6. Soils/Dirt/Hydroponics

Living soil is the basis of food security and thus sustainability. The basis of good, living soil is the mycelium that helps generate the humic acids.

See this short video about the multi-billion year old history of where we got our living soil. The lesson is to learn how living soil is made, long before there were humans, then, we create that process though with ourselves within that process in the commodity ecology arrangements locally designed for specific areas.

The short stunning video demonstrates that mycelium is an excellent base for starting the commodity ecology on a groundwork of living soil because literally mycelium was the later basis for all land base life that depended and grew up from that living soil. Mycelium was the first land dweller that prepared everything chemically for soil formation that other creatures utilized later.

Paul Stamets: 6 ways mushrooms can save the world (17 minutes)
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/258



"Entrepreneurial mycologist Paul Stamets seeks to rescue the study of mushrooms from forest gourmets and psychedelic warlords. The focus of Stamets' research is the Northwest's native fungal genome, mycelium, but along the way he has filed 22 patents for mushroom-related technologies, including pesticidal fungi that trick insects into eating them, and mushrooms that can break down the neurotoxins used in nerve gas. There are cosmic implications as well. Stamets believes we could terraform other worlds in our galaxy by sowing a mix of fungal spores and other seeds to create an ecological footprint on a new planet."

Other frameworks of creating living soil like hot composting, worm farming (vermiculture), or mulching potentially are separated from the long term embedding of humans in the larger ecological relationships that can be institutionalized at the same moment. These other techniques can be done, though with re-basing commodity ecology, the ecologizing of human commodification, on mycelium seems the added sounded basis to start maintaining and constructing novel ethnobotany relationships in particular ecoregions.

Moreover, it is probably to be expected because mycelium was the first arriving "'life organ' of ecology" that these species would be an integral start for life--and for other commodity ecology paths. It has THE MOST cross-connects or overlaps SO FAR with leads into other categories. It connects very well with:

58. Remediation
16. Herbicides/Pesticides
6. Soils/Dirt/Hydroponics
5. Garbage/Garbage disposal
7. Drugs/Medicines
11. Mycelium based food
72. Packing Materials (for seeding forests, mycelium and seeds embedded)

THAT means mycelium's many local multiple consumptive positional uses makes it a good place to start upon the commodity ecology for branching in multiple directions from this locus. He says 6 ideas. I count seven. Really, all the difficulties with sustainability are already solved. It merely means putting all the pieces together combined with challenging the corrupt developmentalism with the bioregional state institutional arrangements, challenging the arrangements that keep sustainability, sustainable politics, and territorial states from happening.

Intimately related to this section are the categories on herbicides/pesticides and fertilizers. That is, if you have to use them. In many cases, you can get soil that is healthy, live, and productive without them. For instance, a quote from the short film below:

"You can fix all the world's problems, in a garden. You can solve them all, in a garden....And most people today don't actually know that,...and that makes most people very insecure [to see salty dead desert soil bloom and desalinize before their eyes because they are more attached to their worries and mental constructions than solving the issue]."

Greening the Desert
5:20 min
http://permaculture.org.au

A short film on turning around worst case scenarios of soil in the world, turning them into a (mycelium-rich) garden. The heavily salty desert around the even more heavily salty Dead Sea in Israel becomes a garden without pumping in extra water or artificial fertilizer/herbicides. "We could green the entire Middle East in this way," Geoff Lawton says in the film.



In the above video, the permaculturist notes that nearby degradative and self-destructive farms burn away the secret that could save their soil. The degradative farms burned off so called 'waste from agriculture' and turned it into easily erodible and easily-lost ash because they were ignorant of what to do with it. For the permaculturist, these so-labeled wastes were a key feature of creating their oasis of desalinated soil in the desert, without adding any water artificially and just working with what they had to create solutions for everything.

This is a longer film about Tasmanian/Australian Bill Mollison, who invented the permaculture term with his 1970s book Permaculture One.

From the following film, Mollison noted by 1989--nearly twenty years ago--there were already over 1,000 working examples of permaculture in the world.

Permaculture (1989 film) [The Life of Bill Mollison]
52 min 33 sec

Details the rise and rise of the "Permaculture Concept" as espoused by Bill Mollison and Geoff Lawton. (Another version of the same here.)



The term 'permaculture' was meant to reflect 'permanent culture' and permanent agriculture,' after noting that all historical societies predictably destroyed themselves with soil destruction and desertification. Societies have been desert creating entities--though is it required? Hardly so. Permaculture is a word originally coined by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the mid 1970's to describe an "integrated, evolving system of perennial or self-perpetuating plant and animal species useful to man", as a consciously designed landscape which mimics the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an (over!)abundance of food, fibre and energy for provision of local needs. People, their buildings and the ways in which they organize themselves and plant species spatially are central to permaculture. Thus the permaculture vision of permanent or sustainable agriculture has always been one of permanent or sustainable culture, or sustainable society.

Bill Mollison as an inventor of the concept of permaculture (with David Holmgren) and Geoff Lawton as founder of the Permaculture Research Institute are names associated with international 'permaculture activism'. All help spread working test plots of permaculture examples around the world.

This is a lecture about permaculture:

Introduction to Permaculture - segment 1
19 min 47 sec
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8298358562571067395

A lecture given by Mary Shalhub-Davis at Sacred Grounds Coffeehouse in Tampa, Florida, on the subject of Permaculture.

The definition she likes is "permaculture is an holistic approach to landscape design and human culture. It is an attempt to integrate several disciplines: biology, ecology, geography, agriculture, architecture, appropriate technology, and community building." Importantly she notes that permaculture can be urban or rural, small or large in land scale. The secret is creating the low-labor cycles where the plants, the animals, and the (potentially modified) landscape, interact in such a way as to provide an overabundance of food without much 'farmer' labor input, if any at all. In the Bill Morrison video he talks of 'abandoned' permaculture plots where its owner had moved away. However, the permaculture kept on producing, creating a veritable garden of Eden without any farmer to watch over it.

Permaculture is: without any synthetic pesticides or herbicides (species interactions achieve this effect for free), has a radical reduction of farmer labor required, has zero tilling, is without additional water requirements, as well as is a form of perennial agriculture (instead of annual plantings), is without a clear planting cycle, and can be integrated (typically) into pre-existing forest ecologies.

(If forests don't exist groups like the Colombian llanos-residing dwellers at Gaviotas (see the book Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World (1999)) solved that difficulty as well by creating a forest-creation cycle from nothing that provided a foreign species fast-growing tree as a trellis for later 'local domestic' forest growth that would take over from the foreign species. They were able to start a process of forest generation in an area that had been desert and eroded soil for thousands of years in the frontier of Colombia. They expanded their community built on an economy of forest creation and profit--leading to expansion of forest lands with expanding human settlement and agriculture from virtual desert conditions.)

This is another example from Australia. People began to be interested in this man, Peter Andrews, and his ideas during a decade-long drought in Australia (that ended slightly in 2008) that revealed ONLY his farm had maintained its greenery. Everyone else around him was desert. He created a soil-creating framework, an oasis of permaculture techniques. He had just as much water or raw materials issues as the rest of neighboring farmers and ranchers. However, only his organization of them was sustainable while others were creating deserts from their forms of organization.

Australian Story - "Land Regeneration"
29 min
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8960194180325234816

Details the use of basic permaculture concepts to change a piece of salted and degraded land into a productive oasis.



Effectively 'learning from Ladakh,' Australian Peter Andrews is applying and reinventing the EXACT water harvesting and soil infiltration techniques as Northern India (15 minutes into it).

Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh
1 hr 0 min 11 sec
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5314168278683386338

Are we facing the prospect of going 'back' to the future? Will the future be more like the past? These kinds of questions need to be raised, and they are with great insight and understanding in this film about the development of Ladakh, in Northern India. A poignant and timely look into the dark face of globalisation, this documentary contrasts the once utopian essentialisms and sustainable practices of the Ladhaki's, with the disastrously destructive modern encroachment and infiltration.... In this gripping and authentic film, both local markets and local identity are undermined and soon everything is exploited.



Here is a forest garden based permaculture started with experiments by Mr. Robert Hart.

Forest Gardening with Robert Hart ... a film by Malcolm Baldwin (1 of 2)
7 min 25 sec
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weGAe9NM0kg

"[A] haven of tranquility and abundance....His vision was to plant a major edible forest which could fulfill a healthy diet in beautiful surroundings. Some thirty years later, this....provides a model of what can be achieved in any backyard...grown in a secession of layers that imitate nature. The natural forest is regarded as having seven stories...the top story as being tall, light-demanding trees, the second story being short shade trees, the third story is the shrub level, the fourth the herbaceous, the fifth plants that spread horizontally, the sixth the rhizome or root layer, and the seventh the vertical level [of] climbers and creepers." He is indebted he says to Toyohiko Kagawa (1888-1960), a Japanese inventor of "3-D" methods of linking soil and conservation with food production (fodder trees to conserve soil, supply food and feed animals).



(2 of 2)

Here is a 'permaculture trio' of three short films in one. Another one about Robert Hart, edible forest gardens, as well as urban permaculture.

PERMACULTURE TRIO: Forest Gardening, Edible Landscaping, Urban Permaculture
48 min 5 sec

[T]hree short (about 15 minutes) documentaries.... 1) Robert Hart's Forest Garden Find out loads about what forest gardening is, and how to make your own.... 2)Edible Landscapes Second is an amazing case study about Rural Permaculture in Britain, showcasing loads of amazing edible plants and aquaculture and flowers, as well as fantastic medicinal plants. Look out for a cure for female infertility that's dropped in here.... 3) Urban Permaculture This is a brilliant and inspiring documentary of permaculture techniques used effectively in an urban back garden. With little more than 2 hours of work a week, this couple produce about a fifth of their food intake....



Another example of a working permaculture in a temperate and high altitude climate. The coldest places in Austria are growing lemons at 3,000 ft and much more: the Kramaterhof alpine farm of Sepp Holzer is an alpine garden of Eden with strategic uses of large rocks for passive heat in the winter in the farm's water system.

Farming With Nature: A Case Study Of Successful Temperate Permaculture;
A visit to the farm of Sepp and Veronika Holzer; The Krameterhof in Lungau, Austria
37 min 10 sec
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=727825431796194016

Permaculture is a design-based approach to practical sustainability, using systems thinking and approaches that combine regenerative ethics with ecological principles to create sustainable environments. Permaculture was developed in the sub-tropics (Australia) and thus there was some debate about how well it could adapt to practiced in Temperate climates. [Like Robert Hart's temperate forest-based permaculture,]...[t]his film dispenses with any such worries. In this documentary, we take a look at a case study of permaculture in the Austrian Alps, which is snowed over for much of the year. Despite this, by using permaculture design and a lifetime's experience, the farm here produces abundant and diverse yields, while attracting interest from people and restaurants far and wide.



Here is greater detail about permaculture in practice.

Permaculture in practice
49 min 42 sec
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7629806485951726891

Permaculture in Britain, interspersed with case studies from all over the country. Packed with inspirational design features and beautiful Permaculture systems.



Here is an permaculture 'eco-subdivision'. It was conceived as an integrated landscape of human and ecological relations with multi-species (plants and animal raising mixed with agriculture/orchard and housing for a full community.

Murrnong - a permaculture subdivision
8 min
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOW-RdCFax0
A permaculture community subdivision based on tree crop agriculture, on the edge of an Australian country town....



If this can be done in arid Australia, it be done virtually anywhere.

Here's a smaller home version, 'square foot gardening' might be called 'square foot permaculture' due to the employment of many permaculture principles at a very tiny scale, though still based on seeding and harvesting processes (unlike permaculture that just grows an "Eden" of food endlessly without tending). There is a very tiny amount of tending in this model:

Square Foot Gardening
36 min





As if it's not obvious, I don't care for totalitarian unsustainable police states whether they are Cuban or based in the United States. However, for a LARGER working model of organic, soil-creating agriculture--and political mechanisms that support it instead of destroy it--take a page from the "accidental agricultural revolution" in Cuba after they lost access to subsidized Soviet Block inputs and petrochemicals from 1989:

Cuba: The Accidental Revolution PT-1 and PT-2 (1989 to present in agriculture)
Canadian Broadcasting Company
90 min
(split into in ten minute segments at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdnlcYx6AIE )

Other Secrets of Sustainable Soil Creation

However, another secret of sustainable soil has been recovered from Amazonian archeology. See the below BBC video about this.

The lost urbanized societies in the Brazilian Amazon and the western half of Bolivia are yielding other secrets of soil sustainability, how to create renewable soil with large agricultural techniques, instead of creating a social process that destroys the soil. One key to this process of sustainable soil involves 'char-and-burn' remineralization of the soil instead of 'slash and burn' (meaning remineralization by burning items to white ash).

For remineralization, in a lower-temperature, lower-oxygen char-and-burn of any 'agricultural waste' you create charcoal instead of white ash. Then you mix that charcoal in the soil. Since charcoal is hard to erode and only partially turned to free chemicals, this remineralization by charcoal-in-the-soil facilitates a slow and stable release of minerals into the soil--over centuries. This places minerals durably in the soil instead of with white ash turning these minerals into something erodible and easily-lost.

In the below video, see a working example of this ideal anthropogenic (human-created) 'char-and-burn' form of agriculture that makes a soil-creating agriculture instead of a soil-destroying agriculture. Even after these urban Amazonians are long gone, their anthropogenic soil is still incredibly rich. Learn one of the 'secrets of the 'terra preta'' below: this sustainable char-and-burn mineralization of the soil to move away from the unsustainable slash and burn styles of mineralization. (Some of these videos have been removed though I leave the titles to see so you can find them, as well as because I assume someone will repost these elsewhere. Then I will update the links).

Unravelling Human Creation of Amazonian 'Terra Preta'/Dark Soil (Or, How to Make Permanent, Anthropogenic, Self-Renewing Soil); 7 min.:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kUvgOPAPnA



"This is a short excerpt from a BBC Horizon documentary entitled "The Secret of El Dorado". It recounts how a previously unknown highly populated area of Eastern Bolivian Amazonia extending into the Amazon River Basin gave the area a major urban/agricultural society. It completely disappeared as Europeans arrived. However, it left its 'terra preta'--the dark earth of the Amazon--that is still mined and carried off because it is so beneficial a soil. And it still self-replicates--long after the original human/indigenous creators have died off and their secret lost. We are slowly unraveling how to recreate this perpetual self-renewing soil. Some secrets of it are featured in this short video clip. One secret is slash-and-char instead of slash-and-burn. The charcoal mixed later into the soil creates a slow release of minerals instead of burned ash that is eroded away very quickly. Very smart. See the amazing differences of scale of yields by only varying the addition of charcoal! Watch the longer video below for more detailed information about other aspects of the terra preta."

BBC - Horizon - The Secret of El Dorado
49 min
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2809044795781727003


"New evidence that advanced societies flourished in the Amazon Basin before the arrival of Europeans. It was the most notorious wild-goose chase in history: the Conquistadors' search for El Dorado, a fabulous kingdom of gold that Indians said lay hidden in the jungles of the Amazon Basin. But now, at last, archaeologists have uncovered the truth behind that myth. They have found evidence of a huge society, as advanced as the Egyptians or the Incas, right in the heart of the rainforest. And this is more than the story of a lost world rediscovered. For it seems that the people of the real El Dorado possessed a secret with the power to transform our world and their secret in the soil could be the solution to solving famine in the Third World and other nations [by making local independent and autonomous agricultural sound for poor soil areas--because you can invent the soil out of nothing in a low-tech way!] once and for all."

So, one of the main points is that a long durable human agriculture (permanent culture) would be soil creating instead of soil destroying. Actually at the herbicides/pesticides I go into this as well, so see that link.

Below is something I wrote for the Encyclopedia of Social Problems (2008, pending) on "Erosion." Perhaps I'll add some more of the details that were clipped out of the accepted draft. It helps you understand the generalizable biochemical processes involved in good soils.



Erosion

Erosion can refer confusingly to effects of human and natural processes, and human-natural interactive processes, the latter serving here as the focus in discussing soil erosion and biodiversity loss, particularly as a result of surface water runoffs in both urban and rural environments.

When humans disrupt soil creation processes habitat fragmentation, habitat destruction, and general ecological unraveling begins in that soil gradient's plant and animal life specific to it. Worldwide, the majority of biologists blame anthropogenic soil erosion and biodiversity loss for the current sixth major mass extinction event in the history of planet Earth. This is the first anthropogenic mass extinction event, and it is far more rapid than any of the “Big Five” in past geologic times.

Natural Erosion and Soil Creation

In different soil gradients, a specific slow, organic and inorganic physical process of natural soil creation occurs that involves beneficial erosion. This process jockeys increasingly with a faster, human soil erosion and sheet runoff that kills plant and animal life within a soil gradient—carrying the slowly formed soil away. Thus, anthropogenic soil erosion and associated biodiversity loss start in the alteration of this balance in the creation or destruction of soil and in how humans affect water dynamics.

Understanding soil creation chemically and physically is necessary if one wishes to understand and arrest the process of soil destruction. Soil creation results from a mixture of decayed organic and inorganic matter relationships which create an all important macro-molecular chelate arrangement of humic acids. Humic acids are a major component required for making humic substances, created via microbial degradation of once living matter. A large amount of humic molecules are hydrophobic, meaning they innately allow in the presence of water, clumping into `water avoiding' supramolecular nodes.

Only the acidic component of humic substances, mainly carboxylic acid, gives soil a capacity for chelation, a capacity to ‘store’ inorganic minerals as ions without them having a strong chemical bond with anything else. Chelated inorganic ions are both more readily bioavailable for plants or are sequestered away from them if they are poisons. Thus one of the most important properties of humic acid is this chelation ability to solubilize many ions into hydrophobic cations (water avoiding, chemically positive ions). For bioavailability chelation, ions like magnesium, calcium, and iron are made available for plant absorption. For sequestering chelation, humic acid holds apart as ions many elements that otherwise would form toxic molecular salts to poison the soil without positive biological effect (like cadmium and lead). For instance, sodium and chlorine ions naturally want to combine to form a salt. Instead, in good fertile soil they are attached as separate ions to humic acids and clay—rendered harmless by chelation. Thus, many good soils contain large quantities of safely chelated “salt,'' held apart in ionic form from precipitating out in this way. Plant growth thrives in such “theoretically saline'' soils, in many cases. In short, humic acid chelation capacities have an important dual role for living systems: making biological uptake of nutrients possible as well as sequestration of poisons. Chemistry of varied humic acids has a profound influence on chelation capacities as well.

On the contrary, human soil erosion processes chemically have in common destruction of the humic acid creation process. This causes [1] loss of chelation capacity and [2] loss of water permeability and loss of soil infiltration capacities as a consequence. For agriculture, the latter can lead to [3] forced excessive watering, and in turn, a raised pH. Water as slightly alkaline (chemically positive) as well as dilutive would demote the slightly acidic (chemically negative) environment that encourages humic acid creation and would thus demote chelation action further. Such watering as a consequence can lead to [4] artificially raised water tables that can bring in external salts to precipitate from below, creating a hardpan and encouraging soil erosion of the drier soil above it. These four interactive soil destruction factors cause increased salt precipitation in chelated soil. This encourages a chemical and physical change toward poorer soil and less water-absorbent soil in both urban and rural areas. This primes the conditions that cause soil erosion whether by sheet water runoff or wind.

Erosion: Just Add Water or Wind

Poor land/soil uses like deforestation, overgrazing, styles of chemical and physical agriculture (tilling), unmanaged construction activity, and urban impermeable surfaces demote humic acid formation. This leads to erosion because less humic acid means less hydroscopic soils, resulting in an innately dry soil—regardless of climate. Human-created poor soils facilitate ongoing natural water erosion and wind erosion above rates of natural soil formation. In heavily eroding water conditions, it is not water alone that erodes, but also suspended loads of abrasive particles of poor loose soil, pebbles, and boulders which expand the power of erosion as they traverse and scrape soil surfaces. Waterborne soil erosion in these conditions is additionally a function of water speed and suspended particle dynamics.

Wind erosion occurs in areas with little or no vegetation, often in areas without sufficient rainfall. However, the common factor of a less humic acidic hydroscopic soil facilitates wind erosion regardless of climate. One example is the long-term shifting dunes in beaches or deserts, which advance to bury any plant life even when underground sources of water may be sufficient. Huge areas of western China are experiencing expanding desertification and wind based erosion, whipped into incredible dust storms caused by mostly anthropogenic climate change. Both water and wind erosion cause further biodiversity loss from receiving water sedimentation and ecosystem damage (including fish kills).

Anthropogenic soil erosion and biodiversity loss expand from edge effects, the ecological juxtaposition between contrasting environments. The term identifies boundaries of natural habitats and disturbances by poor land use choices. When an edge is created to a natural ecosystem and the area outside is a disturbed system, even the natural ecosystem fragment is affected for great distances inward from the edge. This edge effect area is called the external habitat and has a different microclimate than the residual interior habitat. This partially compromised external habitat starts a feedback loop process, leading to further soil erosion and microclimate change unraveling and exposing more interior habitat to further habitat destruction. For example, Amazonian areas altered by edge effects exceed the area actually cleared, and fires are more prevalent in the external habitat area as humidity drops and temperature and wind levels rise. Increased natural fire frequency from the 1990s in the Amazon, Indonesia, and the Philippines is an edge effect.
In such contexts, an ecosystem unravels toward a simpler ‘emergy’ state (embedded or sequestered biomass energy). Intrusive exotic species are part of this, further causing biodiversity loss to levels of lower complexity. Exotics are hardly to blame. The blame is human soil erosive processes that create edge effects and biodiversity loss which exotics opportunistically utilize.

Shifting Blame and Shifting Cultivation

The blame for much of the world’s soil and biodiversity erosion usually focuses on the poor—the slash and burn cultivators of mostly the Developing World. However, transnational corporate Developed World logging around the world with Developed World directed mining, export-driven grazing of cattle and plantation agriculture linked to a war economy demoting political expression of local ecological self-interest. This combines as the major blame for soil and biodiversity loss, as well as the major factor keeping such degradation in place. In short, current faulty and unsustainable Developed World models and associated warfare are the larger origin of soil erosion, defoliation, and biodiversity destruction. Another example of misplaced priorities of exclusive blame (though proper concern) on peasant slash and burn for erosion is its false magnification by politicized Developed World research institutions. Despite the largest blame for soil erosion and biodiversity loss coming from Developed World developmental models, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) assessed shifting cultivation of the last independent natives to be the main cause of deforestation—ignoring more invasive and destructive unsustainable Developed World logging. The apparent discrimination and policy focus against independent shifting cultivators (whom the FAO recommend be forced to work on export economy rubber plantations) caused a confrontation between FAO and environmental groups who saw FAO supporting unsustainable commercial logging and plantation interests against local rights of indigenous people to be independent economically.

The lesson here is that the infrastructural and cultural adherence of more than 3-4 billion people (at least ambivalently) supportive of Developed World political economic models and commodity choices are far more dangerous to soil erosion and biological diversity than the estimated mere 250 million people subsisting on slash and burn. Instead of nomadic slash and burn sustenance-minded shifting cultivation villages, it is the expansion of permanent agricultural monocropping techniques particularly in export frameworks of high herbicide/pesticide commodities, mining pollution, transnational corporate logging, and tree plantations that has led to more soil erosion and biodiversity loss. Massive export-oriented sheep and cattle herding, for instance, led to soil erosion and biodiversity loss in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and the Amazon. In less than 150 years in Australia, export-oriented monocrop agriculture in New South Wales led to clearing 90 percent of native vegetation. The same chosen agricultural strategy and chosen commodities removed 99 percent of Tallgrass prairie in North America in the same period, leading to extreme habitat fragmentation and massive suspended loads (sediment) flowing down the Mississippi River. In the past fifty years, erosion is affecting even oceans, with over sixty massive ‘dead zones’ of deoxygenated ocean water appearing off the littorals of the Developed world.

In short, organizing developmental paradigms of more locally attenuated human-environmental commodity relationships to maintain local natural soil gradient formation processes and to maintain soil infiltration are two generalized goals common to addressing soil erosion and biodiversity loss. There are already many land use techniques developed in urban and rural areas to allow for quick sedimentation and slowing water speed. Wider goals are to demote contexts that allow suspended loads or soil destruction in the first place—by altering agricultural and construction practices to mitigate against loosened soil or heavy watering. There are frameworks of urban water handling and agricultural water and soil handling already developed to allow for more water infiltration, less (sometimes zero) soil tilling, and elimination of chemical pesticides and herbicides.

Integrating ecological relationships into urban infrastructural relations and making rural extraction sustainable by encouraging soil-creating human activities instead of soil destruction are both crucial. This seems to be the only route to demote massive soil erosion and biodiversity loss that follow soil gradients. Comparatively historically, soil and biodiversity survive with human societies, or all will fall together.

Mark D. Whitaker
See also

Environment: Runoff and Eutrophication, Sewage Disposal; Environmental, Degradation, Movement; Water: Organization, Quality, Supply.


Further Readings and References

Ascher, William. 1999. Why Governments Waste Natural Resources: Policy Failures in Developing Countries. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins Press.

Diamond, Jared. 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Viking.

Hillel, Daniel. 1991. Out of the Earth: Civilization and the Life of the Soil. New York: The Free Press.

Ponting, Clive. 1992. A Green History of the World the Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Potter, Christopher S., and Joel I. Cohen. 1993. Perspectives on Biodiversity: Case Studies of Genetic Resource Conservation and Development. Washington, D.C.: AAAS Press.

Pye-Smith, Charlie. 2002. The Subsidy Scandal: How Your Government Wastes Your Money to Wreck Your Environment. London Sterling, VA: Earthscan.

Quammen, David. 1997. The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction. Scribner.

Steensberg, Axel. 1993. Fire-Clearance Husbandry: Traditional Techniques Throughout the World. The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters’ Commission for Research on the History of Agricultural Implements and Field Structures. Herning: Poul Kristensen.

Books on Permaculture:

Permaculture One: A Perennial Agricultural System for Human Settlements by Mollison and Holmgren (Paperback - 1990)

Permaculture Two by Mollison (Paperback - Jun 1979)

PERMACULTURE: A Designers' Manual by Bill Mollison and Reny Mia Slay (Hardcover - Oct 1, 1997)

The Permaculture Way: Practical Steps To Create A Self-Sustaining World (Practical Steps) by Graham Bell, Bill Mollison, David Bellamy, and Brick (Paperback - Mar 30, 2005)

Permaculture Magazine by Permanent Publications - Magazine Subscription - 4 issues / 12 months

Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability by David Holmgren (Paperback - Dec 2002)

How to Make a Forest Garden by Patrick Whitefield (Paperback - Jun 22, 2002)

Or contact the Permaculture Research Institute, founded by Geoff Lawton.


In comments below are strategies of zeolite, soil remineralization from mining tailings, and other material inputs utilized to make soil sustainability.