Eco-Threats To Our Civilization’s Food Supplies

According to The Writer’s Almanac, it’s the anniversary of “Black Sunday” in 1935, the day on which the Great Plains region experienced one of the largest dust storms in American history.  It’s an important reminder of what happens when farm land is misused, which, of course, is happening every day at some level.

Let’s begin with the article mentioned above:

That morning, the weather was clear and warm, little to no breeze. But by afternoon, the sky had turned a strange purple and the wind had started to whip. A towering black plume of dust shot across the Plains, from South Dakota to Texas, before people could react. Cars were shorted out, and animals were smothered on the spot – countless birds, mice, jackrabbits. Cattle’s stomachs were later found to be filled with several inches of dirt, their eyes cemented shut by a mixture of tears and dust.

The disaster of the Dust Bowl years was completely manmade. Motivated by a spike in wheat prices right after the First World War, settlers had rushed into America’s farmland to remove the native grasses and plant more wheat. When the price in wheat fell during the Depression years, farmers abandoned their now-empty fields. With no native grasses in place to hold the soil down, it was free to move in the air. A few more years of drought after that was all it took to turn a once-thriving prairie into an arid wasteland.

Nearly 850 million tons of topsoil was displaced in 1935 alone, with the worst dust storms hitting areas in Oklahoma and the panhandles of Texas. People adapted their lives to the dust. Women would knead their bread in a dresser drawer draped over with cloth, working the dough through two hand-holes cut in the drawer’s sides. They abandoned stovetop cooking in lieu of the oven, where less dirt could get through. Meals had to be eaten immediately or else they would accumulate a layer of dust. Children walked to school in goggles and dust masks.

Thousands fled to California during the Dust Bowl, overwhelming the state’s resources. Others suffered health and respiratory problems from the constant presence of dust. Homes and farm equipment were buried in great dunes of sandy dirt. The multiyear tragedy led to the federal government’s passing of the Soil Conservation Act in 1936.

Today, farmers use more careful agricultural methods to prevent the kind of erosion that would lead to another Dust Bowl.

Yes, our agricultural methods will prevent another Dust Bowl. But that doesn’t mean that our approach to agriculture and environmental stewardship isn’t creating other horrific problems.  Here’s a short list:

Monocropping.  There are significant short-term economic advantages to growing a single crop on a certain area of land, year after year, without resting the soil.  Obviously, farmers can specialize in planting and harvesting that crop, thus limiting the expertise and capital equipment required.  However, this practice severely depletes the soil; the plants (normally corn, wheat or soybeans) strip the soil of the nutrients it needs. This forces farmers to use fertilizers, which have environmental issues discussed below. There are also risks to our entire civilization associated with monocropping, e.g., a disease that hits a certain strain of wheat is both a) more likely to occur, and b) will more readily wipe out a huge portion of the world’s wheat harvest.

Chemical fertilizer run-off.  When the excess nitrates that are the base of chemical fertilizers wind up in our streams, rivers, and lakes, they often cause enormous algal blooms, resulting in “dead zones,” killing of all fish and other aquatic animals.

Pesticide residues.    Insecticides, fungicides and herbicides tend to bioaccumulate, i.e., to increase in concentration with the plants and animals on which our civilization depends for its food sources.  In particular, these poisons tend to move up the food chain, meaning, for instance, that the concentration of a particular chemical will be higher in the cow than in the grass it ate.

Desertification.  The Princeton University Dictionary defines the term as “the process of fertile land transforming into desert typically as a result of deforestation, drought, or improper/inappropriate agriculture.” I.e., it’s land that has lost its vegetation, water bodies, and wildlife.  Though monocropping (discussed above) leads to desertification, the more obvious causes are deforestation (cutting down trees) and climate change, the result of higher temperatures and drought conditions.  Approximately 30 million acres of farm land become barren every year.  California saw the death of more than 12 million trees in the recent drought, and another 35 million are severely compromised, many headed for the same fate.

Sea-level rise.  Due to the thermal expansion and melting of the ice sheets in Greenland and the Antarctic, the oceans will rise somewhere between one and five meters by the year 2100, reducing the land mass accordingly.

Arboreal disease.  In addition to abiotic tree diseases, e.g., those caused by air pollution, there are an uncountable number of biotic maladies.  Especially plants that are stressed from drought are susceptible to disease caused by insects, fungi, bacteria, viruses, parasitic plants, nematodes and other microorganisms—and of which become more virulent in warmer temperatures.

Wildfires.  A study conducted in 2016 shows that the number of wildfires in the Western U.S. has doubled in the past 30 years, due to global warming.

GMOs. There is no scientific reason to object to genetic modification per se; our civilization is merely doing in the laboratory in hours and days what previously was happening in the fields over years and decades.  But the process by which companies like Monsanto are patenting and licensing certain GMOs, and essentially forcing farmers to use them, is clearly abusive in the extreme.

Is there another dust bowl in our future?  No.  Are there severe assaults on the world food supply happening (and worsening) every day?  Absolutely.