Yep. That works.

Quick quiz: What's the most important resource for civilization? Let’s exclude water, which is, far and away, the most important (and would, ahem, leave me without the topic I chose to write about this week).

You’ll be tempted to say oil, but that's not even close. Nor is metal.

The correct answer? Dirt.

“Yes,” you’ll say, “dirt is literally everywhere. It's what the ground is made of, for Pete's sake. How can something so common be that important? I mean, yeah, we need it to grow all of our food, but it's not like we're going to run out anytime soon.”

Unfortunately, I've got some bad news for you but, naturally we'll first need to go back in time.

During the Roman Republic, the fields of Italy were famed for their fertility and were a big part of Rome's early conquests. And during the Roman Empire? All of the grain was shipped from the fertile fields along the Nile via the Port of Alexandria. In time, the fields of Italy were no longer capable of supporting the population of Rome; the soils had been exhausted of nutrients, with much of the topsoil stripped away.

Let's travel even further back to ancient Mesopotamia. The end of Mesopotamia's reign as the center of civilization ended due to the very thing that made it possible: irrigation. Long-term irrigation caused the salinity of the fields to increase until the fields were too salty for crops.

“But,” you’ll say, “we're talking thousands of years, here. Technology's increased to the point where we don't need to worry about that anymore.”

Nope. Doesn't work.

Sorry to be a downer, but we need to worry about it now more than ever.

Soil is fragile stuff that can take decades—sometimes centuries—to form. Our ancestors needed millennia to master agricultural methods that preserved the soil, and we've largely discarded their methods.

Terracing, contour plowing, no-till farming, use of compost and manure: those are no longer in the playbook for most of our farms, especially the largest ones.

Tractors, nitrogen fertilizers, and genetically engineered crops allow us to do an end-run on soil. We can use them to grow crops in even the worst soil, at least for three to four years.

After that? They just move to a new field. That's not sustainable, though. We're already using about 40% of the Earth's surface for agriculture. We can't keep moving fields forever. We're simply eroding away soil faster than it's produced.

This isn't a situation where there's going to be a simple technological solution, in large part due to the fact that this is a technological problem. Instead, we need to concentrate on careful husbandry of the land, especially encouraging small farms that use sound long-term strategies.

Thankfully, this is starting to happen, but it's got a long, long way to go. Every single civilization that's neglected its dirt has suffered for it. We've neglected ours for far too long.

_________

Quotable

Dear Yard Ramp Guy: Onward, reverse-alphabetically. In the meantime, you B most excellent.

“Years later, people look back upon their darkest day and say—as Churchill said of London's war years—‘This was our finest hour.' In a tough spot right now? You may be on the very edge of winning.”

— Guy Lynch

Zeppelin: Unleaded

The federal government has maintained a helium storage program since WWI, with the express purpose of making sure that America never falls behind in, um, a zeppelin arms race.

The Federal Helium Program is often viewed as one of the biggest boondoggles the government keeps funding. Both Reagan and Clinton tried to get rid of it. They couldn't have been more wrong, though.

Even apart from the fact that the program pays for itself with the proceeds of the helium it sells to U.S. companies, the helium program has plenty of other benefits to keeping it around.

First off, helium provides 42 percent of the nation's supply of unrefined helium gas. Second, it's already all stored in a huge porous rock formation below the Texas Panhandle, so there isn't a lot in terms of maintenance fees.

Even if we did need to harvest more, it's not that difficult. Among other things, helium is a byproduct of harvesting natural gas in the Midwest. Most importantly, helium is surprisingly essential to industries across the board.

Here's a non-exhaustive list of helium's uses:

1. Airships are making a major comeback (see HERE), and they obviously need lots of helium.
2. Cryogenic purposes. Not just freezing dead bodies, but cooling the magnets in MRI scanners and other similar uses. Helium makes an extremely effective coolant and is part of the process of making oxygen-hydrogen rocket fuel.
3. Creating stable pressurized atmospheres. Deep sea divers often use atmospheric mixes that include helium.
4. Arc welding materials that are contaminated by air or nitrogen.
5. Supersonic wind tunnels.
6. Gas chromatography—a method of analyzing the components of chemicals.
7. As a protective gas in growing silicon and germanium crystals.

Last, and certainly not least: those party balloons that float and hug the ceiling? Filled with helium. I just bought 30 of them for my grandson’s birthday party. Birthdays just wouldn’t be as fun without helium.

_________

Quotable

Ho ho ho, Yard Ramp Guy. And all that jazz.

“Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.”

— Dave Barry

Beware of Cat

The greatest mass murderer of all time is a housecat named Tibbles.

The Stephen's Island Wren, or Lyall's Wren, was a flightless bird about the size of a sparrow that was once found throughout New Zealand. By 1894, however, it had been driven extinct everywhere but Stephen's Island. (It got over to the island during the last Ice Age, when sea levels were lower; it didn't swim there.)

The story goes that Tibbles, the cat of the lighthouse keeper on the island, single-handedly wiped out every remaining representative of the species on the island, presenting many of them as gifts to his owner. It makes a great story, since that would make Tibbles the only creature ever to single-handedly wipe out an entire species.

And yes: it's probably not true. Most experts agree that feral cats on the island were responsible. (Though Tibbles certainly helped, and he did apparently bring lots of Lyall's Wren corpses as gifts to the lighthouse keeper.)

Only about 16-18 preserved specimens of the extinct bird (minus a few bones) are known to still exist. It seems like an evolutionary oddity. There are only four other flightless songbirds ever known to have evolved, including three other species of New Zealand Wren, and all are now extinct.

Lyall's Wren is, however, important to the study of how species go extinct, as it's a very clear-cut example of extinction as caused by invasive species. (The mainland extinction was mostly caused by the Polynesian rat, another invasive species.)

So, a few important lessons here. First, introducing cats to an area with endangered animals smaller than them is a bad idea. Second, ecosystems can be very fragile; it can only take the addition or removal of a single species to disrupt them.

Third, spay and neuter your pets.

And to anyone who thinks I'd spend all this time writing a post to complain passive-aggressively about a neighbor’s dog doing something irresponsible (again)…I have no comment.

_________

Quotable

Oh, Yard Ramp Guy: here’s a helpful quote for when your customers are trying to choose:

“Man selects on for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends.”

— Charles Darwin