Scraping the Barrel: A Cautionary Tale for Our Times
Ever since I started to write for the late-lamented ‘Phuket Gazette’, I have endeavored, from time to time, to address what I consider to be the burning issue de nos jours – namely the continuing and as I see it, irreversible destruction of our planet’s natural resources. Sadly we are all culpable, whether it be my Thai partner’s insistence on putting everything edible in plastic bags, apparently to discourage armies of invisible ants, my new neighbor’s construction of a six story condo on a postage stamp of land next to my house, or the indiscriminate ‘fly-tipping’ of garbage down each and every by-way. Am I holier than thou? Alas, no. Confession time looms….
I have a piece of land next to my house which I bought, under duress more than a decade ago, because a developer was eying it covetously. The envisaged apartment block would have obliterated my sea-view. The fallow plot, now left to its own natural devices, went through the usual tropical transmogrifications – first, neat grass, then coarse bunch grasses, sedges and low ground hugging weeds such as wedelia. These were in turn supplanted by evergreen shrubs associated with secondary growth that included calatropis, wrightia and thevetia , and then by scrubland trees such as acacia, macaranga, leptospermum and saraca. In next to no time, the whole area had been annexed by trees, themselves hosts to tropical vines and lianas, a dense drapery over the burgeoning sylvan outlines. In the tropics, vegetation riots. I had to decide. I could either leave the whole area alone, continue to abandon it to nature and allow it to become a fully-fledged jungle, or I could take drastic action. After much soul-searching, I summoned the back-hoe.I hate hacking down trees for all sorts of reasons, from the aesthetic to the practical. Trees not only look good, they do good and they do you good – by sequestering carbon, pumping out oxygen , storing water in their roots and preventing erosion by binding the topsoil. I put all that to the back of my mind.
So the man came with the back-hoe and grubbed up all the trees, some already four metres tall, and unceremoniously dumped them, roots waving goodbye, in the back of waiting lorries. And here’s the rub. I had anticipated some loss of top soil, but nothing on the scale I witnessed that day. As each tousled and mangled root system was deposited, it was accompanied by a liberal quantity of precious top soil. The operator made no attempt either to shake the roots free of clinging topsoil , or to avoid shoveling up loads of loam with each giant scoop of the back-hoe. At the end of the operation –and it took 14 truck loads to carry away the spoil – my land, probably untilled for centuries, had been scoured and scraped.
Top soil is a precious commodity anywhere, but especially in islands such as Phuket. Why? Because there is so little of it around. In part, that is because it is naturally sparse in these rocky, wind-swept locations. Look at any local excavation and you will see a tell-tale layer of dark topsoil a mere eight or ten centimeters thick. To compound the problem, this earthy veneer has endured a number of assaults: first from tin miners who gouged the surface and left a bare landscape pitted with toxic holes , then by rubber planters who replaced 60 percent of the virgin jungle with neat rows of havea brasiliensis, and more recently by tourists who now flock to this once emerald isle. The result – a rash of resorts and apartment blocks.
However, the main reason why top soil it is so valued is because it contains almost all the elements essential for healthy plant life: it is where the macro-nutrients of nitrogen, phosphate, potassium and magnesium are all normally present as assimilable salts. No top soil means no healthy plants. Nitrogen, the most vital element of all, is crucial to plant growth and greening, phosphorus is involved in the production of new roots, flowers and seeds, potassium speeds up various organic processes. Not merely a storehouse of these goodies, this layer is also where earthworms tunnel away. As evolutionist Charles Darwin knew full well – and he spent forty years researching the subject – worms are one of the most important inhabitants of our planet. Present almost everywhere in the earth’s top-soil, they are detritivores, which means they feed on plant debris such as dead roots and leaves as well as processing inorganic, mineral elements such as tiny stones. As a consequence of this tireless activity, they produce casts of concentrated humus – at least twice as rich in nutrients such as phosphates in the surrounding soil.
The natural tendency of precipitation is to leach this top soil, to push these essential salts deeper into the sub-stratum. Worms reverse this process, bringing enriched soil back to surface areas where shallow rooting plants can benefit, as well as burying organic matter such as dead leaves where it can compost more rapidly. And worms improve the structure of top soil not only by cementing particles of earth together in water retaining aggregates, they also allow better drainage and aeration by virtue of their tunneling activity. It has been estimated that worms move at least 8 tons of earth per acre per year, amending the earth, depositing humus, and helping to leave the soil friable and workable. For unlike the denser substrate of sand, clay or rock, good loam allows delicate plant rootlets to invade its pores. But despite the best efforts of our earth-bound denizens, the process of renewal is painfully slow: it still takes five hundred years to replenish one inch of this miraculous stuff. At a stroke, I had obliterated four or five centimeters of the fragile, life-enhancing layer.
What transpired – literally in my own backyard – is a microcosm of a problem that besets our planet. This process of erosion, this abrading of top soil, has been going on all over the world. Such a harsh process not only scrapes off the top layer of earth, it dries out and exposes to the elements what little is left. Dust bowls around the world are testament to this. To take one notorious example. In the 1930s, a combination of severe droughts and farming malpractices motivated by greed, led to the erosion of vast acreages of land in the American Prairies. Farmers not only destroyed what trees were there, but more crucially, and aided by new and efficient farm machinery, they ‘tractored’ and deep-ploughed existing grasslands that had been grazed by millions of bison for eons. No longer anchored by tree or tough grass roots, exposed to desiccating winds, the churned-up soil, was blown away in vast clouds. On April 14, 1935, and on a day afterwards known to locals as ‘Black Sunday’, twenty ‘black blizzards’ swept across the Great Plains, obliterating the sun and reducing visibility to a few feet. What remained was a near-lunar landscape which could support only minimal crops. Families – see Steinbeck’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ – were forced to jump in their ‘jalopies’ and migrate west to California. 500,000 Americans were rendered homeless.
What have we learnt? Not enough. Maybe less dramatically than in 30s Oklahoma, homo sapiens has inexorably created similar problems in other parts of the globe. A map of the world’s loss of primal vegetation shows Brazil, Indonesia and equatorial Africa, as ongoing offenders. In these developing countries, the predicament has been largely caused by wholesale and unscrupulous clearance of land, especially virgin jungle, often by burning, and the consequent leaching away of the exposed soil by heavy tropical rains. Climate change, the harbinger both of floods and droughts, has not helped.
So what is being done to avoid a cataclysm, a world famine of more than biblical proportions? The answer, perhaps a surprising one, is more than you might expect. As cultivable land disappears as a consequence of chronic misuse and urbanization, new land, reclaimed from the wild, is pressed into service. Between 1960 and the late 1990s for example, land supporting cultivable crops increased by about 11 per cent. In addition, the yield of these crops was massively increased, thanks not only to the use of pesticides and herbicides, but to the development of genetically modified strains. These so-called GM varieties have doubled or even trebled yields. More resistant to insect damage or viral depredation, they have helped, at least in theory, to arrest the indiscriminate over-use of toxic chemicals, and to control plant diseases. In Hawaii, the papaya industry was on its knees, threatened by a virus which had already decimated output. Scientists developed a new GM papaya called the Rainbow. It stopped the virus in its tracks. Now Hawaii exports papayas.
But the writing is still on the wall – and in mile-high letters. By 2050, the world’s population is expected to have grown from a current 7.7 billion to 9.1 billion. Down on previous estimates, it is still an extremely alarming figure. There is still far too little sustainable agricultural practice, too much land being exploited for short-term gain, and then cast away like a well-worn glove. Despite GM crops and more efficient husbandry, we are still using far too many chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides , 90 per cent of which end up polluting our rivers and oceans, poisoning fish, creating algal blooms and upsetting the precarious balance of nature.
How well are we dealing with a plastic glut so severe that the stuff will bulk larger in our seas than fish by mid-century? There has been no concerted global response to climate change. We are addicted to the cash cow of monocultural crops such as wheat or soy or oil palm, still overgrazing what grassland remains. Perhaps most worrying of all is the obliteration of our forests and jungles, natural habitats for so many species. How long does it take to replace ten towering teak trees?Or a thousand mahoganies? Or one Javan rhinoceros?
I come back to my own little tale. What happened to me in Phuket is a tiny instance of what is happening, and will continue to happen, worldwide. And it is a truly global concern. In the past, civilizations came, flourished and declined – usually as a result of their own excesses – without the rest of the world being much bothered, much less directly affected. When Carthage or Rome or Spain hit the buffers, the rest of the world got on with its own concerns. The issues were not global issues. Today they are. It is no longer a case of saying: ‘That is none of my business’ or ‘It doesn’t affect me’. It does….
I have since tried to redress the balance in my own neck of the woods. How? By re-planting my denuded plot with fruit trees and a edible plants. It now boasts eighteen banana palms, as well as tamarind, coconut, mango, cashew, mangosteen, neem, rambudan and papaya. There are clumps of lemon grass, herbs and sweet potatoes. And the grass in between has been retained. And Charles Darwin would approve the presence of surface casts – a sure sign that earthworms are leaving their calling cards.
And yet I cannot avoid the naked truth. I am supposed to be an environmentalist, a nature lover. Yet I tore down trees and destroyed the top soil – like an Oklahoma bully-boy, or a Brazilian Bolsonaro. I have tried to make amends of a sort, but the land will not entirely recover in my lifetime, or that of my grandchildren. Mea culpa.
Patrick Campbell has been a Visiting Professor at the Universities of British Columbia and N. Colorado, and is the author of ten books, about forty academic articles (mostly about poetry), and much journalism. He retired to Phuket, Thailand, where he has been able to indulge his love of nature, his passion for environmental issues and his interest in the arts. He contributes on a weekly basis to newspapers.