Deforestation, Soil Erosion, and How You Can Help

In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond explains two factors were present in every society that collapsed: deforestation and soil erosion. After reading Collapse recently, I decided to research more on deforestation and soil erosion to understand what we are doing currently, and how we might be able to prevent it. 

Today, deforestation and soil erosion are massive problems worldwide, however there is good news. For one, we have clear evidence of causes and can understand why deforestation and erosion is happening. Secondly, there are signs that we are making progress. 

Let’s start by understanding the problem.

A Symbiotic Relationship

Diamond examines societies that collapsed or are collapsing, both ancient (i.e. Mayan, Easter Island, etc.) and current (i.e. Rwanda, Montana, etc.). He also examines societies who have chosen to succeed (i.e. New Guinea, Dominican Republic, Japan, etc.). In collapses, populations typically outgrow their food capacity, leading to starvation, war, migration and more. Though many factors contribute to a collapse, deforestation and soil erosion have been factors in every one. 

Soil and forests have a symbiotic relationship. Forests protect soil by shielding wind, absorbing water and providing nutrients to the soil. If soil is well cared for, there is no need to cut down more forests. If soil is “mined” in favor of quick profits or because of miseducation, we exhaust it and need to cut down more trees to access healthy soil.

Deforestation

Forests keep rivers cool and habitable for fish, and protect the soil from wind and rain, and provide habitat for diverse ecosystems. A healthy forest is diverse, supporting a wide range of species. This diversity is crucial for our survival. Sadly, 95% of all “wildlife” is now for human consumption (and to raise the animals we eat). 

The main causes of deforestation are beef ranching, soy, palm, and logging. Let’s look at ranching and logging.

Ranching

How bad is the problem? In Brazil, an area of rainforest three-fourths the size of Texas has been lost due to cattle ranching in the last 30 years. In the U.S., only 2.5% of the landmass is considered wilderness.

To understand how deforestation is playing out today, I read This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West by Christopher Ketcham. If there’s one takeaway from this book it’s “the eviction of cattle is the single most important action we could take for the public lands, for the wild plants and the wild animals.” Cows, which are best suited to live in wet, rainy, grassy climates, are trampling, eating and pooping all over arid, fragile ecosystems in the west. 

In the U.S., primarily in the west, there are large areas of land set aside for the benefit and enjoyment of future generations. These lands are legally owned by all Americans and are managed by the federal government by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS). The USFS was originally established to prevent deforestation. If you’ve spent time in the American west, you might be familiar with these lands. You can camp, hike and enjoy many of these areas for free or low cost. 

It is supposed to be multi-use land, but the BLM is pimped out for ranchers, loggers, and oil drillers. Some ranchers are receiving grazing permits on BLM land for heavily subsidized prices. The benefit, if it exists, is hard to understand. Public grazing returns $1 for every $2,500 dollars spent. Less than 2% of our beef supply is coming from cows grazing on this land. Removing cattle from the West would reduce only 0.1% of the West’s employment as 10% of these ranchers own 50% of all livestock on these lands. 

Meanwhile, widespread grazing causes horrible damage, “Conservation biologists in recent years have concluded that grazing is the ‘most insidious and pervasive threat to biodiversity on rangelands’ and that it may be the major factor negatively affecting wildlife in the 11 western states.’ Some ecologists believe it is the primary cause of species extinction, topsoil loss, and desertification in the West”

The ranchers, who Ketcham unabashedly refers to as parasites living off the government, are the same people who swear against the government when any regulation threatens their profits. The attitude is heavily supported by me-first, planet-hating, influences of Mormonism in the west. Ranchers on BLM land are nothing more than thieves of American people and vandals of American land.

Logging

Similarly, logging companies receive subsidized permits to log our forests. Like ranching, Americans lose between $1400-1900 dollars for every acre logged.

Forest fires occur naturally and are good for healthy forest regrowth, though they’ve been happening with greater frequency. Logging advocates claim forests need to be thinned to reduce fuel and fire sizes, but this is ecologically incorrect. By thinning the forest, you are creating more opportunities for sunlight to dry out the forest bottom, creating more fuel.

Soil Erosion

Deforesting leaves our soils more vulnerable. If our soil erodes away, we won’t be able to grow enough food to survive. When layers of soil are blown away by wind or washed away by rains, they lose vital nutrients that are essential for growing. If we don’t properly manage our soil, we have to cut down more forest to access fertile, diverse soil.

In his books Dirt and Growing the Revolution, David R. Montgomery detail soil mistakes of the past and highlights farmers worldwide leading a movement to regrow our soil.

In Dirt, Montgomery highlights how several civilizations failed because they did not properly steward their soil. As populations grew, along with the need for more food (or perhaps the other way around), people began growing on more marginal lands. More food leads to more people. But bad growing seasons and exhausting marginal land would devastate societies, with more people than the land could support

A culture of carelessness in the U.S. – with a lesson in racism

Unsurprisingly, the U.S. has perfectly exemplified environmental carelessness. When European colonizers invaded the U.S., they sought out to find a good to exploit and export to Britain for a high profit. Colonial economics led to mining for the best food from their colonies, like coffee, sugar, bananas, tobacco, or tea. This led to monoculture, and in the US, tobacco and cotton would become dominant crops, selling for much higher than other crops.

For colonizing Americans, land was abundant and cheap. They bought land, forced slaves to deforest it, and then forced slaves to farm tobacco (and later cotton). Tobacco is labor intensive and in order to make a profit growing tobacco, slavery was a necessity. Had farmers properly cared for the land, rotating crops and not exclusively growing tobacco, the need for slaves would have been eliminated. Landowners would exploit land for a handful of years until it was exhausted and moved west to fresh land. Complete abuse of the soil led to deep gullies and ruined farmland. 

Montgomery tells how this culture of American recklessness continued into the 1900s, showing how deep tilling of the Great Plains led to massive soil losses in the dust bowl, and how fertilizers have been poisoning our lands.

A short, but profound lesson in racism: In the 1800s, slave owners were breeding slaves and selling them to Americans moving west. The ability to sell slaves to western states was critical for southern colonizing landowners. Roughly 75% of their wealth was held in their slaves.  After Lincoln became president and northern abolitionist pressure helped ban slavery in states like Missouri, Texas, and California, the economic prospects of southern slave owners eviscerated. The Civil War followed quickly thereafter.

I am continually fascinated by how things benefiting the environment also benefit human health and the economy long term. I found this specific example between horrible human exploitation, land exploitation, and economics particularly fascinating. Had colonizers farmed responsibly, instead of careless cash crop exploitation of tobacco and cotton, there would have never been a need for slaves. Instead, Americans sold luxury crops to Europeans on the backs of Africans. Which by the way, also came at the expense of Native Americans who were killed in droves and are still oppressed today. Talk about consumerism.

Growing a Revolution

Despite mistakes of the past, there are signs of improvement. Things can be bad but improving, which is the focus of Montgomery’s follow up book Growing the Revolution. Montgomery travels around the world, from the Great Plains to Ghana to Costa Rica and places in between. He meets farmers who are leading the way in conservation agriculture (also referred to as regenerative agriculture).

According to Montgomery, conservation agriculture may vary from place to place but it shares three main principles:

1. Minimum disturbance of the soil – no tilling of the land
2. Growing cover crops and retaining crop residue so that the soil is always covered
3. Use diverse crop rotations, change what you are growing frequently enough to avoid pests

When these three principles are used, organic matter in the soil is built up and can be sustainably grown on into the future. It provides excellent habitat for pollinators. Farms that use conservation principles are able to better withstand droughts, floods, high temperatures and other extreme weather. 

If done right, conservation agriculture requires minimal to no fertilizer. Additionally, intense grazing for only 1-2 days per year can help strengthen plant roots and return manure to the soil in an easy way. Montgomery also talks about the benefits of biochar, which has the potential to sequester anywhere from 10-67% of worldwide carbon emissions if implemented en masse.

From an economic perspective, regenerative agriculture is a no-brainer. With healthy soil, farms typically grow more per acre and save a ton on fertilizer expenses and diesel costs from running tractors through fields significantly. They also save a ton of time. One example he spotlighted was Cronin Farms and its impact in South Dakota that saw average farmland value in the area went from $300 per acre to $3000 per acre.

Montgomery conservatively estimates that adopting all three principles of conservation agriculture on a mass scale, with reduced fertilizer and diesel use, could potentially lead to “reduce or offset 10 to 20 percent of global carbon emissions.” Add the estimated 10-67% offsets from Biochar, the potential to reduce carbon could be anywhere from 20-87% if implemented on a large scale!

Conservation agriculture is a growing movement, particularly in the Americas. From the 1970s to 2013, farms using no-till (the first principle) have gone from 3 million hectares to 157 million hectares. Though this is only 11% of farmable land, the progress is undeniable.  South America is leading the way, accounting for over 42% of land under no-till, while North America is in second with 33%. There is a ton of potential in the Americas and even more in the Eastern Hemisphere, not to mention what would happen if all three principles of conservation agriculture were adopted worldwide.

Reason for Optimism

While there are headwinds, there plenty of reasons to be optimistic. 

Conservation agriculture requires few inputs, which is not of interest to oil, fertilizer, or machinery companies. As Montgomery eloquently put it “Agrobusiness is now as much about selling products to farmers as selling what farmers produce.” They will lobby the government for policies that aren’t necessarily in farmers’ best interest, or the planet’s. Switching to conservation agriculture can sometimes take a couple of years for the land to readjust, jeopardizing farmer’s livelihoods in the short term. If governments can provide incentives for making the switch, the transition would be greatly accelerated. Subsidies for conventional agriculture don’t do the farmers, taxpayers, or the land any favors.

Nevertheless, the benefits of conservation agriculture are attractive. Increased crop yields, reduced expenses, greater resilience to extreme weather, and more free time make conservation agriculture incredibly appealing. Most of all, being able to grow on the land sustainability into the future will reassure farmers for the long run.

For society at large, we will benefit by having better and healthy food, cleaner ecosystems, and more forests.

What You Can Do

For someone who isn’t a farmer, how can you promote healthy soil and forests? I am not a farmer and don’t claim to be. My knowledge is limited and I don’t claim to know the challenges farmers face. That said, there are several things we can all do!

First, educating yourself is critical. Reading any of the books I mentioned, checking out other books, watching documentaries, or getting involved with organizations in your community are all great options. Here is one such organization – No-till on the Plains – but there are countless.

You can also call your lawmakers (who you vote for!) and pressure them to:

• Provide support for farmers switching to regenerative/conservation agriculture
• Eliminate subsidies for conventional agriculture
• Eliminate subsidies for oil
• Eliminate grazing, ranching, and oil permits on public lands and in national forests (it is your land after all)
• Always support the Endangered Species Act of 1973. It is one of the most comprehensive, beneficial, and effective pieces of environmental legislation ever passed.

In terms of your eating habits, you can:

• Switch to a plant-based diet to eliminate the need for grazing cows
• Grow your own food using conservation agriculture techniques
• Buy regeneratively grown food, or organic if regenerative isn’t possible. Farmers markets and CSAs will often have good potential for this and you can ask the farmers directly. There does not yet seem to be a dominant certification or source for identifying food grown regeneratively. If anybody has advice or recommendations, please comment below!

Solving climate change and providing enough food for a population projected to level out around 11 billion people will take teamwork. The solutions are simple, though not necessarily easy. Change takes time. However, eating plants, conservation agriculture, and bike lanes don’t require rocket science. Creating and maintaining healthy soils and forests will require education, collective will, environmental stewardship and consistency over time. It will require the mindset of living in line with nature.