Bill Mollison lays it out clearly to a group of young Americans, on his introduction to permaculture course.
THE TERRIBLE TIME OF DAY, By Bill Mollison 1981
I don’t think anybody has summarized what is happening on
the face of the Earth.
In order to change our ways, we seem to need to terrify ourselves,
anticipating tidal waves and catastrophes. Now those
things may come off, and the San Andreas fault may shift. But
we can’t do much about that. What is really happening is something
for which we, as human beings, are personally responsible.
It is very general. Almost everything we say applies everywhere.
The real systems that are beginning to fail are the soils, forests,
the atmosphere, and nutrient cycles. It is we who are responsible
for that. We haven’t evolved anywhere in the west
(and I doubt very much elsewhere except in tribal areas) any
sustainable systems in agriculture or forestry. We don’t have
a system. Let’s look at what is happening.
Forests
Forests have been found to be far more important in the oxygen
cycle than we ever suspected. We used to think oceans
were the most important element. They are not. Not only are
they not very important, contributing probably less than 8% of
the oxygen in atmospheric recycling, but many are beginning to
be oxygen-consuming. If we release much more mercury into
the seas, the ocean will be oxygen-consuming. The balance is
changing. Therefore, it is mainly the forests that we depend on
to preserve us from anarchic condition.
Of the forests, some are critically important, like the evergreen
forests, of which there are two extensive systems. One is
equatorial, multispecies; and the other, cool evergreen forests
of the Russian tundra and the southern evergreen forests.
Rain forests are critically important in the oxygen cycle, and in
atmospheric stability.
The forests also provide a very large amount of our precipitation.
When you cut the forest from ridges, you can observe the
rainfall itself fall between 10% and 30%, which you could probably
tolerate. What you dont see happen is that precipitation
may fall over 86%, the rainfall being only a small fraction of the
total precipitation. It is quite possible on quiet, clear nights with
no cloud, no rainfall recorded anywhere on any gauges, to have
a major precipitation in forest systems. It is particularly true of
maritime climates. But it is also true of all climates. Therefore
it is possible to very rapidly produce semi-desert conditions simply
by clearing trees from ridge top. This is being done at a
great rate.
It is the character of forests to moderate everything. Forests
moderate excessive cold and heat, excessive run-off, excessive
pollution. As forests are removed, immoderate extremes arrive.
And of course, it is the forests that create soils. Forests
are one of very few soil-creating systems.
What is happening to forests? We use a great many forest
products in a very temporary way - paper and particularly newspaper.
The demand has become excessive. At present, we are
cutting one million hectares per annum in excess of planting.
But in any one month, that can rapidly change. Last month, for
instance, that doubled because of clearing of the Mississippi
bottom land forests for soy beans.
Of all the forests that we ever had, as little as 2% remain in
Europe. I don’t think there is a tree in Europe that doesn’t exist
because of the tolerance of man or that hasn’t been planted by
man. There is no such thing as a primeval European forests. As
little as 8% remain in South America. And 15%, I think, is a general
figure in other areas. So we have already destroyed the
majority of forests, and we are working on a rather minor remnant.
Cutting rates vary, depending on the management practices.
But in general, even in the best managed forests, we
have a constant loss of 4%, giving 25 more years to go. But in
fact, what we observe throughout Southwest Asia and in South
America, and throughout the Third World, and wherever multinationals
can obtain ownership of forests in the Western
world, is about 100% loss. It is a "cut and run" system.
We have long been lulled into a very false sense of security
by reassurances that the logging companies are planting eight
trees for a tree cut. What we are really interested in is biomass.
When you take something out of the forest in excess of
150 tons and put something back which doesn’t weigh much
more than 10 ounces, you are not in any way preserving biomass.
What are the uses to which we put forests? The major uses
are as newsprint and packaging material. Even the few remaining
primeval forests are being cut for this. Forests that had
never seen the footsteps of man, that had never experienced
any human interference, are being cut for newsprint. Those are
forests in which the trees may be 200 feet to the first branch,
gigantic cathedrals. They are being chipped. There are trees in
Tasmania much taller than your redwoods. These are being cut
and shipped out as chips. So, for the most part, we are degrading
the primeval forests to the lowest possible use.
That has effects at the other end of the system. Waste products
from forests are killing large areas of the sea. The main
reason why the Baltic and Mediterranean and the coast off
New York have become oxygen-consuming is that we are carpeting
the sea bottom with forest products. There are, broadly
speaking, about 12,000 billion tons of carbon dioxide being released
annually by the death of forests. We are dependant on
the forests to lock up the carbon dioxide. In destroying forests,
we are destroying the system which should be helping us. We
are working on a remnant of the system. It is the last remnant
which is being eroded.
Climate
The effects of this on world climate are becoming apparent
both in the composition of the atmosphere and in the inability
of the atmosphere to buffer changes. In any month now, we will
break the world weather records in some way. In my home
town, we are very isolated and buffered by ocean and forest.
But we had in succession the windiest, the driest, and the wettest
month in history, in two hundred years of recording. So
really what’s happening in the world climate is not that it is
tending toward the greenhouse effect; it is not that it is tending
toward the ice age; it is starting now to fluctuate so wildly
that it is totally unpredictable as to which heat barrier you will
crack. But when you crack it, you will crack it an an extreme
and you will crack it very suddenly. It will be a sudden change.
Until then, we will experience immense variability in climate.
That is what is happening.
We can just go cutting along, and in maybe twelve more
years we won’t have any forests.
There is still another factor. It would be bad enough if it were
just our cutting that is killing forests. But since the 1920’s, and
with increasing frequency, we have been loosing species from
forest to a whole succession of pathogens. It started with
things like chestnut blight. Chestnuts were 80% of the forests
that they occupied. So a single species dropping out may represent
enormous biomass, enormous biological reserve, and a
very important tree. Richard St. Barbe Baker pointed out that
the trees that are going are those with the greatest leaf area
per unit. First chestnuts, with maybe sixty acres of leaf area
per tree. Then the elms, running at about forty. Now the beeches
are going, and the oaks, the eucalypts in Australia and Tasmania.
Even the needle leaf trees in Japan are failing. The Japanese
coniferous forests are going at a fantastic rate. So are
the Canadian shield forests and the Russian forests.
The Phasmid Conspiracy
Now we come to a thing called the phasmid conspiracy.
Each forest varies in each country in that its elms, its chestnuts,
its poplars, its firs, are subject to attack by specific pathogens.
Insects are taking some sort of cauterizing measures.
The American reaction would be to spray; the British reaction
would be to fell and burn; and in Australia, the reaction is to
say: "Aah, what the Hell! It’s going to be gone next year; let it
go!"
Really, is it these diseases? What are the diseases? Phasmids
are responsible for the death of eucalypts. There is the
cinnamon fungus. In elms, it’s the Dutch elm disease. In the
poplars, it’s the rust. And in the firs, it’s also rust. Do you think
that any of these diseases are killing the forest?
What I think we are looking at is a carcass. The forest is a
dying system on which the decomposers are beginning to feed.
If you know forests very well, you know that you can go out this
morning and strike a tree with an axe. That’s it. Or touch it with
the edge of a bulldozer, or bump it with your car. Then, if you sit
patiently by that tree, within three days you will see that maybe
twenty insects and other decomposers and "pests" have visited
the injury. The tree is already doomed. What attracts them is
the smell from the dying tree. We have noticed that in Australia.
Just injure trees to see what happens. The phasmids come.
The phasmid detects the smell of this. The tree has become its
food tree, and it comes to feed.
So insects are not the cause of the death of forests. The
cause of the death of forests is multiple insult. We point to
some bug and say: "That bug did it." It is much better if you can
blame somebody else. You all know that. So we blame the bug.
It is a conspiracy, really, to blame the bugs. But the real reason
the trees are failing is that there have been profound changes
in the amount of light penetrating the forest, in pollutants, and
in acid rain fallout. People, not bugs, are killing the forests
.
Soils
As far as we can make out, we have lost 50% of the soils we
have ever had before 1950. We have been measuring pretty
well since 1950. And we have lost another 30% of the soils
that remain. Now this is as true of the Third World as it is in
the Western World.
The rate at which soils are created is at about four tons per
annum per acre - much less in dry areas. Soils are created by
the fall of rain and the action of plants. The rate varies. In the
desert, they are being created at a much lesser rate. But in
these humid climates, at about four tons per acre. If you don’t
loose any more than four tons of soil per acre per annum, you
are on a break-even.
But let us look at the usual thing. In Australia, we lose about
27 tons of soil per cultivated acre per annum. You do a lot better
than that in America, however. Where you grow corn, you
can loose as much as 400 tons per acre per annum. While the
average may be twenty, it will go as high as 400 or 500 tons.
So we are not doing too well. In Canada, they are measuring
the humus loss, and that is about the same. There, they are
running out of humus. In the prairies, where they started with
good humic soils, they are now down to a mineral soil base.
Here is something that should be of interest to each of us.
For every head of population - whether you are an American or
an East Indian - if you are a grain eater, it now costs about 12
tons of soil per person per year for us to eat grain. All this loss
is a result of tillage. As long as you are tilling, you are losing. At
the rate at which we are losing soils, we don’t see that we will
have agricultural soils within a decade.
Apart from the soils that we lose directly by tillage, we are
losing enormous quantities of soils to what is called desertification.
In the state of Victoria, in Australia, we lose 800,000
acres this year to salt. That means not only a loss of soils
which are tilled, but also a loss of the soils that we don’t till.
Deforestation Causes Soil Loss
Now the main reason for disappearance of soils is the
cutting of forest. And almost always the cutting of the forest is
remote from where the soil is lost. That is, you can do nothing if
your soil starts to turn salty here, because the reason lies way
up the watershed, maybe a thousand miles away. We are now
starting to get soil salting in humid climates in Australia. It is
becoming a "factor out of place." It is no longer only occurring
in deserts. It occurs in quite humid, winter-wet climates. How
did this happen?
It is not a simple process, but it is easily understood. The
rain, as it falls on hills and penetrates forests, has a net downward
transfer. If we remove forests, we now have a net evaporation
loss. Forests transmit clean water downward, and they
release clean water into the atmosphere. This net downward
transfer carries with it the salts which are an inevitable part of
that additional four tons of soil per acre which is produced
from breakdown of rocks. These salts normally travel on out in
deep leads. They are not surface systems. Fresh water runs
from the surface and soaks down. Even in humid climates, we
have much saltier water at depth than we have on the surface.
This is because the trees act as pumps to keep the leads low.
If we cut the trees down, the deep leads rise at a measurable
rate, and they are rising measurably across enormous areas
in America, Africa and Australia. When they are up to about
three feet below the surface, the trees start to die of "phasmids."
And when they are up to about 18 inches below the surface,
other crops start to die. When they reach the surface,
they evaporate and the soil visibly goes to salt. Then the Australian
government starts providing free pumps to farmers and
they start pumping out the salt water. Where can they discard
the water they pump out? Big problem!
The next step is to have concrete delivered, so now water diverted
from the rivers soaks into the soil while they are pumping
the salt water off to the sea. And they have to be doing that
forever. You now want a thousand thousand pumps. At the
same time that the government is supplying pumps to farmers,
it is leasing additional wood-chipping licenses to the multinationals,
who are doing very well. They are selling pumps on one
hand and wood chips on the other. It is a happy circumstance
for some people, but a catastrophe for the Earth.
Most people, however, aren’t doing very well at all. So we are
losing soils and increasing desert at a simply terrifying rate.
And that is without any plowing for agriculture. You ask if the
analysts of the multinational firms are aware of these problems?
No, they have degrees in economics and business management
and all sorts of irrelevant areas.
Mining is also a major factor in salting on a local basis, and
has accounted on its own for the loss of whole hardwood forests
in areas of Western Australia and no doubt elsewhere.
Mining brings up a lot of residues which are evaporated on the
surface.
Highways, Cities and Wells
The largest single factor in Britain causing loss of soils is the
construction of highways. It is also a major factor in America. In
Britain, I think that there is a mile of highway for every square
mile of surface. And highways are being rapidly extended on the
supposition that you will never need the soil and that highways
will enable you to increase energy use. Highways account for
the permanent loss of soils, as do cities.
Cities are located on the 11% of very good soils of the Earth.
Canada is an interesting example, where cities are liable to
obliterate the top quality soils, without any other factor, and in
this decade, leaving agriculturalists to move on to less sustainable
situations. At the same time, we are calling for at least sustained
production, and in some cases an increase of production,
on the soils that remain. As the loss of agricultural soils is
largely due to the excess application of energy - mechanical energy
and also chemical energy - then the fact that we are attempting
to sustain productivity on the remaining soils means
that the rate of loss must increase due to the fact that we use
more and more energy on less and less surface.
Other factors work for loss of soils. In the arid southwest of
this country, there is a sort of cut and run agriculture in which
you sink a bore [drill a well] and pump up semi-saline water to
annual cultivated crop. You keep this up for four years. By then
the surface is heavily mineralized and you must seek another
area and sink another bore, which results in a sort of carpeting
destruction. You can see it. There are two or three good years,
then returns fall below economic level. The soils are usually
glued together with carbonates and they give up. pH rises by
about two points per annum. You might start at pH 8 and rapidly
go to pH 11. It is then that you pull out.
PDC Pamphlet I, An Introduction to Permaculture, Page 4
We look now at wind deflection of soils. This has brought
about failure of the inland soils in America. There are soils blowing
out to Los Angeles and falling as red rain. Soils from Central
Australia marginal areas fall on the cities as a sort of finely
diluted mud, measurable at 12 tons per acre per day. Wind is
a major factor in soil loss. The drier it gets, the more wind becomes
the factor that we look to.
We don’t have to look any further than the soil, or any further
than the forest, to see a finite world. I think we can say
with confidence that we don’t have a sustainable agriculture
anywhere in the world, or a sustainable forestry.
Water
Let us move now to water. Even a decade ago, somebody
said that water would become the world’s rarest mineral. The
water table everywhere is now falling rapidly. These are very ancient
systems we are playing with. Many of them are about
40,000 years in evolution. No longer is there any way you can
get cheap surface water. If you could, Los Angeles would buy it
and use it. A major factor in this is the way we seal everything
over in cities and towns. We don’t get any recharge of soil water.
We seal over huge areas with highways. We don’t return
water to the water table at all. As soon as water is in a river or
creek it is gone. It is on its way to the sea, or it is evaporated on
the desert salt pan. The flowing river is not really a very useful
thing. It is on the way out.
There are two very critical areas for water. One is within cities.
The other is on the edge of deserts. Both are running into
real trouble. Encroaching deserts are killing some millions of
people now in Africa. It is visible from the air as migrations of
herds and people out of the Sahara.
One of the dangers has been the long term disposal of atomic
waste in the deep waters. Some of these are beginning to
seep through the Sacramento Valley. You had better start
counting the radioactivity coming in the water table in Maine,
New Jersey and California, and, I have an idea, in lots of other
places as well.
Industry has simply used deep bores to put dangerous
wastes into the water table with the result that large areas of
this water table have become unpotable. I think Boston has
ceased to use its ground water. And you’ll never be able to use
it again. There will be no way you will ever clean that foul water.
In many towns and cities now, water is running at 700 parts
per million dissolved salts, which is at about the limit of the tolerance
of the human kidney. At 1100 parts per million, you
would experience fainting, accumulation of water in the tissues,
all sorts of problems. Most deaths from that commonly occur
in the cities, in Perth and Adelaide in Australia, in Los Angeles.
In all these areas, perhaps, we shouldn’t be using water for
drinking. It’s ok to shower in, although in Atlanta, the chlorine
alone almost asphyxiates you when you shower. PCB’s are a
cause of sterility. I think about 20% of American males are now
sterile by age 20.
The fact that water is becoming a scarce resource is manifestly
ridiculous, because roughly half a million gallons fall on
this roof right here annually. But you could be very short of water
here soon unless you build tanks or surface storages to
catch the water.
Now, of course the loss of trees has a pronounced effect on
this increased scarcity of water in cycle. The water is not cycling.
We are losing water on the surface of the Earth. I think
that 97% of water is locked up at all times and only 3% goes
into any cycling at all. We are reducing that very rapidly.
There are yet other factors. There is industrial pollution.
There is a desperate scramble for energy sources, whether
they are wood, coal, oil or atomic power. These are all really
dangerous things to use in terms of the general life system.
We are going toward real trouble. The danger is mainly in the
end result - what comes out of the process, what goes up the
chimneys. But in the case of wood, it is also the fact that you
destroy a tree.
By Bill Mollison - An Introduction to Permaculture
No comments:
Post a Comment