Dirt

Houston, we have a problem, we need more compost

The Gauntlet — A recurring feature

One of the most fascinating and sad things about some people is their self-loathing. I think guilt and not getting comfortable and honest with yourself is a real impediment to happiness. Politicians often seem to focus most on staying in office and the good graces of their Party hierarchy.

1. Voting against your self-interest. Lindsay Graham announced recently that he will vote against codifying same-sex marriage when the legislation reaches the US Senate. The tent is big, but not that big. At least Lindsay is not lonely. Another representative, Glenn Thompson from PA voted against codifying same-sex marriage. The cool thing is he hopped on a plane and three days later attended the wedding of his son (who happens to be gay).

2. The polls are growing! They are less obtrusive than your average spam call about your expiring car warranty. I have verified that I have no idea who voted and for what. Your votes are sacred and secret! Glad to note that amongst the non-apathetic, it is unanimous that it is none of our business how many kids people have. There is hope. There is exactly ONE OF YOU (at least) who I expect will vote and select Option 5 in today’s poll. You know who you are and I expect to hear of a bumper crop of garlic later this year.

3. Share an example when you think you witness people being against themselves…fascinating, sad, and hopefully something neurologists or behavioral economists might help us all understand better. I respect that people can have heartfelt differences. Voting against your self-interest is just weird to me. Share a comment to help me understand Lindsay and Glenn for example.

4. You’ve had the chance since Saturday and NO ONE seems to care about pies? This is very confusing to me. Even if I just think about them it is a shock that no one has an opinion. According to the rudimentary statistics that Substack reports to me, most of you didn’t even look at Linn’s Fruit Bin. Maybe this is an old man thing. I wonder how many times a year people have pie. I think I see a poll coming in the future. Commit to pie, your life will be better.

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Compost is cool. At some level, it is magical the transformation from the banana peel (sans the Dole label) to rich compost. We have all learned that the Earth can heal itself given enough time. We are unique as for the first time we have built machines (and businesses) that can gouge the Earth with such speed and tenacity, that it is not clear ecosystems will survive.

“For over 2000 years, many Greeks believed that earth, air, fire, and water were the four basic elements. If they included wind, I could have had a musical inspiration. Aristotle, more of a philosopher than a chemist, had agreed that there were four basic elements but they were hot, dry, cold, and moist, which the simple bodies were derived from.”¹

The Greeks have retained a special place in our history. We have lionized their early attempts at reason, discussion, and democracy. They have ended up in our art and I dare say in our consciousness and philosophy. Since I love history (the 2nd Tuesday of the month has been locked up in my schedule for years), the early Greeks can be sprinkled into my writing once in a while without resistance.

Alas, the passage of time is never kind to the early efforts of things. The Greeks are no exception. The periodic table lies in sharp contrast to earth, air, fire, and water as a premise. The length of time that Greek contributions have stood is impressive but undeserving of reverence. The pitch of most roofs in our world still owes their ratios to their early understanding of what a right triangle is. Hooray Pythagoras.

Tonight I decided to talk about dirt (earth). I was inspired by a Newsletter I read by Antonia Malchik titled “On the Commons”. Antonia recently penned a fun post titled “Soil and Dirt” and it is provided for those who are interested:

Soil and Dirt

She writes about walking superimposed on the world. If that is a mouthful, I apologize for speaking for her. That is merely my conclusion about the writing. It is fresh, challenging, and filled with great references for other stuff to read. What could be better? I credit the Greeks in today’s post because the earth is still fundamental for getting along on our planet.

Steady consumers of my writing know that I shade to the premise that almost all progress is recent. The rate of change has been speeding up for hundreds of years. While it may have been doing that even longer, the magnitude of change is now apparent to our eyes. Since today the topic is soil, I better get to it. I figure that two million years of evolution led us to about 12000 years ago. It finally became time for earthlings to settle down. The beginning of agriculture has shaped the course of the recent history of our planet. Before any of you begin welling up with pride, 12000 years is only about 0.0003% of the history of the Earth. Farmers, just like humans in general, are but a blip. What makes farming and the soil so interesting is that for the first time, we are subverting the natural cycles of our world and exerting pressure on how our ecosystems run. Even these early farmers, mostly emulating nature and domesticating wild grasses like corn, wheat, and rice ran into challenges early when they pressed the soil to yield more fruit. It is not a coincidence that this “top of the food chain” creature would also introduce animal and plant extinction as one of its gifts to the ecosystem.

Asians quickly embraced irrigation on a systematic scale in the production of rice. The use of bonemeal and animal waste became the early approach to replenishing the dirt. Once we “settled down”, we began to systematically outrun the natural cycle. Archeology tells us of many great civilizations established in areas where they were only a couple of droughts away from collapse (think Aztecs). The Dust Bowl with a bit of bad weather and overpressure on the dirt is America’s best example of our tenuous dance with the natural cycles of Earth.

The appeal of crops like cotton and tobacco led to the near fracture of our country altogether. Here we just had a plant that we could grow but alas it took a lot of effort to harvest and process it. The tragedy of indentured servitude remains the original sin of our country. It is remarkable to me, a man born in 1960 to realize that it took us till the 1965 Civil Rights Act to finally entrench an approach to equality that matched the high-minded ideals of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. It seems from 1776 to 1965, nearly two centuries kinda suck for everyone but white men but THAT WAS OUR ORIGINAL INTENT. If we mean to revere it, we should own it.

Even the very best of the Founders arrived at their station in life bound to these high-labor agricultural products. Most of the Founders expressed religious beliefs that granted cover and rationalized indentured servitude. It was a ‘necessary evil’ because the Industrial Age had not yet provided a mechanization replacement for the exploitation of our fellow man. I venture their original intent seen through this prism can only be judged harshly by what we know today. It seems a shame to WHITEWASH IT.

When politics debates “our poor farmers” I can’t help but conclude this is a nostalgia story. Here we reside at the tail-end of the information age with the age of agriculture and the industrial age in the rearview mirror. We accomplish all of our farming these days with about 1% of the population. Students of the SCOTUS understand that one view of our history is the unchanging truth of the Founders of the nation. Original Intent is the philosophy a minority but growing expanse of judges embraces. At the nation's birth, over 90% of the people were engaged in agriculture. Domesticated animals were still at a premium. There were only two ways to “improve your productivity”. Option one was to have more children. Option two was to identify and exploit people who don’t look like you and dehumanize them. Option one meant the women of the world were birthing machines. Option two meant we had to figure out a way to rationalize how everyone beyond a white male was expendable. The birthrate around the world driven by agriculture puts the world on the path of lots of mouths to feed. Original intent (conditions) seems absurd since our world today is unrecognizable. What the Founders embraced, and Original Intent provides cover for was a worldview that concluded that 93% of the world was chaff (women 50% and 14% Caucasian) and the spoils ALL RIGHTFULLY BELONGED with the white male as a birthright! Think about this the next time someone gets high-minded with you and talks about Original Intent.

There never was a time in which all the mouths could be fed similarly. Rather, the rise of the estate, the plantation, and even the modern 10,000 acres of corn would always distribute the bounty unequally. It inevitably fed a cycle of mouths outstripping capacity. The progress we see in the modern world is still reserved only for a small subset of all of us. To be born in the United States remains like winning the human lottery. Only about 15% of the world lives in a “1st world country”. Whatever we might perceive in a discussion about climate change, deforestation, the nitrogen cycle, or the pervasiveness of pollution and waste, it is sobering to realize that the problem is of a grand scale. When close to six in seven of us on the planet dream of joining the first world, only full-scale change to things can change the direction of our ecosystem.

My take on this is that the birth of our nation was subsumed by what was happening at the time. The Founders were frequently wealthy landowners. Humanity struggled for almost 12000 years to transition to what’s next. The agricultural age transformed the world as one creature began modifying the world they lived in rather than interacting with it. It was the dawn of the Industrial Age that would negate all that came before.

For most of the Agricultural Age, humans figured out how to interact and accept the world they lived in. They largely just emulated nature. Finding wild grasses became the means to cultivate grains and feed a growing population. One person regardless of commitment or endurance was doomed to struggle to eke out an existence. Finding animals that could be domesticated provided the path to productivity. When the crop itself was difficult to harvest, this top-of-the-food chain animal quickly rationalized slavery and serfdom as a way forward. A creation story that chided us for applying dominion over the world was a convenient path to such beliefs as long as we could dehumanize our kind along the way. Never underestimate the ability of humans to rationalize.

Our earth, up to this time, retained wonderful properties to replenish itself. The trick was not to overexert the soil (akin to riding the horse to exhaustion). Alas, the path to our current state was destined from the beginning:

1. Observe nature and pick the food it provides for free. At this point, we are just hunter-gatherers. Finding a wild berry was a treat but might not sustain us.

2. Settle down in the areas where the gathering is easy or plants of interest prevail. Figure out how to emulate nature and grow more of the stuff we like. Growing a peach when we consider the cycle is a lot of work. Up to now, the appeal of an all-or-nothing mammoth hunt remained our nostalgic dream. Lots of concentrated protein and the heroic myth.

3. Sustained success in this approach only emerges in places with domesticable animals. A simple explanation of why the trek out of Africa was inevitable. The nice thing about such an explanation is it does not require ridiculous racial nonsense about how people from one area versus another were innately superior. Africa SIMPLY LACKS native animals that could be domesticated to pull a plow. The simple answer of chance is a much better explanation than fate or destiny. A simple example lies in North America which offered so much opportunity but lacked domesticable animals. In this circumstance, the only viable option was to continue roaming. Europeans brought the animals they found by chance in their old neighborhoods.

4. It is interesting that even early farmers rapidly pushed the soil to its limits. Irrigation to flood rice paddies, Animal waste, and bone meal to replenish the stripped nutrients of the soil.

5. Soon we approached the limits of what a single endeavor might produce. Mechanization and later plant breeding intervened. All the while the population of able-bodied folks grew. It took till the early 1800s for us to reach one billion mouths. Each successive billion added to the till has taken less and less time.

6. By the time we reached two billion, our methods to ‘manage the soil’ became more drastic. The development of chemical fertilizers thanks to Fritz Haber paved the way for even more intense working of the soil.

I think that how we came to be, our transformation from early humans to what prevails today has been pretty slow. Two million years is a blip in comparison to the history of the planet. Nevertheless, a world of primates with us at the top of the heap is an exciting experiment that seems now, after two million years to bring along some risk. I know a bit about the important crops of corn and soybeans thanks to one of my sons who works in the field. Less than 250 years since the founding of the country we have a relationship with the soil that is unrecognizable. Nowadays planting corn 8-10 inches apart as a plant that will grow beyond six feet high is “reasonable”. To a non-farmer, it seems the soil has quite a burden. It seems impossible without chemical assistance to do anything of this sort. Nitrogen fertilizers inject enormous amounts of pollutants into the upper atmosphere. While climate science focuses on CO2, a freight train of impact beyond CO2 is approaching close behind with various nitrogen-based molecules impacting the atmosphere. Likewise, the algae bloom we all take for granted in the Gulf of Mexico is mostly the result of fertilizer runoff into the Mississippi.

Earlier I referred to the challenge of new members of the first world economies. Anyone who has not been living under a rock has witnessed the transformation of China and the creation of a large and new middle class. China followed our playbook. Raise a lot of high-yield crops that you feed to animals so people can enjoy more meat in their diet. Patiently waiting for animals to eat and fatten doesn’t scale very well when the goal is a $1 cheeseburger. Here is my absolute favorite story from the time leading up to the amazing and memorable Summer Olympic Games in Beijing. China was rapidly embracing growing lots of soybeans and corn to feed hogs so they could become more consistent meat eaters like us. If you avoid my links like the plague, I GUARANTEE this one will give you an uneasy laugh if you read it in its entirety. If bashing China is one of your favorite sports, Google “Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone”. They are merely following our lead. The image of thousands of boats shoveling algae and moving it inland to feed hogs is unnerving.

I will finish tonight with a bit of perspective. The history of the Earth as we understand it is interesting. It seems whether ice ages, asteroids, or volcanic activity, we can all wrap our heads around the idea that stuff can happen to our planet that introduces enough change to break the balance. Our current age, with the best available information, implies that we are changing our world in a way not so different than a natural disaster. It seems this is extremely difficult to embrace for many people as the consequences may be catastrophic. I think it may be tied to what we believe and not what we might be persuaded by. A while back I wrote about truth. I think it bears repeating.

Truth

After reading this you might think I’m a pessimist. I am not. I think that despite politics, despite lots of people not understanding or caring about the issues, I think science and technology will yet again bail us out. We are going to have great lives in the years and decades ahead. Why? I figure that the breakthroughs in renewables will simply overwhelm any other dumb and outdated way of making electricity we’ve struggled with for the last 200 years. The change will be here by the end of this decade and then the doom scrollers will pivot to some other ridiculous conspiracy. I am excited to think that by 2040 ALL OF THE PEOPLE on this planet who struggle for clean water will be desalinating the ocean and almost free of charge. Cleaning the water won’t mean adding even more CO2 to the atmosphere. The lifting of lives and opportunities will be one of the greatest moments for humankind. Likewise, with dirt, I am sure the crazies and the selfish will continue to overwork the soil. By 2040 farming will be well on its way to being a vertical indoor industry fueled by almost free renewable power. How’s that for being bright-eyed and bushy-tailed? For those of you not convinced and hence not sufficiently upbeat, here is an unrelated video that will surely get you there.

Tonight’s poll is about dirt and how we feel about it.

Tonight’s song is a stretch. This whole story started with the Greeks.

1. https://www.calstatela.edu/sites/default/files/dept/chem/09summer/158/daily40-aristotle.pdf