Between Soil and Soil.

• Position: Essay

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

A ten-year-old has lived rough 25 percent of all the oil ever burned. A twenty-two-year-old has lived through 54 percent of it. That's how fast the end of the fossil fuel interlude is coming on.

We have what I call the 3.45 billion-year imperative: Organisms are made of carbon, and they go after energy-rich forms of carbon, whether they're bacteria in a Petri dish going after sugar, drosophila flies in a flask going after mashed up bananas and yeast, or humans going after oil.

Look at what's happened with population growth as we use that energy-rich fossil carbon.

In my lifetime, almost three quarters of a century, the world population has tripled. Since John Kennedy's time, it has doubled.

We've got to internalize the implications of economic as well as population growth.

We've become a bunch of technological fundamentalists, thinking we're going to solve our problems through technology, solve our problems without thinking about the need to practice restraint in the use of fossil energy, the stuff of which we're made.

That's what makes this the most important moment in the history of Homo sapiens .

So it's a tall order. We're asking a lot of us.

We have the power of abstract thinking, powerful enough to create an economic system that acquires that energy-rich carbon and the accoutrements that carbon makes available. That's the growth economy, and I think it's safe to say that the growth economy and our brand of it, capitalism, is nothing short of Petri dish economics: Get to the edge as fast as we can and think we'll solve our problems the same way as before, while not acknowledging that so far it's been by the use of energy destroying so much of the ecosphere.

I t comes down to this, friends: Can we keep ourselves fed? Can we save the stuff, the soil and water, of which we're made? All of us are just stopovers between soil and soil.

Thirty-three years ago at the Land Institute, we began to think about the problem of soil erosion. One could see that a prairie was not having this problem of soil erosion beyond replacement level, whereas the corn fields and wheat fields were. Furthermore, they were fossil-fuel dependent, and dependent upon putting chemicals on the field.

With an evolutionary ecological view, it is easy to conclude that one does not put chemicals out there with which our tissues have no evolutionary experience, without regarding them guilty until proven innocent. How hard is that?

When one looks around...