The Crash Course: The Unsustainable Future of Our Economy, Energy, and Environment (32 page)

Soil Erosion and Desertification

Even if all the soil (and its critical minerals) were staying in place, instead of being dispersed out to the ocean, there is another way in which modern farming practices aren’t sustainable. Much of the soil itself is being lost, and this, too, is a concern. Fertile soil builds up only very slowly, often requiring 100 years of natural processes to create a single inch, and it is being lost at a rate that far exceeds its rate of accumulation. Some of it is lost slowly through simple erosion over time, and sometimes it is lost rather dramatically, as was the case in the U.S. dust bowl in the 1930s, when a single dust storm on April 14, 1935 was calculated to have contained 300,000 tons of topsoil, twice as much material as was dug from the Panama Canal.
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Desertification is another destructive process that is often initiated and accelerated by the actions of humans. The process usually involves overgrazing of already marginal, dry lands, which destroys the meager plant cover that protects what little soil there is. Eventually a fine wind storm comes along and blows that soil away, and then nothing is left to absorb the sparse rains when next they come. Plant roots themselves also play an important role in both capturing and liberating water; they perform vital functions lost to overgrazing and difficult to reestablish once gone.

Conclusion

All of this is to say that instead of building up our primary wealth—soils—we’re rather steadily, and sometimes dramatically, eroding and depleting them. Sustaining our current farming yields currently requires enormous energy inputs to create the fertilizers and run the irrigation pumps. But these practices are themselves unsustainable. Sooner or later, the energy won’t be there to create the fertilizers and irrigate the fields.

Taken together, these facts about the fate of our soils and available farmland lead me to a stark conclusion: The cost of food is going to go up rather dramatically in the years to come. Farming on arid land isn’t sustainable. Farming in a way that depletes the soil isn’t sustainable, nor are methods that cause soil to be eroded faster than it’s created.

The whole story of farming on an industrial scale is one of low costs and even lower sustainability. In order to farm sustainably, soils must be minimally maintained at their current depths and levels of fertility. In a world of surplus energy, these defects can be hidden by “nutrient subsidies” hauled in at great energy costs from far away. But when the energy subsidy is withdrawn, the true state of our croplands will be revealed.

The alternative to this bleak story of lost soil and squandered nutrients begins in your local area. There are farming practices available that build soils and nutrients; these have begun to “close the nutrient loop” and are therefore on the path toward being sustainable. It would be a useful exercise to explore how these options are (or aren’t) being applied in your area.

The bottom line with regard to soil is that it is the single most important form of primary wealth. Without soil, we’d be entirely lost. Without food, nothing else is possible. It is past time to reconnect with our soil and treat it with the respect and admiration it deserves.

CHAPTER 21

Parched

The Coming Water Wars

When you were young, perhaps your mother admonished you to turn off the tap while brushing your teeth to conserve water. That’s good advice, and I don’t want to diminish it, but the coming water predicaments will be driven more by the food on your plate than by what swirls down your drains. Water tables all across the globe are falling fast as aquifers are pumped at rates far faster than they are being recharged.

As Lester Brown explains:

The link between water and food is strong. We each consume, on average, nearly 4 liters of water per day in one form or another, while the water required to produce our daily food totals at least 2,000 liters—500 times as much. This helps explain why 70 percent of all water use is for irrigation. Another 20 percent is used by industry, and 10 percent goes for residential purposes. With the demand for water growing in all three categories, competition among sectors is intensifying, with agriculture almost always losing. While most people recognize that the world is facing a future of water shortages, not everyone has connected the dots to see that this also means a future of food shortages.
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While turning off the faucet while brushing your teeth is a good idea, residential water use comprises only 10 percent of the total. Even if we could cut our domestic water use by 100 percent, we’d still have 90 percent of the issue to deal with.

As with Chapter 19 (
Minerals
) and mineral wealth, my purpose in this section isn’t to write exhaustively about water issues. For that I refer you to other excellent sources for the details.
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Instead, I want to simply illustrate that the exact same exponential dynamics of depletion and growth are present with respect to water as they are in petroleum and minerals. It’s the same story all over again:
Exponential growth is driving extractive behaviors that are creating water issues, problems, and predicaments all across the globe
. No longer can clever engineering deliver all of the desired water to some places in the world; even now, there simply isn’t sufficient water to meet the level of desired consumption.

Therefore, the story with water is more or less the same as the story for oil and minerals: We’re placing exponentially increasing demands on what, in many cases, is essentially a fixed supply. The drive for water demand is no more complicated than population growth. The 70 million new people on the surface of the planet each year (equivalent to 8.3 New York Cities annually) need to eat, and food takes a lot of water to grow. For example, a single pound of wheat takes a thousand pounds of water to grow, and this 1:1000 ratio coupled with population growth is the key driver for increasing water demand across the globe.

Running Dry

The water with which we are most familiar is above ground in the form of ponds, lakes, rivers, and reservoirs; that form of water has the wonderful characteristic of recharging and replenishing itself from the rain and snow that falls from the sky. We can easily view the water levels in rivers and reservoirs and see for ourselves whether the levels are rising or falling enough to be cause for alarm. Over just the past 40 years, as the world’s population has more than doubled, many of these rivers and reservoirs have gone from being sufficient to being nearly depleted.

The mighty Colorado River no longer roars into the sea, having been reduced to a trickle by the innumerable demands placed along its entire length. The Yellow River in China is in the same condition. All over the globe, once-mighty rivers now limp toward the ocean, often drying up entirely during the dry season before they reach the sea. While there’s some latitude to push things a bit further along with conservation efforts and altered-use practices, the surface water of the world clearly cannot stand any more “doublings” in demand. Already practically every major river has been dammed, diverted, sluiced, and sliced up into apportioned allotments, and many minor rivers have disappeared entirely. The conclusion is clear: Sooner or later, fresh water will be a major limiting factor to population growth and economic expansion.

What Lies Beneath

Because we can see it, we often tend to think of surface water as the main story, but really the relationship between surface water and the totality of the water we use is very similar to an iceberg’s dimensions above and below the water. The most important sources of water for most cities and agriculture lie in the aquifers hidden from view deep beneath the ground, which means that precious few people truly appreciate what’s going on down there. What we find here are rapid and increasing rates of depletion. Many of these aquifers recharge so slowly, often over the course of tens of thousands of years, that Lester Brown rightly calls them “fossil aquifers” to link them to same depletion dynamics that plague petroleum reservoirs. In the United States, the massive Ogallala aquifer lies under eight western states, supplies 21 million acre-feet of water for irrigation every year, and may dry up in as little as 25 years.
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In this sense, extracting water from deep, ultra-slow-recharging aquifers is no different from mining: Once the ore (or water) has been removed, it’s as good as gone forever, at least on a human timeline. This is where our intuitive sense of water, which regularly falls from the sky, can lead us astray. Instead of thinking of it as an infinitely renewable resource, we need to be aware that an enormous proportion of the water we use is effectively a nonrenewable resource. Aquifers like the Ogallala are more like a non-interest-bearing bank account gifted to us by a distant relative. Because it won’t last forever, a prudent person would have a strict budget and a solid plan for what to do on the day that the account runs dry.

Ancient aquifers all over the globe are being pumped at unsustainable rates and will therefore someday fail to provide sufficient water to local populations. The list of problem areas are nearly endless, and very few of these locations have any sort of credible plans for what to do when the water runs out.

Exporting Water—The Food Story

Water is an indispensible factor in the story of ever-increasing crop yields over the past several decades. World food harvests have tripled since 1950, and irrigation is responsible for a large portion of those gains. Most people are surprised to learn that every pound of harvested wheat requires one thousand pounds of water to grow. In a sense, this 1000:1 ratio means that when the United States exports wheat, it’s really exporting water. A million tons of grain is the same as a billion tons of water, which explains why many water-starved countries prefer to buy their grains rather than try to grow them on their parched soils. It’s cheaper than digging wells or building desalination plants.

Without the use of aquifers, much of the dryer agricultural land in the world, such as the wheat fields in Saudi Arabia, would have to be abandoned altogether. And agriculture in the more temperate regions would have to revert to dry land farming practices—which means depending on rainfall alone, rather than irrigation—and this would lower yields. This is an inconvenient reality at a time when future food security is already an open concern of world leaders and population is slated to grow by approximately 40 percent over the next 40 years.

To quote Lester Brown again, “Knowing where grain deficits will be concentrated tomorrow requires looking at where water deficits are developing today.”
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The dryer and more populous nations are already struggling with severe water issues today. So as we ponder the predicament of falling water tables, we might also ask what the impact of these will be on our ability to support even a few more decades of exponential growth, let alone an endless amount of it. Given the enormous litany of water issues that are already upon us, I find it quite improbable that we will be able to support even one more economic doubling without running into serious issues.

The Food Bubble

Because water is so indispensible to agriculture, and the more populous and dryer regions are so heavily dependent on ancient aquifers to meet their irrigation needs, some stark conclusions are apparent. Again from Brown’s
Plan B
:

Many countries are in essence creating a “food bubble economy”—one in which food production is artificially inflated by the unsustainable mining of groundwater. At what point does water scarcity translate into food scarcity?
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David Seckler and his colleagues at the International Water Management Institute, the world’s premier water research group, summarized this issue well:

Many of the most populous countries of the world—China, India, Pakistan, Mexico, and nearly all the countries of the Middle East and North Africa—have literally been having a free ride over the past two or three decades by depleting their groundwater resources. The penalty for mismanagement of this valuable resource is now coming due and it’s no exaggeration to say that the results could be catastrophic for these countries and, given their importance, for the world as a whole.
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As was the case with our money system, which was essentially born in its current form on August 15, 1971 with the slamming of the gold window by Nixon, we don’t have thousands of years of experience to help guide us through what happens when the aquifers that allowed the emergence of large populations above them are depleted. It can rightly be said that we are currently experiencing a “food bubble,” in the sense that the harvests are now running at a rate higher than the aquifers can sustain.

The story of water is another tale of an unsustainable practice that’s playing out right before our very eyes and getting surprisingly scant attention, given the stakes involved. The mystery here is why so many clearly unsustainable practices are running at once without more pointed national and global discussions about exactly how and when we’ll terminate the practices on our own terms so that we can enter a future shaped by design, not disaster.

Energy and Water

Because water is a liquid and flows so easily, down rivers and through pipes, its other primary characteristic often gets overlooked: It’s heavy. A cube of water measuring just slightly over three feet on a side weighs a ton. It is wonderful that huge amounts of water will flow so readily down an incline, such as 100-mile long culvert. However, if you want water to go uphill, there’s an enormous energy price to pay.

In certain states in India where the irrigation pipes now reach deep into the earth to draw up the precious but retreating water, irrigation now accounts for more than half of the electrical energy used. Unsurprisingly, bringing water up from great depths is enormously energy intensive, and irrigation is one of the major uses of energy in farming, consuming 13 percent of the direct energy used to grow food.
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As aquifers deplete and retreat to lower and lower depths, the energy—and cost—required to pull those waters up mounts. In the future, we’ll see twin pressures on food-growing costs: The direct increase in petroleum prices and the mounting costs of drawing water up from ever-greater depths. And even then we’re assuming that the aquifers will remain viable indefinitely.

The other primary use for water that often goes overlooked is the production of energy itself. Nuclear and coal-fired plants both require enormous amounts of water, used in the cooling cycle, to operate. If we express the amount of water required on the basis of kilowatt hours, we find that it takes two gallons of water to produce a single kilowatt hour of consumed electricity. Surprisingly, hydroelectric plants “consume” the most, as their reservoirs lose a lot of water to evaporation. For all new thermoelectric plants (coal, nuclear, etc.) the average is approximately 0.5 gallons per end-use kilowatt hour. This may not sound like a lot, but it means that more than half of all the water consumed in the United States is consumed by electrical power plants. If we want more electricity, we’ll need to use more water.
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The Future of Water

Once again, if we take a hard look at the facts as they stand, we come to the conclusion that the correct question isn’t
How do we manage our water resources to allow perpetual growth?
but rather
Since our use of water will someday hit a limit, would we rather approach that limit on our own terms or on nature’s terms?

Fresh water isn’t evenly or very well-distributed across the globe, and neither are these water-based problems—some places are in much worse shape than others. The future of water is already upon us, as evidenced by the number of farm operations and regions that have been systematically losing their water access by expropriation or selling their water rights to cities. When economics sets the rules, farmers lose, because the monetary value of the crops that can be grown with a given amount of water is a fraction of the value at which water can be sold to residential and industrial customers.