How the Extinction of Wild Poop has Triggered Continental scale losses of Soil Carbon and the movements trying to reverse this
Niko Bertulis
It’s a chicken and the egg conundrum.
Soil restoration or biodiversity restoration, which comes first. Our planet clearly suffers an epidemic of soil degradation. A cursory understanding of natural history tells of a planetary collapse of biodiversity, the gradual unraveling of a the complex web of insects, birds, fish, mammals, plants etc. These creatures all share a direly important feature, they have digestive tracts that build soil.
The faunal gut is a rather perfect compost factory, ceaselessy churning plant growth into both time release organic fertilizer pellets and an immediately soluble liquid biofertilizer aka urine.
Concurrent with civilizational collapsing of biodiversity we have developed a remarkable propensity for making compost to keep our farms and gardens healthy and happy.
This is good. Organic methods keep nutrient dense food on the table for billions of subsistence farmers, market gardeners and their customers. Yet our wild biomes continue to steadily decline with the degradation of soil, mostly from a thousand kinds of micro-aggressions, a little pollution, a little soil compaction, a little too much deforestation, a little too much synthetic nitrate oxidizing all the soil carbon etcetera etcetera.
Cumulatively this clumsiness with our precious, fluffy, dark soil has tragic consequences, namely the loss of plant vigor, the base of the foodweb, in forests and grasslands alike. Without a steady flow of leaf, nectar, fruit, nut, seed, cambium etc. insects, birds, ungulates, predators et al begin their slow march to extinction. This decline reinforces the decline in plant vigor; this is the largely, invisible yet devastatingly tragic carbon entropy vortex.
If you scrape and claw your way through the paywalls and dustbins of scientific literature this story becomes crystal clear, but the far more enjoyable path to grokking this fascinating story is to dealve into a sub-genre of historical non-fiction that we could call the “re-shifting our baseline genre” which is inarguably my favorite genre of literature. These myriad books tell the stories of how intimately soil history and cultural history intertwine, not necessarily perceptible from short term political and economics lenses, but glaringly obvious from the long term thinkers and the keepers of the old stories.
I won’t name them all but David Montgomery’s “Dirt, the Erosion of Civilization,” Alice Outwater’s “Water, a Natural History,” Daniel Hillel’s “Natural History of the Bible” and Charles Mann’s “1491”, “1493” series are classics of this genre.
Historic place names of landscapes across the Middle East point to the telling of this story, “ the Fertile Crescent”, “the land of milk and honey” etc.
Here in California where I live it’s a similar story that can be gleaned from the natural/cultural histories. Before European colonization millions of salmon, elk and wild food forests sustained one of the highest populations densities of humans anywhere on earth. This unimaginable abundance was sustained through a carefully tended landscape of nutrient cycling that recognized and honored the web of poop cycling that made it all possible. The abrupt damming of nearly every river and wholesale slaughter of wildlife to feed the meat hungry 49-ers constituted a near death sentence to the entire indigenous food web.
Now we have a food system dominated by haber-bosch’s synthetic nitrate so collectively we have forgotten the importance of the old ways. This is the shifting baseline. Our new baseline understanding is the megafarm to bigbox grocery pipeline with it’s hidden costs of marine dead zones and synthetic nitrates tenacious aptitude for quietly oxidizing soil carbon at monumental scales. This unspoken desertification, this silent spring, this imperceptible holocaust, has allowed for an exponential growth in human numbers. Warehouses of corn, wheat and soy lineup on the game board of every geopolitical strategist politicking food aid and sanctions into the darkest hallways of petroleum diplomacy.
Thusly questioning the dominance of a Borlaugian food system becomes taboo and the organic farmers remain outsider hippies in the realm of international trade and politics.
Meanwhile the restoration and conservation movements are left with hardly a leg to stand on, for the two legs of a functional ecosystem are a strong base of the foodweb, plants and their soils, and a dynamic equilibrium of fauna, namely the predators and their prey. So we try and conserve the bits and pieces of former glories and keep at bay the death by a thousand cuts that our economies relentlessly perpetuate. We try to restore entire ecosystems that have been reduced to weeds and generalists adapted to weeds.
The holy grail of restoration is found in walking the thin black tightrope of re-pooping our soils. This is where, when and how the vicious cycle of carbon entropy can revert back to the decadent cycle of carbon syntropy.
Virtually every methodology of land restoration centralizes this fecal decadence into its systemics. I will conclude with an abridged list of these fecophilic sub-cultures that bravely endeavor into the despairing politics of hygiene hysteria in recognition of the restorative nature of biological excretions, aka, exudates, frass, droppings, caca, cookies and pies etcetera etcetera.
Soil Food Web
Rewilding
Restoration Agriculture
Restoration Grazing
Habitat Gardening
Syntropic Agriculture
Biodynamics
Permaculture
Regrarians
Organic Farming
FMNR
Holistic Management
Korean Natural Farming
Regenerative Agriculture
Sustainable Agriculture
Agro-forestry
Perennial polycultures
Conservation Agriculture
Aquaponics
No-till Farming
Chinampas
