The Agricultural Apocalypse of the 21st Century

For over ten thousand years, since the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution, humans have been taking life from the living soil and not meaningfully returning it.

We owe everything to a thin biosphere "skin" wrapped around this floating rock in space. Our air, our water, our food, our clothing, our homes, our fuels, and even our weather are ENTIRELY DEPENDENT on a nearly invisible, humble domain of tiny beings, working tirelessly to make life possible on this planet.

In the last two centuries, with the advent of monocropping and chemical agriculture, we've seen many times more soil loss and degradation than previous centuries combined, perpetuated by an increase in industrial technology and population, and a general ignorance of what and where we are.

We've reached a tipping point — our only source of health and intelligence, our soils, has fatigued past the point of failure. Without advanced, widespread bioremediative intervention, our artificially inflated population will collapse to the actual metric the ecology can support. Small pockets of communities living in balance with their environment will be the only survivors of an agricultural apocalypse the world has never seen.

Drought, pestilence, and severe weather will incur famines, wiping out millions at a time. Even minor geopolitical upheaval can shut down global supply chains, and those without stockpiles of synthetic fertilizers will cease to grow food, resulting in mass starvation. Even without the dramatic loss of staple foods, the pernicious decline of essential minerals, and thus the complex phytonutrients in our crops, is contributing to mass degradation of our physical health and our IQ. The loss is twofold, because the human body uses minerals to protect itself from toxins and pollution, further depleting it of essential nutrients.

The tipping point has been reached, arguably passed, and we have to act now. And by the grace of God, we have everything we need to do so.

The ocean holds every mineral lost to soil degradation. Biochar sequesters carbon while supplying the backbone for rebuilding soil microbiology, catalyzing the ecosystem's natural propensity to self-heal. The immune system, regulator, and communicator of the entire food web — fungus — sits dormant in our dead soils, waiting for us to restore the resources it needs.

Digital distractions and human arrogance are the only things standing in our way: not only to actually succeed, but to thrive in a way we've never done before. Restoring our agricultural soils with terra preta will cause an ecological and economic boom that will go down in history as a 21st-century renaissance and be known as the Second Agricultural Revolution.