changing the landscape of their own agro-ecosystems. Societal and cultural pressures don't help; slavery, economics, poverty, agrochemistry, monoculture crops for export, corrupt governments, those in power motivated by little else than money. It's all in here, and yes...it's scary.
I guarantee this book will permenantly change your perspective on food and agriculture. Erosion, in particular, is a predominant theme. Many of us are concerned by the contamination and depletion of soils by 'Big Ag,' using gallons upon gallons of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. These issues are addressed as well; however, it's important to realize that we have been ruining soils since long before anyone had any idea about NPK. Erosion of fertile topsoil is a huge concern, and we come to realize that clearing land for farming is a dangerous prospect.
Another revelation in this book (for some) is that poverty and hunger will never be solved by increasing the worldwide supply of food. Hunger is a food distribution issue, not a food availability issue, illustrated by the example of Ireland's infamous potato famine: shiploads of meat were being sent off to England as the peasants starved on fungus-infected potatoes. They had been forced to move away from Ireland's already small area of fertile lands (which were being farmed for export of crops and animals) and ended up in marginal locales where little else was possible to grow. It stands to reason that Montgomery is against GMO crops, as he believes that the companies who distribute them, regardless of what they say, are motivated by other desires than to end world hunger. We need to be teaching substinence farmers how to conscientiously grow crops and build soil so that they can grow what they need to survive.
It takes thousands of years for topsoil to form: once it is gone, it is gone for our lifetimes. And we are already farming, says Montgomery, almost all the arable land on the earth. With the population expected to double in the next century, it will be impossible for modern agriculture to continue to deplete the soil at its current rate--that is, unless we want to lose a lot of those new people to starvation. Where have we been, and where are we going? Montgomery quotes Marie Antoinette: There is nothing new except what has been forgotten. This book is a journey: one that takes you through time and across the earth, then pulls you from blind indifference into a passionate, disturbed understanding of what lies beneath our feet.
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