Is it me, or are we being inundated with catastrophic floods? Cedar Rapids, Nashville, Australia, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana…the list goes on, and while it seems like an especially bad year, the trend has been growing. You can blame it on global warming, the rapture, or just plain bad luck. But I have a different theory. And it’s backed by science. Yet no one is reporting on this, so please forward this to as many reporters as you know.
It’s about the soil—the massive destruction of our soil’s ability to absorb moisture, a soil genocide, really. It has been occurring over the past few decades and has reached a critical mass. What’s destroying our soil’s ability to absorb water? That’s easy: the massive application of agricultural chemicals, which has been accelerated by the almost complete conversion to GMO crops (mainly corn and soy) that enable even MORE chemical usage.
Are you confused? Allow me to explain. It’s actually quite easy to understand, once you pay attention.
Healthy, organic soil is alive with billions of living creatures per square inch. All those living creatures absorb water. They absorb so much water, in fact, that if you look at healthy organic soil under a microscope it LOOKS like a sponge. So yes, before chemical farming, there were floods, but they were fairly regular, predictable, and much less catastrophic.
How does chemical “conventional” farming destroy the soil’s ability to absorb moisture? All those chemicals—especially the herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides—KILL the living organisms in the soil. All the living organisms, good and “bad.” Just as too many antibiotics kill all the good and bad bacteria in your body, too many chemicals kill everything in the soil, leaving it a dead, empty filler that can’t do what it’s supposed to do. It can’t feed the plants, it can’t protect the plants, it can’t absorb water, and it also can’t absorb carbon dioxide, leading to even more climate change (hence the tornadoes, I say, though scientists are still investigating that connection).
This seemingly radical finding has been scientifically proven at the Rodale Institute’s 30-year-old farming systems trial. It’s also been replicated by universities around the world. It just hasn’t made it onto your local evening news report, since reporters are too busy documenting the needless and horrible deaths of innocent people, the total destruction of homes, lives, farms, families, and the American Dream that catastrophic flooding and tornadoes have caused.
What can you do? Demand organic—buy and eat and grow organic food and fiber. Stop using chemicals in your own backyard. Insist that GMO foods are labeled! Take action with your local and state government. Share this with any reporter you know. Tell your friends and neighbors that the artificially cheap, toxic-chemical-filled “conventional” food is part of what’s causing flooding, and that all of us have the power to stop it.
There are doomsdayers who get on all the news shows who claim the world is ending on a certain date, and for a few weeks everyone gets a bit scared and wonders if it may be true. Invariably, those days come and go and we are still here. Yet the people who are trying to get a real message across that really could mean the difference between life and death on this precious planet earth barely get covered in the media. Or worse, get laughed at and mocked in the mad rush at the supermarket to plan a weekend summer picnic, where we grill toxic cheap foods and stuff ourselves like there’s no tomorrow.
Well, what if there isn’t?
Also wetlands development. It all comes back to us…karma.
And what soil we haven’t killed we have paved over, encouraging the rain to run away as fast as possible (rather than soaking in) to artificially straightened and sped up creeks and rivers. Gosh we are effective at messing up the world.
Luckily what we have done can probably still be turned around. Aim to do your own little part and retain all the rain water that falls on your place by improving the soil, building rain gardens (shallow ponds that hold water to allow it to soak in), and replacing solid pavement with permeable pavement. And lobby your local planning board to do the same thing. Oh, and buy organic food and clothing as much as pocssible, and tell your representatives money for sustainable farming and conservation programs is vitally important.
As a farmboy very knowledgeable of the technological, artificial changes in chemical soil composition, it pales in overall comparison to the massive, unbridled use of fossil fuels, resultant atomospheric CO2 levels, with domino effects of methane gas mega-releases from previously frozen and therefore trapping tundra, reduced glacier and artic ice reflectivity and on and on….all massively increasing global atmospheric moisture levels leading to the heavy snowfalls and rain events. Organic farming is surely the best way to shore up our survival and aid in reduced flooding and improved health, but the real monster is the worlds addiction to burning exponential amounts of fossil fuels.
Thanks Wes! By the way, most agricultural chemicals are a sad waste of those fossil fuels too.
Funnily enough, I just called a gardener to aerate and condition the soil in my front yard because, I noticed that when it rains hard (heavy downpours) the rain just sheets to the other side of the yard. When I do an inspection of the area, I find that in large swathes, the soil is so compact and dry, that it is a wonder that the grass grow at all! I’ve only been here 5 years, but I am aware that the former owner had the yard chemically treated several times a year, for allmost all of the 11 years that they lived here, that’s scary! Now, I am trying to make the situation better and stop the run off from spilling into the community pond, which by the way, is a mess, from all of the chemicals used on lawns and runs downhill.
We must band together and to something about it soon. It’s a wonder that the frogs still live in there!!
Every day I am heartened to learn of new groups of people who share this dream of reclaiming our great Planet for future generations of our offspring and other life. Since moving to my current location 15 years ago to begin my stand for organic and safe foods I have watched this movement unfold into bigger and bigger groups of people combining their efforts towards this same goal. We have now got 8 farmers markets dedicated to organic and home made foods and fibers within 30 miles of my home. Each year these small groups grow in numbers and the word is spreading by word of mouth and by people being sick of being sick from chemical non-foods found in local grocery stores. Little by little the word is getting out there and I am hopeful. For those of you new to this who own a property or live on one that is damaged take heart and start with the soil. Add worms. Build a compost pile and use it. Learn how to incorporate it into your little patch of earth and begin. Be the light in your neighborhood have a meeting at your home to share your vision for a safer environment and a safer food supply for all. Share how each one could help toward a better environment in your own little space. I have been amazed at how many people actually will take part in this change if educated a little bit and encouraged to share their new found knowledge.
When we first moved here I could not find a single worm in any shovelful of dirt so I built my compost pile and bought 10 pounds of worms from a worm farm. Every year we have composted everything we take from this earth, leaves, weeds, food scraps, even the dead mice we catch. Now my ground is soft, workable and fertile an loaded with worms and worm castings. Every shovel full has worms in it. The food I grow is wonderful and tasty and the Hens produce the best eggs I have ever eaten. They get no chemicals in their diet and no soy or GMO corn. My other pet project is to get the Soy foods out of diets. Soy is not food but it is a legume that when grown properly without the chemicals nourishes the soil and replenishes it. Grow it and till it in do not consume it.
While I don’t dispute your theory, I must remind you that 1/3 of the U.S. is currently in extreme drought conditions which are at crisis levels
and threaten food production. These extremes in nature I assume will only increase as time goes on.
I really don’t enjoy conspiracy theories that can’t be proven one way or the other, yet, but I’ll stick my neck out that maybe there’s something to that H.A.R.P.P “scientific research” center up in Alaska. So far away from any public scrutiny. Which smacks of government paternal authoritarian shock doctrinal action.
Storm fronts hovered over C.R. Iowa for 10 days+, dropping a continuous 24 inches of rain or more! Debuque which was just flooded received 14 inches in a matter of hours. That’s not normal!… that’s not usual! This is not anywhere close to being a coastal monsoon region. No amount of correct soil absorbsion or drainage can keep up with that much water, that quickly. I defend proper organic soil structures, but the ruined soil argument ‘doesn’t hold water’ with me, or it’s only part of a greater problem. What is compounding flooding is how much water is deluged in any one area at any one time, namely extremely short spans of time. THAT’S what the public is NOT GETTING! 1. WHAT IS THE TOTAL RAINFALL? (instead of going right to the evening news shots of floating rafts and soaked shirts)2. WHAT’S THE DURATION FROM START TO FINISH IT FELL? The land can deal with 10 inches of rainfall if it’s coming down SLOW enough. What’s complicating the issue is how the core of engineers are releasing water from locks and dams at inopportune times, in massive volumes which also contribute to downstream flooding. Ask the old timers, they’ll tell you that flooding was not an issue in the old days. Man made dams are not natural. Neither is H.A.R.P.P. It’s either as nefarious as that, or God has grown tired of us. What God Wants, God Gets.