Soil Degradation Quotes

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Cheap meat, dairy, and eggs are an illusion–we pay for each with depleted forests, polluted freshwater, soil degradation, and climate change.
Lisa Kemmerer (Eating Earth: Environmental Ethics and Dietary Choice)
The only truly dependable production technologies are those that are sustainable over the long term. By that very definition, they must avoid erosion, pollution, environmental degradation, and resource waste. Any rational food-production system will emphasize the well-being of the soil-air-water biosphere, the creatures which inhabit it, and the human beings who depend upon it.
Eliot Coleman (The New Organic Grower: A Master's Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener)
In many ways, soil degradation set the long-wavelenght pattern of history, as wars, natural disasters, and climate shifts pulled the trigger on environmental guns loaded by soil loss and degradation.
David R. Montgomery (Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life)
…many currently profitable conventional farming methods would become uneconomical if their true costs were incorporated into market pricing. Direct financial subsidies, and failure to include costs of depleting soil fertility and exporting pollutants, continue to encourage practices that degrade the land
David R. Montgomery
2014 Maria Helena Semedo, an economist and deputy general director of climate and natural resources at the Food and Agriculture Organization, estimated that we have only about sixty years of farming left at our current rate of topsoil degradation before the soil is untenable for future food production. A sobering estimate.
Diana Rodgers (Sacred Cow: The Case for (Better) Meat: Why Well-Raised Meat Is Good for You and Good for the Planet)
We have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not excepting our cattle-shows and so-called Thanksgivings, by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast which tempt him. He sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to the infernal Plutus rather. By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.
Henry David Thoreau (Walden)
When you live from the land, which ultimately all of us do, soil is everything. Forgetting this is at our peril.
Donna Goddard (Nanima: Spiritual Fiction (Dadirri Series, #1))
The adam and I had pondered the death many times since the day he brought me here. But despite our musing about an end of life and our search for evidence of death among fallen and decomposing fruit and the compost of leaves and the refuse of our industry, which we gathered to enrich the soil, I understood the death less well than the explosion that had filled the universe at its incarnation. In fact, every evidence of degrading life seemed only to point back to the sustenance of the living so that I grasped the idea of the death less and less the more I meditated upon it.
Tosca Lee (Havah: The Story of Eve)
Currently, U.S. soils are degrading ten times faster than they can be replenished. Tilling also dries out soil—it was a key factor causing the Dust Bowl crisis in the 1930s—and disturbs the microbiome.
Amanda Little (The Fate of Food: What We'll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World)
By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.
Henry David Thoreau (Walden and Civil Disobedience)
The air, soil and water cumulatively degrade; the climates and oceans destabilize; species become extinct at a spasm rate across continents; pollution cycles and volumes increase to endanger life-systems at all levels in cascade effects; a rising half of the world is destitute as inequality multiplies; the global food system produces more and more disabling and contaminated junk food without nutritional value; non-contagious diseases multiply to the world’s biggest killer with only symptom cures; the vocational future of the next generation collapses across the world while their bank debts rise; the global financial system has ceased to function for productive investment in life-goods; collective-interest agencies of governments and unions are stripped while for-profit state subsidies multiply; police state laws and methods advance while belligerent wars for corporate resources increase; the media are corporate ad vehicles and the academy is increasingly reduced to corporate functions; public sectors and services are non-stop defunded and privatized as tax evasion and transnational corporate funding and service by governments rise at the same time at every level.
John McMurtry (The Cancer Stage of Capitalism, 2nd Edition: From Crisis to Cure)
If you haven't heard what's happening with seeds, let me tell you. They're disappearing, about like every damn thing else. You know the story already, you know it better than I do, the forests and the songbirds, the Appalachian Mountains, the fish in the ocean. But I'm not going to talk about anything that makes us feel hopeless, or despairing, because there's no despair in a seed. There's only life, waiting for the right conditions--sun and water, warmth and soil--to be set free. Every day millions upon millions of seeds lift their two green wings.
Janisse Ray (The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food)
This lesson, in a nutshell, says: the abuse of political power is fundamentally connected with the sophistic abuse of the word, indeed finds in it the fertile soil in which to hide and grow and get ready, so much so that the latent potential of the totalitarian poison can be ascertained, as it were, by observing the symptom of the public abuse of language. The degradation, too, of man through man, alarmingly evident in the acts of physical violence committed by all tyrannies (concentration camps, torture), has its beginning, certainly much less alarmingly, at that almost imperceptible moment when the word loses its dignity.
Josef Pieper (Abuse of Language—Abuse of Power)
What is truly bad, in a way that pumps fresh meaning into that deflated word, returning to it all the force it possessed when her parents used it on her when she was a child—what is bad is that each vile chapter in the other-Lottie’s fantasy of degradation evokes a response in her beyond simple revulsion. Every ugly assertion makes a part of Lottie jump with recognition. She’s no liar, this blank face. She’s telling the truth, giving voice to impulses Lottie hasn’t wanted to be aware she has. She’s tried to make of her soul a garden, so to speak, but the other-her’s words dig into the soil and overturn it, exposing what is wet and wriggling there to the light of day.
John Langan (The Fisherman)
The research is still in its infancy, as we have seen, but, in early March 2020, Nature Communications published a model study that followed the link all the way from shelf to sickbed in one case: malaria, one of those beneath-the-radar diseases, affecting some 230 million and killing 400,000 per year, the vast majority in rainforest biomes. Deforestation is a boost for the mosquito vectors. More sunlight reaches the soil where the larvae develop; when biodiversity retreats, fewer animals prey on them. Nigeria suffers most from malaria due to deforestation. It is largely caused by the export of timber and cocoa. Such commodities end up in the north: consumers with the greatest malaria footprint are the cocoa-guzzling Dutch and Belgians, Swiss and Germans. 'In this unequal value chain, ecosystem degradation and malaria risk are borne by low-income producers' - or, in plainer terms: the Europeans get the chocolate and the profits, the Africans the mosquitos.
Andreas Malm (Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century)
There are too many people working to better the lives of those who already have more than they need, yet those who are in need of real help spend each day with no hope or help to speak of - why my friend - why - they are waiting for you - they are wailing for you - don't you hear them - don't you hear their tears dropping on the lifeless soil beneath their feet! You worry about philosophical questions like, if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound - yet you pay no attention to real questions of life and death that actually require your intervention more than any philosophical question in the world! Why - I ask you again - why - why is it that philosophy, technology and argumentation have more grip over your psyche than the actual troubles of the people! Don't answer me - just think - think and when you have thought enough, shred all shallow philosophical pomp and rush right away to the helpless, the forgotten, the destitute as the real, practical answer to their life.
Abhijit Naskar (When Veins Ignite: Either Integration or Degradation)
There was no time during the rebellion when I did not think, and often say, that the South was more to be benefited by its defeat than the North. The latter had the people, the institutions, and the territory to make a great and prosperous nation. The former was burdened with an institution abhorrent to all civilized people not brought up under it, and one which degraded labor, kept it in ignorance, and enervated the governing class. With the outside world at war with this institution, they could not have extended their territory. The labor of the country was not skilled, nor allowed to become so. The whites could not toil without becoming degraded, and those who did were denominated “poor white trash.” The system of labor would have soon exhausted the soil and left the people poor. The non-slaveholders would have left the country, and the small slaveholder must have sold out to his more fortunate neighbor. Soon the slaves would have outnumbered the masters, and, not being in sympathy with them, would have risen in their might and exterminated them. The war was expensive to the South as well as to the North, both in blood and treasure, but it was worth all it cost.
Ulysses S. Grant (Personal Memoirs: Ulysses S. Grant)
There has been a revolution in the way people think. They have just noticed, without daring to say it, that the old paradigm, according to which ‘the fate of humanity, individual and collective, is getting better every day, thanks to science, democratisation, and egalitarian emancipation’, is false. The age that believed it is over. This illusion has fallen. This progress (debatable anyhow according to people like Ivan Illich)[203] lasted probably less than a century. Today, the unintended consequences of mass technology are beginning to be felt: new resistant viruses, the toxicity of processed food, the exhaustion of the soil and the shrinking of the world’s agricultural production, the general and rapid degradation of the environment, the threat of the invention of new weapons of mass destruction to add to nuclear weapons, and so on. In addition, technology is entering its baroque age. The fundamental inventions were discovered by the end of the 1950s. The improvements to them made in later decades have contributed fewer and fewer concrete ameliorations, like so many useless decorative motifs added to the superstructure of a monument. The Internet has probably had fewer revolutionary effects than the telegraph or the telephone. The Internet is a significant improvement applied to a pan-communication that was already substantially realised. Techno-science is following the ‘80-20’ power law. At the beginning it takes 20 units of energy to obtain 60 units of force. Later it takes 80 units of energy to realise only 20 units of force.
Guillaume Faye (Convergence of Catastrophes)
Generally speaking a view of the available economic systems that have been tested historically must acknowledge the immense power of capitalism to generate living standards food housing education the amenities to a degree unprecedented in human civilization. The benefits of such a system while occasionally random and unpredictable with periods of undeniable stress and misery depression starvation and degradation are inevitably distributed to a greater and greater percentage of the population. The periods of economic stability also ensure a greater degree of popular political freedom and among the industrial Western democracies today despite occasional suppression of free speech quashing of dissent corruption of public officials and despite the tendency of legislation to serve the interests of the ruling business oligarchy the poisoning of the air water the chemical adulteration of food the obscene development of hideous weaponry the increased costs of simple survival the waste of human resources the ruin of cities the servitude of backward foreign populations the standards of life under capitalism by any criterion are far greater than under state socialism in whatever forms it is found British Swedish Cuban Soviet or Chinese. Thus the good that fierce advocacy of personal wealth accomplishes in the historical run of things outweighs the bad. And while we may not admire always the personal motives of our business leaders we can appreciate the inevitable percolation of the good life as it comes down through our native American soil. You cannot observe the bounteous beauty of our county nor take pleasure in its most ordinary institutions in peace and safety without acknowledging the extraordinary achievement of American civilization. There are no Japanese bandits lying in wait on the Tokaidoways after all. Drive down the turnpike past the pretty painted pipes of the oil refineries and no one will hurt you.
E.L. Doctorow
The most productive nation in the world, yet unable to properly feed, clothe and shelter over a third of its population. Vast areas of valuable soil turning to waste land because of neglect, indifference, greed and vandalism. Torn some eighty years ago by the bloodiest civil war in the history of man and yet to this day unable to convince the defeated section of our country of the righteousness of our cause nor able, as liberators and emancipators of the slaves, to give them true freedom and equality, but instead enslaving and degrading our own white brothers. Yes, the industrial North defeated the aristocratic South—the fruits of that victory are now apparent. Wherever there is industry there is ugliness, misery, oppression, gloom and despair. The banks which grew rich by piously teaching us to save, in order to swindle us with our own money, now beg us not to bring our savings to them, threatening to wipe out even that ridiculous interest rate they now offer should we disregard their advice. Three-quarters of the world’s gold lies buried in Kentucky. Inventions which would throw millions more out of work, since by the queer irony of our system every potential boon to the human race is converted into an evil, lie idle on the shelves of the patent office or are bought up and destroyed by the powers that control our destiny. The land, thinly populated and producing in wasteful, haphazard way enormous surpluses of every kind, is deemed by its owners, a mere handful of men, unable to accommodate not only the starving millions of Europe but our own starving hordes. A country which makes itself ridiculous by sending out missionaries to the most remote parts of the globe, asking for pennies of the poor in order to maintain the Christian work of deluded devils who no more represent Christ than I do the Pope, and yet unable through its churches and missions at home to rescue the weak and defeated, the miserable and the oppressed. The hospitals, the insane asylums, the prisons filled to overflowing. Counties, some of them big as a European country, practically uninhabited, owned by an intangible corporation whose tentacles reach everywhere and whose responsibilities nobody can formulate or clarify. A man seated in a comfortable chair in New York, Chicago or San Francisco, a man surrounded by every luxury and yet paralyzed with fear and anxiety, controls the lives and destinies of thousands of men and women whom he has never seen, whom he never wishes to see and whose fate he is thoroughly uninterested in.
Henry Miller (The Air-Conditioned Nightmare)
propose that we consider our farmers on a spectrum, let’s say, of agrarianism. On one end of the spectrum we have farmers like James, interested in producing the finest foodstuffs that they can, given the soil, the climate, the water, the budget, and their talent. They observe how efficacious or not their efforts are proving, and they adapt accordingly. Variety is one of the keys to this technique, eschewing the corporate monocultures for a revolving set of plants and animals, again, to mimic what was already happening on the land before we showed up with our earth-shaving machinery. It’s tough as hell, and in many cases impossible, to farm this way and earn enough profit to keep your bills paid and your family fed, but these farmers do exist. On the other end of the spectrum is full-speed-ahead robo-farming, in which the farmer is following the instructions of the corporation to produce not food but commodities in such a way that the corporation sits poised to make the maximum financial profit. Now, this is the part that has always fascinated me about us as a population: This kind of farmer is doing all they can to make their factory quota for the company, of grain, or meat, or what have you, despite their soil, climate, water, budget, or talent. It only stands to reason that this methodology is the very definition of unsustainable. Clearly, this is an oversimplification of an issue that requires as much of my refrain (nuance!) as any other human endeavor, but the broad strokes are hard to refute. The first farmer is doing their best to work with nature. The second farmer is doing their best despite nature. In order for the second farmer to prosper, they must defeat nature. A great example of this is the factory farming of beef/pork/chicken/eggs/turkey/salmon/etc. The manufacturers of these products have done everything they can to take the process out of nature entirely and hide it in a shed, where every step of the production has been engineered to make a profit; to excel at quantity. I know you’re a little bit ahead of me here, but I’ll go ahead and ask the obvious question: What of quality? If you’re willing to degrade these many lives with impunity—the lives of the animals themselves, the workers “growing” them, the neighbors having to suffer the voluminous poisons being pumped into the ecosystem/watershed, and the humans consuming your products—then what are you about? Can that even be considered farming? Again, I’m asking this of us. Of you and me, because what I have just described is the way a lot of our food is produced right now, in the system that we all support with our dollars. How did we get here, in both the US and the UK? How can we change our national stance toward agriculture to accommodate more middle-size farmers and less factory farms? How would Aldo Leopold feel about it?
Nick Offerman (Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside)
We might be excused our ignorance in this case, because ocean-atmosphere systems are, after all, almost inconceivably complex. Less easy to excuse is our astounding lack of knowledge of much more visible features of our planet’s natural resources and ecology—features that have a direct impact on our well-being. For instance, we know surprisingly little about the state of the planet’s soils. While we have good information for some areas, like the Great Plains of the United States, soil data are sketchy for vast tracts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where billions of people depend directly on agriculture for survival. So we can’t accurately judge how badly we’ve degraded these soils through overuse and poor husbandry, though we do have patchy evidence that the damage is severe and getting worse in many places.18 Similarly, despite extensive satellite photography, our estimates of the rate and extent of tropical deforestation are rudimentary. We know even less about the natural ecology and species diversity inside these forests, where biologists presume most animal and plant species live. As a result, credible figures on the number of Earth’s species range from 5 to 30 million.19 And when it comes to broader questions—questions of how all these components of the planet’s ecology fit together; how they interact to produce Earth’s grand cycles of energy, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur; and how we’re perturbing these components and cycles—we find a deep and pervasive lack of knowledge, with unknown unknowns everywhere. Our ignorance, for all practical purposes, knows no bounds.
Thomas Homer-Dixon (The Ingenuity Gap: How Can We Solve the Problems of the Future?)
A degraded word is a blow to the mind. A true, illuminating word is a seed. The fruitfulness of the seed depends on the soil in which it is planted.
Michael D. O'Brien (Sophia House: A Novel)
There was no time during the rebellion when I did not think, and often say, that the South was more to be benefited by its defeat than the North. The latter had the people, the institutions, and the territory to make a great and prosperous nation. The former was burdened with an institution abhorrent to all civilized people not brought up under it, and one which degraded labor, kept it in ignorance, and enervated the governing class. With the outside world at war with this institution, they could not have extended their territory. The labor of the country was not skilled, nor allowed to become so. The whites could not toil without becoming degraded, and those who did were denominated "poor white trash." The system of labor would have soon exhausted the soil and left the people poor. The non-slaveholders would have left the country, and the small slaveholder must have sold out to his more fortunate neighbor. Soon the slaves would have outnumbered the masters, and, not being in sympathy with them, would have risen in their might and exterminated them. The war was expensive to the South as well as to the North, both in blood and treasure, but it was worth all it cost.
Ulysses S. Grant (Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S Grant)
Conceptually the instruments of mechanization five thousand years ago were already detached from other human functions and purposes than the constant increase of order, power, predictability, and, above all, control. With this proto-scientific ideology went a corresponding regimentation and degradation of once-autonomous human activities: 'mass culture' and 'mass control' made their first appearance. With mordant symbolism, the ultimate products of the megamachine in Egypt were colossal tombs, inhabited by mummified corpses; while later in Assyria, as repeatedly in every other expanding empire, the chief testimony to its technical efficiency was a waste of destroyed villages and cities, and poisoned soils; the prototype of similar 'civilized' atrocities today. As for the great Egyptian pyramids, what are they but the precise static equivalents of our own space rockets? Both devices for securing, at an extravagant cost, a passage to Heaven for the favored few.
Lewis Mumford (Technics and Human Development (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 1))
In 1989, journalist Bill McKibben published The End of Nature, the first popular book about climate change. For McKibben, human destruction of natural environments had reached its pinnacle. Modern societies had already altered, domesticated, and controlled the world more than any before, polluting and degrading water, soil, air—and the nature of life itself. By altering the climate system, humans had taken the final step. Nature untouched by humans had now disappeared through the global reach of a human-altered climate.
Erle C. Ellis (Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction)
Cana’an is a crossroads of the earth. Be it birds or seeds, humans looking for life and refuge, or empires with a will to dominate for power and profit, this land has been frequented by many over the course of the past several thousand years. Our collective diasporas make one of the largest in the world, and our migrational lines are as complex with layers. Despite constant war, endless stories of exile, migration, language loss, and land degradation, there is palpable vitality and wholeness in the elements of place that still live through us. There is a lesson here—a medicine in this crossroads of rupture and immense resilience and revitalization at once, where loss insists on continuation, and life recreates itself constantly through the persistence of tending what remains, from wherever we are. No matter what has been lost or taken, a way persists as long as we do. Plants of place and origin are an interwoven part of these understated worlds that mend and make belonging. They, like our ancestors, have adapted to the challenges of lifetimes, embedding wayfinding intelligence inside of us. When we are lost or have forgotten, they have the power to re-member us. They wake up the ancestral lifelines inside of us. Every time we eat our cultural foods, harvest and prepare our medicines, nurture the soil where we are, plant ancient seeds in new places, these legacies bless our bodies and guide our beings back into union with deeper sources of life’s fundamental wisdoms and the earth’s unfaltering guidance.
Layla K. Feghali (The Land in Our Bones)
speak of this terrain as a primeval and unsettled wilderness—yet this continent had been continuously inhabited by human cultures for at least ten thousand years. That indigenous peoples can have gathered, hunted, fished, and settled these lands for such a tremendous span of time without severely degrading the continent’s wild integrity readily confounds the notion that humans are innately bound to ravage their earthly surroundings. In a few centuries of European settlement, however, much of the native abundance of this continent has been lost—its broad animal populations decimated, its many-voiced forests overcut and its prairies overgrazed, its rich soils depleted, its tumbling clear waters now undrinkable. European civilization’s neglect of the natural world and its needs has clearly been encouraged by a style of awareness that disparages sensorial reality, denigrating the visible and tangible order of things on behalf of some absolute source assumed to exist entirely beyond, or outside of, the bodily world. Some historians and philosophers have concluded that the Jewish and Christian traditions, with their otherworldly God, are primarily responsible for civilization’s negligent attitude toward the environing earth. They cite, as evidence, the Hebraic God’s injunction to humankind in Genesis: “Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it; and rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that creep on earth.”1 Other thinkers, however, have turned toward the Greek origins of our philosophical tradition, in the Athens of Socrates and Plato, in their quest for the roots of our nature-disdain. A long line of recent philosophers, stretching from Friedrich Nietzsche down to the present, have attempted to demonstrate that Plato’s philosophical derogation of the sensible and changing forms of the world—his claim that these are mere simulacra of eternal and pure ideas existing in a nonsensorial realm beyond the apparent world—contributed profoundly to civilization’s distrust of bodily and sensorial
David Abram (The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World)
Milkyway Messiah Sonnet (Simplified Version) Whenever humanity degrades into inhumanity, Whenever the oppressed cry out for a little dignity, Whenever political animals come and sell hate, Whenever morons 'n their yes men ruin harmony, Whenever some cavemen fly the flag of tribalism, Whenever love of luxury undermines accountability, Whenever gentleness is overpowered by greed, Whenever megalomania tramples heart's humility, Whenever goodness is patronized by cold smartness, Whenever compassion is vilified by indifference, Whenever selfishness is accepted as norm and sanity, Whenever accountability is deemed as an offence, Embracing affliction, from the dust 'n dirt of soil 'n street, You the Milkyway Messiah is to rise as the sentient shield.
Abhijit Naskar (Dervish Advaitam: Gospel of Sacred Feminines and Holy Fathers)
Some of the most clear-cut examples of desertification are those that have occurred on farmland because the resulting declines in crop yield are relatively straightforward to monitor. Fields on which just a single crop is grown year after year, so-called ‘monocultures’, will slowly become degraded, as studies on cropland in the semi-arid Pampas of Argentina have shown. The long-term cultivation of millet has affected both the chemical and physical properties of soils. The depletion of nutrients means that larger amounts of fertilizers have to be applied to maintain crop yields, while declines in organic matter and soil stability have meant a greater susceptibility to erosion.
Nick Middleton (Deserts: A Very Short Introduction)
a team of researchers in Pakistan who screened soil from a city landfill site in Islamabad and found a novel fungal strain that could degrade polyurethane plastic.
Merlin Sheldrake (Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures)
There was no time during the rebellion when I did not think, and often say, that the South was more to be benefited by its defeat than the North. The latter had the people, the institutions, and the territory to make a great and prosperous nation. The former was burdened with an institution abhorrent to all civilized people not brought up under it, and one which degraded labor, kept it in ignorance, and enervated the governing class. With the outside world at war with this institution, they could not have extended their territory. The labor of the country was not skilled, nor allowed to become so. The whites could not toil without becoming degraded, and those who did were denominated “poor white trash.” The system of labor would have soon exhausted the soil and left the people poor. The non-slave-holders would have left the country, and the small slave-holder must have sold out to his more fortunate neighbor. Soon the slaves would have outnumbered the masters, and, not being in sympathy with them, would have risen in their might and exterminated them. The war was expensive to the South as well as to the North, both in blood and treasure, but it was worth all it cost.
Ulysses S. Grant (Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant (AmazonClassics Edition))
As a battle cry against feudalism, the demand for democracy had a progressive character. As time went on, however, the metaphysics of natural law (the theory of formal democracy) began to show its reactionary side – the establishment of an ideal standard to control the real demands of the laboring masses and the revolutionary parties. If we look back to the historical sequence of world concepts, the theory of natural law will prove to be a paraphrase of Christian spiritualism freed from its crude mysticism. The Gospels proclaimed to the slave that he had just the same soul as the slave-owner, and in this way established the equality of all men before the heavenly tribunal. In reality, the slave remained a slave, and obedience became for him a religious duty. In the teaching of Christianity, the slave found an expression for his own ignorant protest against his degraded condition. Side by side with the protest was also the consolation. Christianity told him, ”You have an immortal soul, although you resemble a pack-horse." Here sounded the note of indignation. But the same Christianity said, "Although you are like a pack-horse, yet your immortal soul has in store for it an eternal reward." Here is the voice of consolation. These two notes were found in historical Christianity in different proportions at different periods and amongst different classes. But as a whole, Christianity, like all other religions, became a method of deadening the consciousness of the oppressed masses. Natural law, which developed into the theory of democracy, said to the worker: "all men are equal before the law, independently of their origin, their property, and their position; every man has an equal right in determining the fate of the people." This ideal criterion revolutionized the consciousness of the masses in so far as it was a condemnation of absolutism, aristocratic privileges, and the property qualification. But the longer it went on, the more if sent the consciousness to sleep, legalizing poverty, slavery and degradation: for how could one revolt against slavery when every man has an equal right in determining the fate of the nation? Rothschild, who has coined the blood and tears of the world into the gold napoleons of his income, has one vote at the parliamentary elections. The ignorant tiller of the soil who cannot sign his name, sleeps all his life without taking his clothes off, and wanders through society like an underground mole, plays his part, however, as a trustee of the nation’s sovereignty, and is equal to Rothschild in the courts and at the elections. In the real conditions of life, in the economic process, in social relations, in their way of life, people became more and more unequal; dazzling luxury was accumulated at one pole, poverty and hopelessness at the other. But in the sphere of the legal edifice of the State, these glaring contradictions disappeared, and there penetrated thither only unsubstantial legal shadows. The landlord, the laborer, the capitalist, the proletarian, the minister, the bootblack – all are equal as "citizens" and as "legislators." The mystic equality of Christianity has taken one step down from the heavens in the shape of the "natural," "legal" equality of democracy. But it has not yet reached earth, where lie the economic foundations of society. For the ignorant day-laborer, who all his life remains a beast of burden in the service of the bourgeoisie, the ideal right to influence the fate of the nations by means of the parliamentary elections remained little more real than the palace which he was promised in the kingdom of heaven.
Leon Trotsky
As a battle cry against feudalism, the demand for democracy had a progressive character. As time went on, however, the metaphysics of natural law (the theory of formal democracy) began to show its reactionary side – the establishment of an ideal standard to control the real demands of the laboring masses and the revolutionary parties. If we look back to the historical sequence of world concepts, the theory of natural law will prove to be a paraphrase of Christian spiritualism freed from its crude mysticism. The Gospels proclaimed to the slave that he had just the same soul as the slave-owner, and in this way established the equality of all men before the heavenly tribunal. In reality, the slave remained a slave, and obedience became for him a religious duty. In the teaching of Christianity, the slave found an expression for his own ignorant protest against his degraded condition. Side by side with the protest was also the consolation. Christianity told him, "You have an immortal soul, although you resemble a pack-horse." Here sounded the note of indignation. But the same Christianity said, "Although you are like a pack-horse, yet your immortal soul has in store for it an eternal reward." Here is the voice of consolation. These two notes were found in historical Christianity in different proportions at different periods and amongst different classes. But as a whole, Christianity, like all other religions, became a method of deadening the consciousness of the oppressed masses. Natural law, which developed into the theory of democracy, said to the worker: "all men are equal before the law, independently of their origin, their property, and their position; every man has an equal right in determining the fate of the people." This ideal criterion revolutionized the consciousness of the masses in so far as it was a condemnation of absolutism, aristocratic privileges, and the property qualification. But the longer it went on, the more if sent the consciousness to sleep, legalizing poverty, slavery and degradation: for how could one revolt against slavery when every man has an equal right in determining the fate of the nation? Rothschild, who has coined the blood and tears of the world into the gold napoleons of his income, has one vote at the parliamentary elections. The ignorant tiller of the soil who cannot sign his name, sleeps all his life without taking his clothes off, and wanders through society like an underground mole, plays his part, however, as a trustee of the nation’s sovereignty, and is equal to Rothschild in the courts and at the elections. In the real conditions of life, in the economic process, in social relations, in their way of life, people became more and more unequal; dazzling luxury was accumulated at one pole, poverty and hopelessness at the other. But in the sphere of the legal edifice of the State, these glaring contradictions disappeared, and there penetrated thither only unsubstantial legal shadows. The landlord, the laborer, the capitalist, the proletarian, the minister, the bootblack – all are equal as "citizens" and as "legislators." The mystic equality of Christianity has taken one step down from the heavens in the shape of the "natural," "legal" equality of democracy. But it has not yet reached earth, where lie the economic foundations of society. For the ignorant day-laborer, who all his life remains a beast of burden in the service of the bourgeoisie, the ideal right to influence the fate of the nations by means of the parliamentary elections remained little more real than the palace which he was promised in the kingdom of heaven.
Leon Trotsky
Policymakers are becoming aware that eliminating poverty and protecting our common environment are inextricably interlinked, because the world’s poorest people are both victims and agents of environmental degradation. The poorest people are often forced to meet short-term survival needs at the cost of long-term sustainability. Desperate for croplands to feed their families, and for fuel, many clear forests or cultivate steep hillsides, where soil is rapidly eroded. Others migrate to the crowded shantytowns that surround most major cities in the developing world.
William Cunningham (Environmental Science: A Global Concern)
Policymakers are becoming aware that eliminating poverty and protecting our common environment are inextricably interlinked, because the world’s poorest people are both victims and agents of environmental degradation. The poorest people are often forced to meet short-term survival needs at the cost of long-term sustainability. Desperate for croplands to feed their families, and for fuel, many clear forests or cultivate steep hillsides, where soil is rapidly eroded. Others migrate to the crowded shantytowns that surround most major cities in the developing world.
William Cunningham (Environmental Science: A Global Concern)
Policymakers are becoming aware that eliminating poverty and protecting our common environment are inextricably interlinked, because the world’s poorest people are both victims and agents of environmental degradation. The poorest people are often forced to meet short-term survival needs at the cost of long-term sustainability. Desperate for croplands to feed their families, and for fuel, many clear forests or cultivate steep hillsides, where soil is rapidly eroded. Others migrate to the crowded shantytowns that surround most major cities in the developing world.
William Cunningham (Environmental Science)
But what makes it hard for me is that I don't know how I could possibly enter that eternal alliance with Mother Earth. I don't kiss Mother Earth, I don't plow her soil... Should I, then, become a peasant, a shepherd, or what? I go on and on, and I don't know where I'll find myself next—in stench and disgrace or in light and joy. And that's where the main trouble lies: everything in this world is a puzzle. Whenever I've sunk into the deepest shames of depravity—and that has happened to me more often than anything else—I've always recited that poem about the goddess Ceres and man's fate. But has it reformed me? No—because I'm a Karamazov, because if I must plunge into the abyss, I'll go head first, feet in air. I'll even find a certain pleasure in falling in such a humiliating way. I'll even think that it's a beautiful exit for a man like me. And so, in the very midst of my degradation, I suddenly intone a hymn. Even if I must be damned, even if I am low and despicable, I must still be allowed to kiss the hem of the veil in which my God is shrouded; and even if I may be following in the devil's footsteps, I am still Your son, O Lord and I love You, and feel the joy without which the world cannot be.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Inextricably linked to the climate emergency is a broader environmental crisis. A third of the Earth’s land is now acutely degraded, with fertile soil being lost at a rate of 24 billion tonnes a year through intensive farming.[19] Generating three centimetres of top soil takes 1,000 years, and, the UN said in 2014, if current rates of degradation continue all of the world's top soil could be gone within 60 years.[20] 95% of our food presently comes from the soil. Unless new approaches are adopted, the global amount of arable and productive land per person in 2050 will be only a quarter of the level in 1960. The equivalent of 30 football pitches of soil are being lost every minute. Heavy tilling, monocropping multiple harvests and abundant use of agrochemicals have increased yields at the expense of long-term sustainability. Agriculture is actually the number one reason for deforestation. In the past 20 years, agricultural production has increased threefold and the amount of irrigated land has doubled, often leading to land abandonment and desertification. Decreasing productivity has been observed, due to diminished fertility, on 20% of the world’s cropland, 16% of forest land, 19% of grassland, and 27% of rangeland. Furthermore, tropical forests have become a source rather than a sink of carbon.[21] Forest areas in South America, Africa and Asia – which have until recently played a crucial role in absorbing GHG – are now releasing 425 teragrams of carbon annually, more than all the traffic in the US. This is due to the thinning of tree density and culling of biodiversity, reducing biomass by up to 75%. Scientists combined 12 years of satellite data with field studies. They found a net carbon loss on every continent. Latin America – home to the world’s biggest forest, the Amazon, which is responsible for 20% of its oxygen – accounted for nearly 60% of the emissions, while 24% came from Africa and 16% from Asia. Every year about 18 million hectares of forest – an area the size of England and Wales – is felled. In just 40 years, possibly one billion hectares, the equivalent of Europe, has been torn down. Half the world’s rainforests have been razed in a century and they will vanish altogether at current rates within another. Earth’s “sixth mass extinction”[22] is well underway: up to 50% of all individual animals have been lost in recent decades and almost half of land mammals have lost 80% of their range in the last century. Vertebrate populations have fallen by an average of 60% since the 1970s, and in some countries there has been an even faster decline of insects – vital, of course, for aerating the soil, pollinating blossoms, and controlling insect and plant pests.
Ted Reese (Socialism or Extinction: Climate, Automation and War in the Final Capitalist Breakdown)
None of this is to deny that environmental problems are real. Overfishing, deforestation, soil degradation, contaminated groundwater, declining populations of mammals and birds, and, most alarming, the possibility of very rapid climate change—all of these are important. But the contribution of population growth to them is indirect, and the relationship to economic growth is equivocal. Focusing on them as a root cause, as Vogt did, is a distraction. It was a waste of two decades, and doubly unfortunate because the fight over population sometimes shrouded the more important part of Vogt’s message, the part about limits. He denounced social scientists as fools, but he should have listened to them. And that, alas, applies to Borlaug, too.
Charles C. Mann (The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World)
Prophets smite their brows in exasperation at this logic. To their minds, evaluating farming systems wholly in terms of calories produced—in terms of usable energy—is a perfect example of the flaws of reductive thinking. It does not include the costs of overfertilization, habitat loss, watershed degradation, soil erosion and compaction, and pesticide and antibiotic overuse; it doesn’t account for the destruction of rural communities; it doesn’t consider whether the food is tasty and nutritious. It’s like evaluating automobiles entirely by their gasoline mileage, without taking into account safety, comfort, reliability, emissions, or any of the other factors that people consider when buying cars.
Charles C. Mann (The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World)
But the solution is not a rational one. Climate change does threaten the very basis of life on this planet, but a dramatically degraded environment here will still be much, much closer to livability than anything we might be able to hack out of the dry red soil of Mars. Even in summer, at the equator of that planet, nighttime temperatures are a hundred degrees Fahrenheit below zero; there is no water on its surface, and no plant life. Conceivably, given sufficient funding, a small enclosed colony could be built there, or on another planet; but the costs would be so much higher than for an equivalent artificial ecosystem on Earth, and therefore the scale so much more limited, that anyone proposing space travel as a solution to global warming must be suffering from their own climate delusion. To imagine such a colony could offer material prosperity as abundant as tech plutocrats enjoy in Atherton is to live even more deeply in the narcissism of that delusion—as though it were only as difficult to smuggle luxury to Mars as to Burning Man.
David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future)
Substituting stoneage with concrete age is not advancement. Without warmth, logic of concrete is as degrading as the superstition of stone.
Abhijit Naskar (Hometown Human: To Live for Soil and Society)
Climate change does threaten the very basis of life on this planet, but a dramatically degraded environment here will still be much, much closer to livability than anything we might be able to hack out of the dry red soil of Mars.
David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming)
When fruits fall from a tree, they immediately begin to degrade. Nature intended for this to happen so that the fruits’ nutrients could be incorporated back into the soil to nourish the tree and produce another generation of juicy, nutritious fruit.
David B. Agus (The End of Illness)