Dr. David Montgomery, distinguished geologist, part-time rock musician, and author of King of Fish: The Thousand Year Run of Salmon, and also of Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations.
While our radar screens are focused on global warming, peak oil, and biodiversity loss, David Montgomery says we may be missing what he calls the “most basic environmental change sweeping the planet”—soil loss. Conventional agriculture is eroding and degrading the earth’s most productive soils at a rate that will ultimately “undermine civilization,” he says, unless society rethinks the way it treats this absolutely fundamental resource.
