The Poverty-Degradation Trap
Essentially, all life depends upon the soil… There can be no life without soil and no soil without life; they have evolved together. — Dr. Charles E Kellogg
The pattern I’m about to lay out is one of the most important, and one of the least recognized among the policy, governance, & finance crowd, when it comes to ecosystem restoration, conservation, ocean protection, and resource management in general.
I mentioned this pattern in my last post but it bears repeating, and some fleshing out. As a species we face two serious sets of problems:
- The set of human development problems: poverty, ignorance, drought, famine, injustice, inequality, war, etc.
- The environmental set of problems: climate change, soil erosion, deforestation, desertification, aquifer depletion, ocean dead zones, ocean acidification, biodiversity & habitat loss, pollution, etc.
Historically, civilizations (and I don’t use this term with a positive connotation) have only ever dealt with one set of these issues by exacerbating the other. For example, we destroy fundamental resources — soil, water, and ecologies, to provide food. We pollute and degrade ecosystems in order to produce, package, and transport the goods we consume, and to power the societies we live in. When we want to increase jobs, produce weapons, or promote human wellbeing in general, it means degrading ecologies.
Conversely, when we try to solve our environmental issues, we exacerbate the human ones; we put land and waters into conservation, and prohibit the human use of resources within those areas. After all, according to the previous paragraph, we only take care of ourselves by degrading the environment on which we all depend.
The pattern of treating these sets of problems separately inevitably fails to solve either, because they are inextricably connected. Human well-being is completely dependent on ecosystem function, and all real wealth comes from functioning ecologies. When we act as though degraded ecosystems are the necessary externality of civilization, what we’re really doing is seeding that civilization’s destruction.
“To forget how to dig the earth and tend the soil is to forget ourselves.” — Gandhi
History is full of examples. Timgad (pictured above) was a jewel of Roman North Africa, but the city cut down the surrounding forests to grow crops & heat the public baths. With the forests gone, drought/flood cycles emerged, crop production fell, desertification commenced, and the city declined till it was sacked by the Arabs. Then it was lost to memory, until it was discovered in the 1700s under 2 meters of sand. This pattern plays out over centuries, but it is inevitable unless management changes. Deforestation always leads to erosion, drought/flood cycles, falling production, and at least early stage desertification. I am unaware of any exceptions (though if you know of any, please leave a comment below!)
This pattern has played out on every continent since the advent of agriculture, regardless of whatever ism the society may have ascribed to. The Maya, Roman, Chinese, Euphrates/Tigris, Greek, American (Modern and Meso), Indus, and many others have already gone through variations of this theme — where agriculture led to deforestation, desertification, soil erosion, soil salinization, water scarcity — inevitably leading to poverty. (for a lot more detail, check out the book “Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations,” by Montgomery)
Luminaries from Aristotle to Washington to Gandhi have commented on the key role healthy soils play in human society, and the inherent dangers when we do not steward it. In Washington’s case, he attributed colonial westward expansion to tobacco farming’s impact on soil, 100 years before the narrative of Manifest Destiny emerged.
Once you know this pattern, you see it almost everywhere. Today it’s in California, where elevation of farmland has fallen nearly 10 meters due to the overuse of water in agriculture. It’s in the entire SW United States where the Colorado Watershed provides 15 million acre feet of water, 80% of which goes to agriculture, and where demand for water in the next generation is expected to increase by another 15 million acre feet per year.
It’s in Indonesia, where small-scale farmholders burn rainforest to convert to palm oil production. In Brazil where the amazon is cleared for timber, then beef, and then soya. It’s in Seville, where rice farmers have cut their production by 50% (leaving half their farms fallow), because there’s not enough water anymore.
It’s in Mexico, Ghana, Senegal, Mozambique, and as far as I can tell, coastal communities everywhere, where fishing villages have seen their catch fall by over 90% in the last two decades, forcing fishermen to poach illegal species (a la the Totoaba and Vaquita situation), deforest mangroves (leading to massive erosion, and entire towns being swallowed up by the ocean), or simply give up and move into cities.
Yes, we can temporarily create human wellbeing by degrading ecosystems and mining their resources, and we have done so as a species for thousands of years. It used to be that when a society did that, either they’d pick up and move, or go a-conquering. I find this deeply concerning, particularly when headlines from the Smithsonian report that areas of N. America’s grain belt have lost 1/3 of their topsoil.
So here’s the bottom line: We can extract great wealth from ecosystems in short periods of time (geological blinks) but the degradation of those ecosystems leads inevitably to poverty and many other problems. Degraded lands reach a point that they are no longer able to produce food, no longer foster biodiversity, no longer retain water, and no longer maintain soil. It’s fast wealth, followed by long and crushing poverty due to ecosystem damage. That’s the pattern going back at least 10,000 years, with agriculture smack dab at the root of it.
What’s worse, this pattern fractals up and down human organizations , across all geographies, and across cultures — from as small a unit as a family farm, to as large a unit as a nation state (and maybe even a planet).
No amount of clean energy will save us if we continue to degrade ecosystems. No amount of carbon sucked out of the atmosphere will prevent massive calamity and crushing poverty, drought, or famine, as long as we continue to degrade ecosystems. And yet, we have to feed, clothe, and power ourselves. This is the degradation-poverty cycle; any attempt to create sustainable societies must address it. For us at Regenerative Resources, it’s one of the fundamental problems that we solve.
