[Lore]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('timmac', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Lore', '
')
Drought, famine, pestilence and war are at our doorstep.

[timmac]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Lore', 'T')he result of cheap energy, and a wonderful climate to live and grow food in and by the way, these problems are not history, they're with us today.

[Lore]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('timmac', '
')I did'nt say it was only part of our history, I said it always been part of our history and yes even in the future, those things will always be with us till that certain day arives,

And the Dust Bowl era was a wonderful climate to grow food in ??

Also fuel was not that cheap to folks during the depresion era you know, just saying.

[Cid_Yama]

Prior to our use of petroleum in agriculture, the human population was less than a billion people, and had been relatively stable. Even then we had been depleting topsoil since the advent of agriculture. Back at the beginning we could move on to greener pastures as land became less productive. Not so any more.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'C')all it the thin brown line. Dirt. On average, the planet is covered with little more than 3 feet of topsoil -- the shallow skin of nutrient-rich matter that sustains most of our food and appears to play a critical role in supporting life on Earth.

"We're losing more and more of it every day," said David Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington. "The estimate is that we are now losing about 1 percent of our topsoil every year to erosion, most of this caused by agriculture."

The National Academy of Sciences has determined that cropland in the U.S. is being eroded at least 10 times faster than the time it takes for lost soil to be replaced.

Healthy topsoil is a biological matrix, a housing complex for an incredibly diverse community of organisms -- billions of beneficial microbes per handful, nitrogen-fixing fungi, nutrients and earthworms whose digestive tracts transform the fine grains of sterile rock and plant detritus into the fertile excrement that gave rise to the word itself ("drit," in Old Norse).

As such, true living topsoil cannot be made overnight, Montgomery emphasized. Topsoil grows back at a rate of an inch or two over hundreds of years. Very slowly.

"Globally, it's pretty clear we're running out of dirt," Montgomery said.