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Capitalism versus the Biosphere

As long as the individual manufacturer or merchant sells a manufactured or purchased commodity with the usual coveted profit, he is satisfied and does not concern himself with what afterwards becomes of the commodity and its purchasers. The same thing applies to the natural effects of the same actions.

—FREDERICK ENGELS¹

THE DEVELOPMENT OF INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM in late eighteenth-century England resulted in air and water pollution and degraded soil. Marx and Engels followed the scientific studies and political literature and concluded that negative social and ecological side effects of capitalism, today commonly referred to as “externalities,” are unintentional, but are nevertheless logical outcomes of a competitive economic system predicated on profit maximization. Engels gives this example:

What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees—what cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock! In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate, the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite the opposite in character.²

The concept of metabolic interactions between humans and the environment was used as framework to help explain what was happening. In biology, “metabolism” refers to the basic chemical processes that occur within cells and organisms, which require an exchange of materials with the outside environment. For example, we need to eat, drink water, and breathe air to get oxygen into our bodies but we also return materials to the environment in our solid and liquid waste and when we exhale CO₂-enriched air. Marx extended the concept of metabolism to refer to all human interactions with the environment: as we go about making clothes, building houses, factories, and machinery, drilling for oil, producing food, and so on. He argued that when capitalists followed their singular goal of making money, some of these interactions created disturbance so great that they caused irreparable rifts “in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.”³

Why do metabolic rifts and disturbances happen? A fundamental assumption of capitalist economics is that there are unlimited sources of natural resources and unlimited “sinks” to absorb the pollution associated with the production, distribution, use, and disposal of products. Environmental and social considerations play only a small role (if any) when making decisions on production and distribution because the overriding goal is to make the highest profit. Thus, “externalities,” the negative side effects of profit-driven production decisions, are inevitable. As new, larger tools and technologies are developed to increase production and more energy is required to run them, damage to nature occurs more frequently and with much longer-term impacts. Individual capitalists (and the system as a whole) are unable to rationally manage human interaction with the rest of the natural world in ways that preserve the integrity and healthy functioning of the biosphere. It is this reality that leads to severe ecological disturbances and rifts, in the natural cycles and processes on which we and other species depend.

THE GREAT ACCELERATION

The United States economy experienced a boom following the Second World War when the productive capacity built for the war effort was repurposed to fulfill the increased demand for domestic commodities resulting from savings built up during wartime austerity and to rebuild war-torn economies abroad. The economy was also greatly stimulated by governmental programs such as the GI Bill, helping war veterans go to college and buy houses with zero down payments, and a huge burst from the increased production and use of automobiles. The building of the vast interstate national system of highways, begun under President Eisenhower in the mid-1950s, led to the growth of suburbs and stimulated new businesses such as restaurants and hotels and gas stations to service highway travelers and stores for the new suburban population. This is period also marks the beginning of the effort to turn the U.S. public into voracious consumers. From the 1950s to the mid-1970s, economic activity more than doubled in the United States, Britain, and Japan and increased rapidly in other already developed countries.

The dramatic expansion of the capitalist system during this period reoriented relations in much of the world toward commodity production of all manner of goods and materials. Global trade increased exponentially, as did energy use, world population, and the global economy as a whole. Production of new and old materials took off: global production of synthetic pesticides went from about one-tenth of a ton in 1945 to about 3 million tons in 1980; plastics jumped from around 2 million tons in 1950 to 52 million tons in 1976, 109 million tons in 1989, and over 300 million tons in 2015.⁴ The Working Group on the Anthropocene, a committee of the International Union of Geological Sciences, has dated the start of the proposed new geological epoch to the post–World War II period, with its “Great Acceleration” of economic activity and resultant damage to the metabolic interactions needed to maintain healthy and fully functioning ecosystems (see Figure 3.1, pages 78–79).

In capitalism, critical economic decisions are often far removed from where the primary effects will be felt and without input from those who will be directly affected. This makes it especially difficult to fully grasp and combat the extent of environmental degradation. Mark Campanale, founder of the Carbon Tracker Initiative and “sustainable investment analyst” of multibillion-dollar projects, illustrates this when describing a meeting “typical of those which happen every day in the City of London”:

Figure 3.1: Social-Economic and Ecological Trends and the “Great Acceleration.”

Source: Graphs created by R. Jamil Jonna based on data in Steffen et al., “Trajectory of the Anthropocene,” 81–98.

A group of Indonesian businessmen organized a lunch to raise £300 million to finance the clearing of a rain forest and the construction of a pulp paper plant. What struck me was how financial rationalism often overcomes common sense; that profit itself is a good thing whatever the activity, whenever the occasion. What happened to the Indonesian rain forest was dependent upon financial decisions made over lunch that day. The financial benefits would come to the institutions in London, Paris, or New York. Very little, if any, would go to the local people…. The rain forest may be geographically located in the Far East, but financially it might as well be located in London’s Square Mile.⁵

Accelerating changes in our metabolism with the biosphere, generated by the activity of our economic system, have created deep ecological disturbances and rifts, resulting in the global environmental crisis we now face. But even when these disturbances are recognized, after-the-fact attempts to fix the situation frequently go on to cause their own unforeseen negative effects, creating even larger problems.

NUTRIENT CYCLES

In ecosystems relatively undisturbed by human activity such as remote forests and grasslands, the flow of matter and energy tends to remain in a dynamic but relatively stable equilibrium. Essential nutrients such as phosphorus and calcium cycle through this healthy ecosystem with very small amounts lost. Nutrients, though removed from the soil by plants, are maintained within the local ecosystem by their return as animals die and plants shed their leaves or die and decompose. A variety of microorganisms can make nitrogen available to plants and help make the elements in minerals and organic matter soluble and thus usable by plants.

Traditional hunting-gathering communities had relatively small impacts on the cycling of nutrients, not that different from those of other hominid species. Beginning around 10,000 years ago, the invention of agriculture in several locations led to increases in the size and mobility of populations. Many communities depended on slash-and-burn, or swidden farming, whereby if the fallow is sufficient to allow strong regrowth of forests, nutrients naturally accumulated in the vegetation and in the residues on the forest floor. By the time these patches went through another cycle of cutting and burning, sufficient nutrients accumulated to grow crops for two or three years. In ancient civilizations such as those in Mesopotamia and Egypt, with agriculture based on the inundation of soils near rivers by annual flooding, sufficient nutrients were added with the sediments that arrived with the water to replenish the soil. While soil fertility was maintained without much additional effort in slash-and-burn and flood-based farming, other long-term farming systems found ways to perpetuate fertile soils such as using lake or pond sediments as soil amendments or rotations with clovers that enriched soil with nitrogen.

With the growth of industrial capitalism centuries later, agricultural land was put into permanent production. As we described in the last chapter, a large proportion of the population was forcibly removed from the agricultural land and migrated to cities to find work. This created a growing rift in nutrient cycling: most of the nutrients from the soil, transported to cities in the form of foodstuffs, were not returned to the fields. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, Karl Marx described the consequences of such a rift in nutrient cycling:

Capitalist production, by collecting the population in great centers, and causing an ever increasing preponderance of town population … disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil, i.e., prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil.⁶

Some seventy years after Marx published Capital, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace wrote that society was pouring “fertility year after year into the cities, which in turn pour what they do not use into rivers and the ocean.”⁷ This was the first large-scale nutrient cycle rift.

A second rift in the cycling of nutrients developed in the mid-to-late twentieth century. With farm animals raised on large industrial farms far removed from the land that produced their food, crop soils lost large quantities of nutrients that were never replenished with manure. Thus farm products for both human consumption and animal feed, containing large quantities of nutrients removed from soils, are transported long distances from croplands to cities and factory farms. (See Figure 3.2.)

These rifts in the cycling of nutrients have led to the impoverishment of soils, while in cities huge quantities of nutrients accumulate as waste and sewage and as manure on factory farms. Simultaneously, the massive amounts of synthetic fertilizers that are brought in to replace the lost nutrients leach into groundwater and run off into lakes and rivers. This causes water eutrophication: huge algal blooms that deplete the oxygen when they decompose, creating giant low oxygen zones where rivers enter the ocean.

Most pronounced in the United States, the shift to raising beef cows in large feedlots was based on feeding them diets high in corn and soy to fatten them more quickly, shortening the time needed to get them to marketable weight so as to increase profits. But this means that less land is devoted to growing perennial crops for pasture or hay, once the near-exclusive diet of domestic ruminant farm animals. For a year or two following a productive legume or grass-legume hay crop, all the needed nitrogen for grains or vegetables can come from nitrogen stored in soil. Without legume forage crops in rotation, nitrogen fertilizers must be applied annually to supply that key nutrient to grow grains. Less land covered in perennial crops leads to an increase in other problems, such as accelerated runoff of rainfall and soil erosion.

The development and extensive use of synthetic fertilizers was a capitalist attempt to work around the massive loss of nutrients from agricultural soils. Most of the human waste in the cities of the developed world is chemically and biologically treated in sewage treatment plants, ensuring that relatively clean water is discharged back into rivers and oceans. It is estimated that half of the treated sewage sludge (referred to as “biosolids”) in the United States is used for landscaping and on farmland; the remainder is consigned to landfills. Farm fields are the logical destination for the nutrients in human sludge. However, use of sludge on farmlands is a highly questionable practice unless stringent actions are taken to reduce the potential toxic heavy metals and organic chemicals from industry and services such as healthcare (with its use of radioactive test materials), and the chemicals in household products before it is applied to soils.

Figure 3.2: Nutrient and Engergy Flows during Different Eras

Source: Modified from Fred Magdoff, Les Lanyon and Bill Liebhardt, “Nutrient Cycling, Transformation and Flows: Implications for a More Sustainable Agriculture,” Advances in Agronomy 60:1–73 (1997).

The “solutions” to the rupture of nutrient cycling result in their own problems. For example, the large quantity of fertilizer needed to replace the exported nutrients requires a lot of energy to manufacture (especially to produce nitrogen fertilizer) and damage to land and water occurs as phosphorus is mined and refined. With respect to phosphate, its continual application to agricultural soils is not possible indefinitely. By the end of the century, the currently known high-grade phosphorus deposits may be depleted.⁸

Use of inadequate rotations—either no rotation for a number of years or alternating between corn and soybeans—results in lower yields than would have occurred if the crops had been grown as part of the more complex rotation needed when farm animals and crops are raised on the same farm. Only about half of the applied nitrogen fertilizer is actually used by corn plants. A lot of excess fertilizer, therefore, remains in the soil at the end of the season, and much of it can leach out, causing stream and river pollution with nitrate (NO₃⁻). According to the Environmental Protection Agency, “Forty-six percent of the nation’s river and stream length has high levels of phosphorus, and 41 percent has high levels of nitrogen…. Poor biological condition (for macroinvertebrates) is almost twice as likely in rivers and streams with high levels of phosphorus or nitrogen.”⁹ Although urban sewage systems and storm runoff make significant contributions, agricultural production is responsible for a huge proportion of nitrogen and phosphorus water pollution. Excess use of nitrogen fertilizer has an additional effect, causing an increase in release of nitrous oxide (N₂O) into the atmosphere. N₂O is a powerful greenhouse gas as well as the leading cause of depletion of stratospheric ozone (O₃), which protects the Earth’s surface from UV radiation.

The magnitude of nitrate losses from cropland in the U.S. Midwest is staggering. The U.S. Geological Survey’s Van Meter continuous monitoring station—in the Raccoon River just upriver from Des Moines, Iowa—samples river flow and nitrate concentrations at fifteen-minute intervals around the clock. Over the span of a year, from April 1, 2015, to March 31, 2016, approximately 100 million pounds of nitrogen (as nitrate and nitrite) flowed down the river on its way to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico.¹⁰

A third rift in nutrient cycling occurred with the drastic reduction in populations of sea birds and large land and sea animals. Migratory herbivores once moved huge amounts of nutrients long distances on grasslands; sea birds and anadromous fish (that live most of their lives in the ocean but return to their home rivers to spawn such as salmon and smelt) carried nutrients from sea to land and whales brought them from the deep ocean to surface waters.

Though extinctions of mammoths and other megafauna happened in precapitalist times, much of the damage to populations of remaining large land and sea animals occurred very recently under the pressures of capitalist resource extraction and land use changes. With regard to the oceans, researchers estimate:

For phosphorus (P), a key nutrient, upward movement in the ocean by marine mammals is about 23% of its former capacity (previously about 340 million kg of P per year). Movements by seabirds and anadromous fish provide important transfer of nutrients from the sea to land, totalling ~150 million kg of P per year globally in the past, a transfer that has declined to less than 4% of this value as a result of the decimation of seabird colonies and anadromous fish populations.¹¹

Three rifts in the natural cycling and flow of nutrients have opened as a result of the functioning of capitalist economies. Trying to remedy the consequences of the first two of these has led to other serious ecological problems. (There has been no attempt to deal with the third rift.)

THE CARBON CYCLE

The preindustrial terrestrial carbon cycle consisted of atmospheric CO₂, together with the energy of sunlight and the photosynthetic process of plants, to create carbon-rich organic compounds. Respiration of plants and organisms feeding on plants or other organisms returns CO₂ to the atmosphere. Oceans also absorb huge quantities of CO₂, which is then incorporated into photosynthesizing organisms such as phytoplankton. Dissolved CO₂ is combined with calcium by shell-forming animals to produce calcium carbonate (CaCO₃), which they take to the ocean bottom when they die, safely sequestering the carbon.

Before the use of fossil fuels, humans burned wood and, later, crop residues, manure, and peat for heating, cooking, and light, returning to the atmosphere more CO₂ captured by plants than by food consumption and bodily respiration.

The dramatic changes to the carbon cycle brought about by human activity, and greatly accelerated during the period following the Second World War, was caused by land use changes (about 25 percent of the increase in greenhouse gas release) and the use of fossil fuels (about 75 percent of the increased emissions). As a result, the average concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere has climbed from a pre-industrial baseline of 280 parts per million (ppm) to over 400 ppm—a level last reached some 23 million years ago.¹² The longest continuous monitoring of atmospheric CO₂ is from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. Figure 3.3 shows the rapid increase in CO₂ from 1960 to mid-2016.¹³

Approximately 45 percent of the excess carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere and contributes to global warming, while 30 percent dissolves into the oceans, causing them to gradually acidify, and 25 percent is removed by terrestrial plants. Hotter, more acidic seawater leads to coral bleaching and makes it more difficult for animals such as oysters and lobsters (as well as corals) to form their calcium carbonate shells.

Figure 3.3: Atmospheric CO2 Concentration (through August 2016).

Source: R. F. Keeling, S. J. Walker, S. C. Piper, and A. F. Bollenbacher, Scripps CO₂ Program (http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu), Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), University of California, La Jolla, California.

Land Use Changes

The world’s soils contain enormous stores of carbon as organic matter, composed of animal and plant residue in different stages of decomposition as well as living organisms. Altogether, soils contain about five times more carbon than is found in Earth’s atmosphere.¹⁴ For every 1 percent of organic matter in a soil—and temperate-region agricultural soils normally have between 1 and 6 percent organic matter by weight—the amount of carbon in the top 6 inches of a field’s soil is approximately equivalent to all the CO₂ in the atmosphere above the field.¹⁵

With the shift to agriculture, major changes occur. The original vegetation is frequently burned, releasing CO₂. In addition, soil disturbance such as tree removal and plowing result in soil organisms having greater access to organic matter and decompose it at an accelerated rate. Thus, converting forests or savannas to agriculture results in a large release of CO₂ into the atmosphere and a simultaneous loss of a significant portion of the soil’s organic matter, perhaps as much as half, as organisms use increasing amounts of newly available organic matter for energy. For a prolonged period following conversion, soils are a net source of atmospheric CO₂, though this can be reversed with suitable agro-ecological techniques.

From the very beginning of capitalism, land conversion accelerated due to the drive to produce profits. There was cotton to grow in the U.S. Southeast to feed the mills of England. There was sugarcane to grow in South America and the Caribbean islands. There was widespread destruction of grassland and forest ecosystems to grow crops, monoculture forests, and plantations. These practices contributed to the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

The imperatives of seeking profits caused increased production of crops to be processed into a variety of products to stock supermarket shelves, feed animals, and supply fuel to cars with crop-based ethanol and biodiesel. This problem persists today. The push to grow more soybeans for export to an expanding Asian market was one of the driving forces for the conversion of Amazon forest to pastureland and then to cropland in the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century. In addition to the accelerated decomposition of soil’s organic matter, the common practice of burning to clear land pumps CO₂ directly into the atmosphere and explains why Indonesia is the fifth largest carbon emitter.

The situation of today’s rain forests in Indonesia and Malaysia is especially problematic because many of its forests have soil composed of peat. It is estimated that the losses of organic materials following drainage and conversion to oil palm plantations have caused the release of about 3,000 tons of CO₂ per acre (about 3,000 metric tons per hectare) over fifty years.¹⁵ Although palm oil is used for foods and cosmetics, it is increasingly being used as a “green” biodiesel and pushed in the European market as a substitute for fossil fuel–derived diesel. It is estimated that it will take over 400 years of growing oil palm and using it as a substitute for petrochemical diesel to make up for the CO₂ generated by the destruction of the rain forest and the associated burning of land and loss of carbon from soils through accelerated decomposition.¹⁶ (Another consequence of this practice is the irrevocable social and ecological devastation of replacing biodiverse rain forest with palm oil plantations.)

In 2015, in the wake of El Niño, Indonesia’s rain forests experienced a spell of extreme dryness. Fires set to burn the felled trees from forest clearing for conversion to oil palm plantations got out of control. In August, the fires were so extensive that thick smoke settled over a region that included Singapore and Malaysia, parts of the Philippines, and Thailand. The fires sickened hundreds of thousands of people and took a severe toll on wildlife, including orangutans, our near-relatives. The New York Times reported about the fires:

Luhut B. Pandjaitan, Indonesia’s coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs … said the country’s “one mistake” was in approving palm oil concessions on 14.8 million acres of peatlands during the past decade, which when drained and burned to clear land for agriculture emit high levels of carbon dioxide into the air.¹⁷

Calling policies that caused such ecological and human tragedy a “mistake” is quite an understatement, particularly as it was all so predictable. The Indonesian fires were the most costly “natural” disaster of 2015, causing an estimated US $16 billion in damages.¹⁸ A study by researchers at Harvard and Columbia Universities puts the number of people who will die prematurely due to smoke inhalation from those fires at 100,000.¹⁹ The 1997 Indonesian fires, also a result of dry El Niño conditions, were estimated to have caused a significant portion of the world’s CO₂ emissions for that year.²⁰

Rise of Fossil Fuels

Over the last three hundred years, there has been large-scale burning of fossil fuels to provide power and heat. Coal and then oil and natural gas are used in ever-increasing amounts, pumping CO₂ into the atmosphere as a by-product.

Along with capitalist social relations and new inventions, the energy concentrated in fossil fuels was key to the speed and manner in which the Industrial Revolution took off.²¹ The system has grown to the point that today the burning of fossil fuels accomplishes the work equivalent of an estimated 25 billion people working 10 hours a day, 365 days a year.²² Tom Wessels, in The Myth of Progress, described the magnitude of fossil fuel consumption in other terms: “For the first time in Earth’s history, a single species is responsible for the entropic degradation of the biosphere by releasing more energy through transformation than is being replaced by global photosynthesis.”²³

As increased atmospheric CO₂ drives increasing temperature, feedback loops occur. Permafrost soils that have been frozen for millennia, comprising almost a quarter of the land of the Northern Hemisphere, are beginning to melt. They hold a huge amount of carbon, stored as both organic matter and as methane gas (CH₄). As these soils warm and thaw, they release large quantities of greenhouse gases—CO₂ from decomposing organic matter and methane—leading to even more global warming. It is estimated that this feedback loop may result in up to 15 percent of the carbon stored in permafrost ending up in the atmosphere by the end of the century.²⁴

This massive amount of fossil fuel combustion is one of the major interventions made in the carbon cycle. Instead of a relatively stable amount of atmospheric carbon cycling from the atmosphere to plants, soils, and animals and then returning to the atmosphere, which existed for centuries, ever-greater amounts of CO₂ accumulate in the atmosphere and the oceans. The results are the warming planet and acidification of the seas. The warming of the atmosphere, in turn, has led to drastic changes in climate and to much suffering.

Remedial Solutions

To date, attempts to counteract or reduce human-induced alterations to the carbon cycle and resulting climate change have all proved inadequate. These “solutions” don’t go far enough either because there has been no desire to disturb corporate profits or they offer new possibilities to profit through market-based approaches that can lead to further problems. A number of more desperate and even more destabilizing proposals have been made for large-scale geoengineering, such as shooting sulfate particles into the atmosphere to reflect a portion of incoming light from the sun, thereby lessening warming of Earth.

While biofuels are regarded by some as a significant part of the solution, their impacts are mostly negative: on people, land, water, and biodiversity. Many problems are the result from the many side effects of capitalist agricultural production in general, such as environmental contamination with pesticides and with synthetic fertilizers, but need to be considered as outcomes when growing crops for biofuel production. Additionally, land that could have been used to grow food for people is used to grow fuel for cars: some 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop is used to make ethanol fuel. In addition, the land grabs and deforestation that occurs in order to grow oil palm in order to make “biodiesel” has enormous adverse consequence for people, wildlife, and the atmosphere as we described earlier. Some biofuels take even more energy to produce than they yield. The extent of their impacts depends on the particular biofuel crop grown, production and processing of biofuel feedstocks, the scale of production, and how they influence land-use change as to who gets displaced. Finally, while using some types of biofuels might reduce CO₂ emission to the atmosphere, others emit more CO₂ than with fossil fuels. Thus, this supposed remedy for the negative effects of fossil fuels has so many harmful side effects that is no solution at all.²⁵

Some scientists advocate the expansion of nuclear power as the only way to effectively reduce emissions of carbon dioxide at the scale required. Aside from myriad safety problems with the operation of nuclear plants—and the high costs of electricity generation—a process for the safe disposal of nuclear waste, which remains radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, is not yet known.

One often-cited emerging technology, carbon capture and storage (CCS)—essentially capturing and permanently burying carbon dioxide below ground—is untried and untested at anything close to the scale needed to make a difference. Its advocacy promotes the idea that we can carry on burning fossil fuels because at some point we’ll be able to store the gaseous waste product. CO₂ captured in the pilot CCS projects is mostly pumped underground in order to pump out more oil.²⁶

Even more fraudulently, individuals are encouraged to compensate the world for the carbon used in commercial airplane flights and other activities by purchasing so-called offset credits (see discussion later in this chapter on Putting a Price on Nature). There are a number of problems inherent in these schemes, especially a lack of accountability or oversight that encourages cheating and gaming of the system. A report by the Oakland Institute, an independent policy think tank, concluded that “there is mounting evidence that … corporate land acquisitions for climate change mitigation—including forestry plantations—severely compromise not only local ecologies but also the livelihoods of some of the world’s most vulnerable people living at subsistence level in rural areas in developing countries.”²⁷

ORGANIC MATTER FLOWS AND SOIL HEALTH

The organic matter cycle is a key part of the carbon cycle—after all, the material of life is built out of chains and rings of carbon atoms, assembled by the photosynthetic activity of green plants. Organic materials are stored aboveground in living plants and animals and in much larger quantities in soils as both living organisms and the residues of dead ones. As discussed earlier, agricultural practices have led to a large loss in soil organic matter, contributing to increases in atmospheric CO₂ levels. But because organic matter levels in soils have such profound effects on agriculture and the environment, it needs attention as a separate issue.

Ample amounts of organic matter are of critical importance to maintaining healthy and productive soils. As soil organic matter content decreases, biodiversity decreases and disease organisms and nematodes that feed on crop plants proliferate because of the decreased competition with other organisms. In general, the simpler rotations of modern industrial-style farming make crop pests—weeds, soil-borne diseases, and insects—more problematic when the soils are depleted of organic matter.²⁸ As organic matter decreases, soils become more compact and less water is able to infiltrate. Fewer nutrients are stored in soils and soil nutrients are more easily lost to leaching and erosion. Accelerated erosion causes a further loss of organic matter along with the lost topsoil. The loss of topsoil and organic matter creates a downward spiral of soil fertility. More aggregates break down and more erosion occurs. It’s a classic feedback loop: the original disturbance causes other changes that further magnify the first disruption. Drastic intervention with fertilizers, pesticides, extra irrigation, and equipment will temporarily remedy the situation—but at a great ecological, monetary, and social cost.

Some early agricultural practices reduced soil organic matter, such as when wheat was grown on the hillsides of Greece, resulting in erosion of topsoil rich in organic matter and negative effects for long-term food production. But other cultures developed methods to help maintain soil fertility. The Mesoamericans developed the chinampa system in the Valley of Mexico: planting beds were built, using sediments rich in organic matter from shallow lakes.

Disturbances in organic matter flows were recognized over a century ago. Three scientists examining the problem of “worn-out” soils in 1908 concluded that the “depletion of the soil humus [organic matter] supply is apt to be a fundamental cause of lowered crop yields.”²⁹ Contemporary soil scientists have only recently rediscovered this reality.³⁰

Practices that developed and were made common during the industrialization of agriculture—such as inadequate crop rotations composed of relatively few commodity crops, reliance on nitrogen from commercial fertilizers instead of legumes, the concentration of large numbers of farm animals separated from the land that grows their feed, and intensive tillage that breaks up soil structure—have led to a great loss of soil organic matter. Agricultural soils in the United States have about half of the organic matter they contained before forests and grasslands were converted to agriculture.³¹ It is estimated that the world’s soils have lost between 50 and 70 percent of the organic matter they contained before they were farmed.³² Over 30 percent of the world’s soils are moderately or severely degraded.³³

Pesticides are routinely used to control organisms that limit crop growth. But more insecticides are needed because plants are more susceptible to insect attack when growing in soils depleted of organic matter and in fields and their surroundings that have low plant biodiversity. In other words, farming practices developed within the context of capitalist economies that focus on monocultures or use inadequate rotations have created large populations of insect pests (in the sense of attacking crops and reducing yields) by eradicating all their competitors and natural predators as well as decreasing the presence of organisms in the soil that stimulate plants to produce chemicals to defend themselves.

Pesticide contamination of farmers, farm workers, water, and the food itself is pervasive. Natural enemies are killed along with the target pests, frequently leading to the outbreak of previously insignificant secondary pests. As target pests develop resistance to the pesticides used, a treadmill is created, necessitating higher pesticide application rates, the use of multiple pesticides, and the continual introduction of new pesticides. This creates a chemical arms race between crop pests and pesticide makers, driving pests to evolve resistance to widely used pesticides. The occurrence of many pest problems on industrial agriculture farms is an outcome of farming under the constraints of capitalist economics and ideology rather than a product of nature. This is partially a result of practices that, among other effects, decrease soil organic matter.

More fertilizer is needed as organic matter decreases because the nutrient-supplying ability of soils is tied so intimately to the amount of organic matter present. And decreased organic matter reduces the amount of rainfall that can infiltrate and be stored in soils, leading to rifts in the hydrologic cycle. This is then counteracted by more frequent irrigation. While these so-called remedies—pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, more irrigation—help to maintain high yields in the short term, crop yields are usually lower than would occur with soils richer in organic matter.

THE HYDROLOGIC CYCLE

Freshwater comprises less than 2 percent of the earth’s total water, and is unevenly distributed around the globe. Freshwater is needed for drinking, irrigating crops, raising farm animals, and many other human endeavors. Thus, the questions of how water cycles—where it rains and where it doesn’t, how much it rains and the intensity of rainfall, and how much of the rainfall infiltrates the soil and how much runs off the land—are all critical. Today the cycling of water is being significantly distorted in a number of ways: changes in rainfall patterns as global warming proceeds, pumping water from subsurface aquifers (permeable strata) faster than replenishment occurs, transporting water long distances to supply another region, excessive use during irrigation and growing water-needy crops in regions with inadequate rainfall, and contamination of surface and subsurface water with industrial chemicals.

Freshwater will soon be the key resource that nations will fight over. Already there are struggles between the states of Georgia and Florida over water use, and the disagreements among western U.S. states are legendary. Dams built by China and other countries along rivers, without being part of a regionally agreed-upon water allocation strategy, lead to headlines like the Guardian’s “A Waterfight Like No Other May Be Brewing Over Asia’s Rivers.”³⁴ Upriver dams, used for irrigation and producing hydroelectric energy, lessen the downriver flows and change the annual flow patterns, harming river fisheries and other traditional uses.

The earth’s warming is projected to increase drought stress in northern South America and parts of Central America and Africa and decease water availability in the large river basins of Southeast Asia. On the other hand, greater precipitation, much of it in more intense storms, is anticipated for portions of the continental United States.³⁵ Regions with increased probabilities of intense storm occurrences includes parts of England, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific coastal regions of Colombia and Ecuador.

Perhaps as an indication of what is in store for the United States, for a period of a little over twelve months beginning in May 2015, “dozens of people [were] killed and thousands of homes swamped with water in extreme events in Oklahoma, Texas, South Carolina, West Virginia and Maryland.”³⁶ The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that eight 500-year storms occurred during this period. The devastating storms that hit Louisiana in August 2016 dropped up to 24 inches (60 cm) of water over a forty-eight-hour period. “The Louisiana flooding has been so exceptional that some places in the state experienced storm conditions considered once-every-1,000-year events.”³⁷

During normal rainfall events, an estimated 60 percent of the precipitation that falls on land enters the soil and is stored there. The remaining 40 percent either flows through the soil into aquifers and springs or overland into streams, rivers, lakes, wetlands, and oceans. Removal of native vegetation and conversion of forests and grasslands to plowed fields decreases soil organic matter and disturbs natural soil structure, decreasing the amount of rainfall infiltrating soil, leading to accelerated runoff and erosion as flowing water carries soil sediments downhill.

Large-scale agriculture, stimulated by economic incentives that encourage growing row crops and covering ever-larger land areas, have accelerated the natural process of soil erosion.³⁸ For example, more than half of Iowa’s topsoil—originally fourteen inches deep—has been eroded by water flowing over soils used to grow corn and soybeans.³⁹

Huge expansions of urban and suburban areas have resulted in increasing portions of land being covered with impermeable structures: houses, commercial buildings, schools, roads, driveways, and, in particular, parking lots:

It’s estimated that there are three nonresidential parking spaces for every car in the United States. That adds up to almost 800 million parking spaces, covering about 4,360 square miles—an area larger than Puerto Rico. In some cities, like Orlando and Los Angeles, parking lots are estimated to cover at least one-third of the land area, making them one of the most salient landscape features of the built world.⁴⁰

Sealing so much of the soil surface contributes to large pulses of runoff from storms, swelling local streams and rivers and leading to flooding and water pollution.

Irrigating agricultural fields uses the largest amount of water by far, accounting for 70 percent globally. In California, agriculture accounts for 80 percent of total freshwater use. A sizable further portion is used (and polluted) by the oil and gas industry due to the huge increase in horizontal drilling (fracking) that produces enormous quantities of contaminated wastewater. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimates that up to 9.6 million gallons of water are used for every fracking well.⁴¹ Even the oil and gas industry recognizes its use of a huge amount of water. In a series called Measuring Success, the engineering firm Siemens, which builds monitoring equipment for wells, claims that “the biggest product of the US petroleum industry [is] water.” If the idea of oil and gas companies producing water sounds strange, that’s because it is. “Produced water” is an Orwellian term invented by the industry used to describe the toxic cocktail of fracking chemicals and contaminated water the industry disposes of by burying it underground.

Reinjection of fracking wastewater into the ground has dramatically increased the frequency of earthquakes. The state of Oklahoma, where earthquakes were rare, now experiences them as often as California.⁴² In the Dallas–Fort Worth area earthquakes had never before been recorded until 2008, after wastewater injection took off. Local resident Cathy Wallace describes having to contend with the knowledge that quakes could come at any time: “Every time it happens you know it’s going to hit, but you don’t know how severe it’s going to be…. Is this going to be a bigger one? Is this the part where my house falls down? It’s scary. It’s very scary.”⁴³ The USGS estimates earthquakes caused by wastewater injection will threaten the lives and livelihoods of up to 7 million people in the United States.⁴⁴

What’s most remarkable is that we have known for decades that injecting large quantities of high-pressure liquid into the ground is a direct cause of earthquakes. Experiments in the 1960s conclusively demonstrated the exact amount and pressure of liquid required to destabilize a fault. In reference to these experiments, Stanford University geophysicist Bill Ellsworth notes, “Scores of papers on injection-induced earthquakes were published in the geophysical literature in the following 40-plus years [1960s on], and the problem was well understood and appreciated by seismologists.”⁴⁵

One of the arguments against shutting down fracking operations (actually doing almost anything improves the environment) is the environment-versus-labor argument. It will cost jobs. But plenty of workers would be needed if society decided to invest in public transit, upgrade infrastructure, and design and build a new electricity grid based on renewable energy. Shutting down the fracking industry will free up workers to do more socially useful and ecologically sound jobs.