Just when Al Gorebot had you convinced.....

....that all you had to lay awake at night and worry about was global warming, along come the "Dirt is Declining" crowd. From the Seattle Post Intelligencer:

washed soil from a neighboring farmer'sJohn Aeschliman shows a spot where rain has property onto the road. Aeschliman says his method of farming, in which plants are seeded directly into the remains of the previous crop without tilling, gives stability to the soil, enabling it to retain water and preserve the organic matter within it. (Andy Rogers / P-I)

The lowdown on topsoil: It's disappearing

Disappearing dirt rivals global warming as an environmental threat

Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Last updated 7:57 a.m. PT

By TOM PAULSON
P-I REPORTER

The planet is getting skinned.

While many worry about the potential consequences of atmospheric warming, a few experts are trying to call attention to another global crisis quietly taking place under our feet.

Call 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."

"It's just crazy," fumed John Aeschliman, a fifth-generation farmer who grows wheat and other grains on the Palouse near the tiny town of Almota, just west of Pullman.

"We're tearing up the soil and watching tons of it wash away every year," Aeschliman said. He's one of a growing number of farmers trying to persuade others to adopt "no-till" methods, which involve not tilling the land between plantings, leaving crop stubble to reduce erosion and planting new seeds between the stubble rows.

Montgomery has written a popular book, "Dirt," to call public attention to what he believes is a neglected environmental catastrophe. A geomorphologist who studies how landscapes form, Montgomery describes modern agricultural practices as "soil mining" to emphasize that we are rapidly outstripping the Earth's natural rate of restoring topsoil.

For the whole story, go to:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/348200_dirt22.html