Part 3: Save Soil

Sadhguru is taking the Save Soil Movement to 4 billion people in the world. Tomorrow he will address the COP 15 at Cote d’Ivoire, urging 197 nations to enshrine policies for soil health. Already, since he set off on his lone motorcycle journey from London, Sadhguru has meandered through Europe and parts of the Middle East in a 100-day journey across 30,000 km. He has been talking to people, governments, UN bodies, media and organisations to make this come about. 

 

The response has been tremendous. It is amazing to see people so open, so willing to do what it takes to achieve this goal. 

 

Please join in too 🙏! Push aside your inertia, put away your cynicism, overcome that feeling of resistance of being roped into some random do-gooding… this is REALLY important. For the sake of our children, we must do this.

In about two decades or so, we will have 40% less food and a population of 9.3 billion people. It is not a pleasant prospect. UN Agencies are foreseeing civil wars, riots for food… oh, not in faraway Africa where anything can happen… they’re forecasting this for Chicago, for the USA, for the First World. Already 27 of 30 wars in Africa in recent decades have been over fertile lands. When they run out, about 1.2 billion people are projected to migrate. Where will they go? They will be at your doorstep, eyeing hungrily your morsel of food.

What we need to do right now is this: speak up and be heard by your government.
Here is a link: https://www.consciousplanet.org/letters

The interface is simple. Put in your region, your name… it generates a letter that you can copy. Send it to the right people in your country with the emails provided. That is all. 

Also, do speak on your social media about Soil and the crisis it is facing. The facts are all there on various UN and other informative websites. If that's all too much to trawl through, savesoil.org has plenty of shareable resources. I was shocked to learn that the situation was this bad, and you will likely be dismayed as well. However it is very much possible to tackle this if we make a loud enough din, because it just means bringing soil degradation into the narrative, which it simply has not been so far. The solution itself is simple, it's just a matter of awareness and will.

When we turn around this soil crisis, you will have done something very critical for future generations: demanded a future worth living.

Part 2: Holding All the Answers

How is the ecological crisis to be approached? Do we go on obsessing over coal and carbon, over who is to be blamed, who must bear the brunt and so on? Do we look for ways to harness solar energy and minimise our footprint? Do we research new and clean energy for our airplanes? Do we stop ravaging the seas? Do we change the way we eat? There are many discussions on many platforms but you will not have heard too many people talk of averting Soil Extinction. (Yes, there is such a thing and it is happening already in many parts of the world. About 52% of the world’s agricultural soil is degraded, severely impacting the quantity as well as the quality of our produce.)

What does soil degradation mean? It means the lack or depletion of organic content in soil. Far from being inert, soil is a complex symbiotic system of organic matter, minerals, gases, liquids and living organisms. It is alive. Take all this out, and soil is reduced to sand. A handful of rich soil contains 8-10 billion microorganisms – more than all the humans on earth. The soil is in fact an underground extension and counterpart of our own bodies, with its teeming microbial presence. After all, about 60% of our own bodies are microbes, aren’t they?

Oddly enough, soil seems to be underpinning factor for a number of ecological issues that we’re facing. Our problems with excess carbon in the atmosphere, our water scarcity, our problems with cycles of floods and drought, our dying rivers and streams, our suicidal farmers (who are finding growing food a heart-breaking business), the looming migration disaster across continents and also the upcoming food crisis. All these – I repeat ALL THESE – can be addressed by simply taking care of the soil.

Rich soil, with plenty of green cover, massively sequesters carbon. Rich soil can hold eight times more water than all the rivers of the world. Rich soil feeds our rivers, releasing water slowly, sustainably. Rich organic soil doesn’t permit water run-off. Rich soil produces rich food and in turn strong, healthy human beings.

This is what Sadhguru has taken up – a global movement to save soil. It is an awareness campaign to alert the citizens of the world to this problem and at once, to introduce it to the solution. (It is characteristic of Sadhguru that he never points to a problem without bringing in the solution as well.) In this case, it is absurdly simple: bring about policy to ensure that agricultural soil has a minimum of 3-6% organic content. This is amazingly easy to do and there are hundreds of ways to do it. There are two sources of organic content: animal waste and plant matter. This needs to go back into the soil.

Governments across the world need to enshrine this into their policy – and farmers need incentives to do this. In India, a simple device like mandating a cover crop during the harsh summer months is a matter of merely Rs 450 per acre. Just throw some seed, any seed, make sure the land stays under shade, take whatever low yields there are and put the stalks and haulms back into the earth. That’s all. In 5-8 years, the organic content creeps up, enriching the topsoil and we will have successfully averted soil extinction.

Part 1: Sickening for Something

The first time I was made sharply aware that we humans weren’t doing a grand job of living in harmony with nature was when I was in high school. One of our textbooks had an extract by the fabulous Gerald Durrell, British naturalist, conservationist, and writer, from a book called Catch me a Colobus. The book is full of adventures in Sierra Leone, where Durrell sought rare endangered animals to bring home to his zoo, which was intended to help conserve various species from dying out entirely.

In the final chapter, ‘Animals for Ever’ he makes a desperate plea for some sense in our dealing with the world around us. He speaks of how humans drove to near extinction two abundant species that no one before could’ve imagined dying out. One of them was the Passenger Pigeon, one of the most numerous avian species ever and the other was the North American Bison. The latter was hunted as a matter of policy, and its slaughter was carried out as a way to starve Native Americans into submission. ‘Every Buffalo Dead Is an Indian Gone’ – that was the cry that led to this horrendous pile of buffalo skulls in this picture taken in Michigan, USA, in 1892.

A passage from his book so stirred my emotions, it awoke a gnawing worry for this planet that has never since left me. Durrell writes:

“…even today the majority of people do not realise the extent to which we are destroying the world we live in. We are like a set of idiot children, let loose with poison, saw, sickle, shotgun and rifle, in a complex and beautiful garden that we are slowly but surely turning into a barren and infertile desert. It is quite possible that in the last few weeks or so, one mammal, one bird, one reptile, and one plant or tree, have become extinct. I hope not but I know for certain that in the same time one mammal, bird, reptile, and plant or tree, have been driven just that much nearer to oblivion.

The world is as delicate and as complicated as a spider’s web, and like a spider’s web, if you touch one thread, you send shudders running through all the other threads that make up the web. But we’re not just touching the web, we’re tearing great holes in it; we’re waging a sort of biological war on the world around us. We are felling forests quite unnecessarily and creating dust bowls, and thereby even altering the climate. We are clogging our rivers with industrial filth, and we are now polluting the sea and the air.

…Conservation means preserving the life of the whole world, be it trees or plants, be it even man himself. It is to be remembered that some tribes have been exterminated very successfully in the last few hundred years and that others are being harried to extinction today – the Patagonian Indians, the Eskimoes, and so on. By our thoughtlessness, our greed and our stupidity we will have created, within the next fifty years or perhaps even less, a biological situation whereby we will find it difficult to live in the world at all. We are breeding like rats and this population explosion must be halted in some way. All religious factions, all political factions, the governments of the world, must face facts, for if we persist in ignoring them then, breeding like rats, we will have to die like them also.”

Grim words, but so prescient! Fifty years, he’d said. He wrote this in 1972. Exactly half a century ago. Climate change is now a fact of life, we are further devastating the planet in myriad ways, driving our fellow creatures into desperate pockets for basic survival, and in many cases towards outright extinction. Right now, of the assessed biodiversity, there are more than 142,500 species on The IUCN Red List, and more than 40,000 species are marked as being threatened with extinction, including 41% of amphibians, 37% of sharks and rays, 34% of conifers, 33% of reef building corals, 26% of mammals and 13% of birds.

Our agricultural practices are so unthinking, we are losing about 27,000 species (yes, 27,000 species!) of soil microbial life every year. Sawing off the very branch that we sit on… do we really imagine we can live well without having a healthy planet as well?