albert howard

"...this development is based on the transfer of food from the regions that produce it to the manufacturing centers which consume it and which make no attempt to return their wastes to the land. this amounts to a perpetual subsidy paid by agriculture to industry and has resulted in the impoverishment of large areas of the earth's surface. a form of unconscious banditry has been in operation: the prosperity of generations to come, in the shape of soil fertility, has been used, not to bebefit the human race as a whole, but to enricha dishonest present,"
Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture. by albert howard p.193

published in 1947...precient...the proponents of sustainable anything owe a large debt ( which is widely recognized by most) to albert howard and his interpretation of soil as an organic whole made up of multiple components, and the delineation of the processes which were destroying it. he saw agriculture as a crucial component of the industrial revolution, but i don't think he could forsee the extent to which agriculture would be colonized by industry. chemical fertilizers were destroying the life in the soil even in his day and still are ( anhydrous amonia, the major nitrate fertilizer used in growning industrial corn , for instance kills 15% of the earthworm population in a given field with each application by drying the soil and changing its chemical balance) but he didn't have to contend with trangentic seed produced by agribusiness limiting the diversity of crops or monsanto and archer daniels midland patenting seeds in an effort to aggressively control diversity's re-introduction into the monoculture of corn and soy beans....fast food and industrially processed food were probably unknown to him as well, though it most likely would not have suprised him...it's taken most of the 63 years since the publication of Soil and Health for any sort of widespread realization of the impact of agricultural industrialization to come about..in that time the system has become second nature and has spread around the world limiting or destroying traditional agriculture wherever it has gone...resource depletion will make us change our ways...the sooner the better...there's a lot to figure out.