Tag Archives: soil

Soil salinity and erosion

Preface.  Civilizations fail when their soils are ruined or eroded.  One way conquerors made sure that those they enslaved during wars was to salt their land and burn their homes so they had nowhere to escape to. Erosion is an … Continue reading

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Climate change impacts on agriculture

Preface. There are three articles below on this topic.  Plus these articles in the news: Nakagawa T et al (2021) The spatio-temporal structure of the Lateglacial to early Holocene transition reconstructed from the pollen record of Lake Suigetsu and its … Continue reading

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Book review of Dirt: the erosion of civilization

Preface. On average civilizations collapsed after 800 to 2,000 years because they’d destroyed their topsoil, some of it caused by deforestation to grow more food, make metals, ceramics, glass and other objects requiring high heat, which fossils provide today. Today, … Continue reading

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Mineral: Soil from Ugo Bardi’s “Extracted”

FIGURE 1. The state of soil health globally. Preface. Ugo Bardi’s book on minerals covers a wide-ranging territory, including soil, which is a mineral.  In this section of the book he shows how humans have damaged the soil so much … Continue reading

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Chemical industrial farming is unsustainable. Why poison ourselves when pesticides don’t save more of our crops than in the past?

Pesticides, herbicides, and insecticides destroy soil and ecosystems. Yet a third of crops are lost to pests just as in the many millennia of farming before chemicals Preface. This is a book review of Dyer’s “Chasing the Red Queen”, and … Continue reading

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Large animals driven extinct by human hunters still affect ecosystems today

Below is an excerpt/paraphrased of Michael Marshall’s 14 August 2013 NewScientist Ecosystems still feel the pain of ancient extinctions, the abstract of the original Nature Geoscience article, and future losses of large animals will affect tropical forests in the future. … Continue reading

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