"If small-scale landownership creates a class of barbarians standing
half outside society, combining all the crudity of primitive social
forms with all the torments and misery of civilized countries, large
landed property undermines labor-power in the final sphere to which its
indigenous energy flees, and where it is stored up as a reserve fund for
renewing the vital power of the nation, on the land itself. Large-scale
industry and industrially pursued large-scale agriculture have the same
effect. If they are originally distinguished by the fact that the former
lays waste and ruins labour-power and thus the natural power of man,
whereas the latter does the same to the natural power of the soil, they
link up in the later course of development, since the industrial system
applied to agriculture also enervates the workers there, while industry
and trade for their part provide agriculture with the means of
exhausting the soil."
Karl Marx, Capital V. 3
===
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/issue=200703&id=281
June/July/August 2007
David R. Montgomery's Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations
By Jesse Lichtenstein
“Predictably—and understandably— more pressing problems than saving dirt
usually carry the day,” writes David R. Montgomery. But as his new book,
Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, details, we are losing the brown
stuff far, far too quickly. Unlike maritime dead zones and radical
climate change, cases in which we have little historical knowledge on
which to draw, we do have some sense of what happens to civilizations
that abuse and lose their dirt. The book’s conclusion takes little
comfort in history: “Unless more immediate disasters do us in, how we
address the twin problems of soil degradation and accelerated erosion
will eventually determine the fate of modern civilization.” (Never mind
the echoes of that useful old tip “If nothing else kills you, cancer will.”)
For terrestrial life forms, dirt is where it all begins. It is “the skin
of the earth—the frontier between geology and biology,” a thin, fragile
living blanket that covers a hard, rock planet. Early on, Montgomery, a
professor of earth and space sciences at the University of Washington
and author of King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon (2003),
examines the organic and geologic processes that produce soil and cause
it to erode. Given enough time, these competing tendencies tend to bring
about an equilibrium in soil characteristics and soil type specific to a
given place. Agriculture, of course, alters things.
With more thoroughness than narrative snap, much of Dirt is given over
to an environmental history of civilizations, which wax and wane over
hundreds and thousands of years as they plow up their topsoil, push
their land to its limits in order to feed burgeoning populations, and
watch the exposed dirt wash or blow away. It then becomes a matter of
moving on to steeper, poorer land, importing food (as in the case of
imperial Rome), melting away into the jungle, or slaughtering one
another over rare arable land. This dirt’s-eye-view of history provides
an interesting perspective on a vast range of topics, from the vanishing
commons and the rise of private estates in Europe to the drive to
colonize the Americas, from slavery and the Industrial Revolution to
floods and famines in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century China. And
no book on dirt can pass lightly over the Depression-era Dust Bowl or
its lesser-known Soviet counterpart.
Montgomery decries the loss of soil husbandry, the intelligent and
long-term stewardship that good dirt requires if we are continuously to
extract food from it. Instead, factors such as population growth, a
variety of economic ideologies, absentee land ownership, and the
profit-driven imperatives of fossil-fuel, agrochemical, and machinery
producers continue to press— worldwide—for maximum immediate yield,
leading to erosion rates orders of magnitude higher than that at which
soil is formed. What is needed, writes Montgomery, is agroecology in
place of agrochemistry—a matching of practice to place, an intelligent
mimicry of nature in place of genetic jiggering and the
ever-less-effective application of ever-dwindling petrochemicals. Urban
agriculture, efficient small-scale organic farms, and no-till methods on
large-scale farms point a way forward. With the world losing an
astonishing 1 percent of its arable land each year (that’s from a 1995
study, so say good-bye to 11 percent of it and add another billion
mouths to feed), Montgomery warns that it is time to treat soil “as a
valuable inheritance rather than a commodity—as something other than dirt.”
