Farmnag – Soil Is Not Dirt and Other Agrarian Insights

Soil is Really, Really Not Dirt

Despite the focus on climate change and carbon, one critical area of resource conservation is entirely off the administration’s radar screen. And it’s the one that determines the quality of all the others. Soil.

 

Past Presidents understood soil’s importance, including both Roosevelts, Truman and Eisenhower. But over time we turned the Soil Conservation Service into the Natural Resources Conservation Service and abandoned most of the programs assuring that America’s soils are conserved.

 

Soil is not dirt. It is the most extensive terrestrial ecosystem on the planet. Eminent biologist E.O. Wilson points out that there are more living creatures within the Earth’s soil than above it or in the oceans.

 

Soil is not a construction material. It is not that stuff sold at home improvement stores in plastic bags. Healthy soil sequesters carbon, cleanses pollutants from runoff, absorbs water and supports vegetation that cools the atmosphere.

 

Soil is not real estate. It is not valued by its location or distance from your house or urban center. Soil is the skin of the planet forming over centuries and millennia. Its value is in its ability to support life.

 

In considering how to spend scarce dollars on conservation and conservation “markets,” we must assess the future viability of our planet – and humans’ way of life. As we adjust tax codes, write regulations and create funds to engender specific actions, we must focus on what is most important for the future – waterfront development or clean water and prime agricultural soils?

 

As we review current regulatory programs, we must re-evaluate their purposes and consequences. Promoting the ruthless mining of vital soils for private gain and false conservation must be stopped. Continuing to allow the destruction of wetlands while pretending we can duplicate their complex functioning should cease. The Army Corps of Engineers, for one, has never seen a landscape that can’t be destroyed or reconstructed – just look at the Mississippi River.

 

One Bush and Congressional legacy that the Obama administration can reverse was hidden in Iraq funding bills. It is the Final Rule on Compensatory Mitigation for Losses of Aquatic Resources (40 CFR Part 230). It makes the business of wetland mitigation banking the preferred regulatory action.

 

“By emphasizing its preference for mitigation banking, the new rule will likely create a bonanza of business for wetland mitigation bankers, who currently provide only one-third of the mitigation required, according to recent studies,” was a statement on the Ecosystem Marketplace website in response to the rule’s release.

 

Wetland banking is a regulatory program but, as it is being administered, the public is being told that the environment is being improved while creating a new speculative “market” with no effective oversight or control. The same “logic” that thought up sub-prime lending, synthetic leases, and bundling mortgages brought this approach to environmental regulation. But rather than just having to write-off bad debt and suffer higher taxes, we will impair the ability of future generations to feed themselves and live in a healthy, sustainable world.  If the SEC, Treasury and Wall Street were unable to contain the financial mortgage disaster, how can we expect the EPA and Corps to regulate this short-sighted financial scheme?

 

The failure rate is significant, about 50 percent. Studies consistently conclude that mitigation does not adequately compensate for wetland losses, despite regulatory standards. These sites are routinely mined of soils to make construction easier, which only increases the likelihood of project failure while giving developers bonus income from sale of soil. While we talk about carbon emissions and sequestration, we are ignoring the resource that has been most effectively controlling carbon since the world began evolving. Soil.

  

The impact of this poor regulatory policy is staggering and irreversible in our lifetime. Consider the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina on our southern shores. Look at the continuing degradation of our nation’s waters. Think about the increased flooding we are experiencing in every state.

 

In America, under the policy of wetland mitigation, we are not only losing our vital wetlands to development, but the best agricultural soils are being mined to create compensatory mud holes – we are losing two irreplaceable natural resources and encouraging twice the destruction.

 

Soil is not dirt, and without it, there is no civilization.

 

 

 

 

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