A Resource We've Got Plenty Of

The Paris climate talks are running over into the weekend, so there's no failure or meaningless success to report yet.

At The Huffington Post, on the front page, there are three stories about the climate talks, but the word "Trump" appears appears 35 times (as of right now; there are perhaps half that many separate reports). So we can say with some justification that humanity deserves its fate. We can speak confidently of failed evolutionary experiments.

Earlier in the talks, on December 2, U.K. sustainability scientists gave a presentation at Paris on the state of the world's soils.

Speaking today (Wednesday 2 December 2015) at the 21st Conference of the Parties in Paris, experts from the University of Sheffield’s Grantham Center for Sustainable Futures revealed that nearly 33 per cent of the world’s arable land has been lost to erosion or pollution in the last 40 years and vital action must now be taken to prevent the devastating knock-on effects...

Duncan Cameron, Professor of Plant and Soil Biology at the University of Sheffield, said: “Soil is lost rapidly but replaced over millennia and this represents one of the greatest global threats for agriculture.

“Erosion rates from ploughed fields average 10-100 times greater than rates of soil formation and nearly 33 per cent of the world’s arable land has been lost to erosion or pollution in the last 40 years.

“This is catastrophic when you think that it takes about 500 years to form 2.5 cm of topsoil under normal agricultural conditions. A sustainable model for intensive agriculture could combine the lessons of history with the benefits of modern biotechnology.”

Here's the Grantham Center's soil sustainability report.

What does good soil management require?

At the moment, intensive agriculture is unsustainable – under the intensive farming system current crop yields are maintained through the heavy use of fertilizers, which require high energy inputs to supply inorganic nitrogen via the industrial Haber-Bosch process. This consumes five per cent of the world’s natural gas production and two per cent of the world’s annual energy supply.

However, scientists have discovered that the key to creating a future sustainable model for intensive agriculture could lie in the past and even be supplemented by human excrement as an organic fertilizer.

Colin Osborne, Professor of Plant Biology at the University of Sheffield and Associate Director of the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures, added: “Historically, good soil management was supplemented by the collection and application of ‘night soil’, which is human excrement – a practice that continued into the 20th century.

“In a historical example of the circular economy, this closed the nutrient loop, recycling organic nitrogen and phosphorus back into soil.

“A sustainable soil-centric re-engineering of the agricultural system would reduce the need for fertilizer inputs and pesticide application, and require less irrigation, thus contributing towards safeguarding finite natural resources.”

Here we are on solid ground (so to speak) because human excrement is one resource we've got plenty of. From a soil-centric point of view, we can even relate this to Donald Trump, who is full of shit. How many hectares could be recovered by the judicious application The Donald's waste products?

And certainly Donald Trump is not the only one. We could re-fertilize all the lost arable land and still have plenty of shit left over to use for other purposes. For example humans could fling it at each other. They like to do that kind of thing.

In 2015, human production of excrement seems inexhaustible. Just look at The Huffington Post.

December 5 was World Soil Day (video).

Have a nice weekend.