7 February 2022. Soil | Retail
The coming problem of soil. The changing face of cities.
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story. Recent editions are archived and searchable on Wordpress.
1: The coming problem of soil
There’s a long review by Elizabeth Kolbert at the New York Review of Books, behind its tightly metered paywall, of two related books: Lina Zeldovich’s The Other Dark Matter, and Jo Handelsman’s A World Without Soil.
The first one is about, not putting too fine a point on it, human shit. The second one is about soil depletion. The way we get rid of the first is causing all sorts of problems, when, used better, it could help fix the serious problem of soil.
It’s a long review, as ever with the NYRB, so I’m just going to pull out some highlights here that capture the main points of the argument.
Lina Zeldovich is based in America now, but grew up in Russia where her grandfather would use the contents of the sceptic tank to fertilise the orchard. Historically, dealing with sewage has been one of the abiding problems of cities, and initially, when populations were small, we would simply flush it into the nearest body of water.
That became more problematic as cities grew (I’ve written about that here before). We started processing sewage instead. And since it contains nitrogen, which is essential for plants, it wasn’t long before the German scientist Justus von Liebig made the connection between the two—the first could be used to help the second. In London the social reformer Edwin Chadwick suggested something similar. Some German cities did do this.
But when chemistry worked out how to fix nitrogen, and therefore produce synthetic fertiliser, it wasn’t necessary to go to these lengths any more. The result of this is that our sewage ends up—even when cleaned up—polluting coastal waters. It creates algae blooms, which are toxic, creating dead zones with little oxygen where few organisams can live:
As Zeldovich observes, our waste treatment methods have set up a vicious cycle. Since we don’t return our nitrogen output to our fields, as her grandfather did, our soils are getting depleted. They therefore require more synthetic fertilizer, which puts more nitrogen into the water. “Farm soils turn to dust while waterways suffocate from toxic algal blooms,” she writes.
Zeldovich believes that this tide is now changing. Public officials and scientists are both concerned about these effects, and can see the potential to use sewage more productively, as a resource, not as a form of waste. On Kolbert’s account,
She spends much of The Other Dark Matter traveling to see the latest in toilet technology. In Israel she tests an apparatus that looks like a quilted tent. The unit, made by a company called HomeBiogas, converts poop into liquid fertilizer and also into methane, which can be used to power a stove. In Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, she visits a firm called Loowatt, which provides its customers with waterless latrines, then collects the contents and converts them—once again—into fertilizer and biogas. In the town of Elora, about fifty miles west of Toronto, she watches as fecal sludge is converted into a soil additive called LysteGro.
As Kolbert says, laudable as these initiatives are, it’s hard to imagine how they scale. But they may need to scale, because the soil problem is getting worse.
(Mollisols. Photo courtesy of the University of Idaho.)
According to the US Soil Taxonomy, there are 12 types of soil, or ‘orders’, but the one we need to be concerned about are the ‘mollisols’, “deep and dark and loaded with organic matter”, because these are ones that feed us.
Ukraine, for example, which has tens of thousands of square miles of mollisols, is losing them at the rate of 500 million tonnes of soil a year, and these losses are now starting to be seen in crop yields. It’s the same story in MOLLISOL-RICH Iowa:
The state has already “lost enough soil to see disturbing yield reductions, and the projections for the future are bleak,” Handelsman reports.
Of course, we only have ourselves to blame for this. As Kolbert notes, agriculture needs rich soil, but modern agricultural practices are terrible for rich soil:
Prairie grasses are mostly perennials, with deep root systems. Plowing them up destroys the soil’s “architecture,” leaving it vulnerable to erosion. Trees have even deeper root systems; cutting down forests to carve out farmland leads to yet more erosion. The crops that replace trees and prairie grasses are usually annuals, with shallow root systems. These don’t hold soil well, and, in any event, get plowed up every year themselves.
And corn, which we grow on a vast scale, is apparently terrible for soil systems.
Nature does produce new soil, as rocks break down. But we are losing six tonnes per acre a year, while 900 pounds (400 kilos) per acre is created. Climate change—or more precisely, extreme weather events—are accelerating the losses:
Increasingly, rain falls in intense bursts; the more force the water carries, the more soil it washes away. Fertilizer use can mask the effects of erosion, but only temporarily and at the expense of fish and other aquatic organisms. “As soil erosion intensifies worldwide, many countries may experience crop loss simultaneously, creating unprecedented food shortages,” Handelsman warns.
Handelsman discusses no-till farming, which doesn’t displace the soil when seeds are planted, improves water absorption, and reduces carbon emissions. But it leads to more weeds, and therefore, typically to more herbicide use. The world’s most popular herbicide, glyphosate, is a probable human carcinogen. Traditional agricultural methods, which she also discusses, don’t have the same impact, but may not feed our current world population, almost half of which is dependent on food grown with synthethic fertilisers.
All the same, although Kolbert doesn’t discuss this, the jury’s out on this yield data. The question of whether forms of regenerative agriculture reduces yields or not seems to depend on how the study is done. And perhaps on who is doing it. And we can be pretty sure that if we don’t do something different, existing yields from current mainstream agriculture will continue to decline. Doing nothing is a form of ‘slow violence’ that will also lead to hunger, or worse.
These are big systemic problems that no-one, at least in the mainstream, is talking about at the moment. Handelsman, apparently, despairs of getting anyone to pay attention to the question of soil depletion, acknowledging that writing a book might be ineffective:
(She) wonders if a soil-themed video game might do the trick. Alternatively, perhaps Hollywood could produce “a scientifically accurate and spellbinding box office hit movie” that would finally raise awareness about soil. I had a hard time imagining the plot, but its title could be Let’s Get Dirty.
2: The changing face of cities
I notice that LandSec, the property company that owns the Buchanan Galleries, the large shopping centre in the middle of Glasgow, is planning to pull it down and redevelop the area on a very different layout. The Buchanan Galleries were opened 20 years ago, but several big retailers have pulled out of it.
(The Buchanan Galleries today. Photo by W F Millar, Geograph.org, CC BY-SA 2.0)
It’s early days, and I don’t know the centre of Glasgow well enough to have a view on a set of plans that will need to go out to consultation, but the language around the proposal is a sign of both the way city centres are now being re-constructed and the way that developers need to think about urban space.
LandSec is one of the biggest property companies in Britain, and Buchanan Galleries is a huge space — 592,000 square feet, according to its website, which naturally talks up the existing building. But the company’s retail portfolio is worth a lot less than it used to, according to its 2021 annual report:
Over the year, the value of our regional shopping centres fell on average 38.2% to £1.0bn, taking the decline from the peak to approximately 60%.
So there are three things worth noticing about the proposed development which are true more generally about the future of cities.
The first is that developers probably aren’t going to get away with large single purpose developments—retail or offices—any more. Glasgow’s City Council has made it clear that developments need to be “to multi-use, of retail, residential, leisure and office.” One thing this will do is to continue the trend of more homes in city centres.
The second is that the proposals are as much about creating public spaces as putting up buildings. New streets would be created, and so on—making the space for this is one of the reasons the Galleries will come down as part of the development. The Glasgow City Council leader, Susan Aitken, talks about “people focused streets” in what looks like a media statement.
The third is that there’s a lot of rhetoric about aligning with the city’s net zero targets. One can be sceptical about this—construction has a terrible emissions impact—but quite a lot of the case made for the redevelopment by LandSec is about improving the city centre public transport infrastructure.
It’s also a huge scheme. It would take 10 years to implement and employ 850 construction workers to build it.
j2t#257
If you are enjoying Just Two Things, please do send it on to a friend or colleague.