Thread by @BabaBoolos

Just as the #Ukraine crisis has been a wake-up call for societies that rely heavily on Russian energy exports and #FossilFuels generally, it also highlights another environmentally and geopolitically disastrous addiction: artificial fertilizers. A 🧵... 1/18

As @michaeltanchum notes, Russia is the world’s largest fertilizer exporter, meaning that "fertilizer represents one of the greatest vulnerabilities for both Europe and Africa."
mei.edu/publications/m…

Modern agriculture is hooked on fertilizers. And not without reason: artificial fertilizers helped send crop yields exploding as the world's human population quadrupled over the past 100 years.

All this sounds great. And in the short term, it was - at least for humans. But artificial fertilizers are creating dependence now and potentially catastrophic food crises in the future - by DEPLETING soil fertility. Here's how.

Artificial fertilizers contain unnaturally high concentrations of nitrogen, phosphorus & potassium. Unsurprisingly, the process of making them is polluting and hugely carbon intensive.

I won't look in detail at the environmental devastation caused by producing these chemicals, but here @erinclarebrown shows the impacts of phosphate processing plants on people unfortunate enough to live nearby. TLDR: it's dirty.

https://twitter.com/erinclarebrown/status/1534476075752902658

But that's just the start. When we apply fertilizer, it's like injecting soil with crack cocaine. It gets a short-term high & soon becomes dependent. We didn't know this a few decades ago, but we now know that this short-term solution is setting us up for long-term catastrophe.

Fertilizers damage the soil in three main ways: Burning up organic matter (which, by the way, releases yet more CO2 as well as causing more erosion & desertification), making soil more acidic, and killing off the soil life that is essential to plant health.

There's now a huge body of research showing how important soil bacteria and fungi are in helping plants access nutrients and resist diseases.

As researcher Rick Haney notes, "when there is a lot of tillage, no cover crops, a system of high intensity [chemical-dependent] farming, that the soil just doesn’t function properly. THE BIOLOGY IS NOT DOING MUCH" (my emphasis)

e360.yale.edu/features/why-i…

All of this means that fewer nutrients are available to plants in natural ways, meaning farmers have to add... more fertilizer. Good news for the chemical firms 🤑🤑🤑...

...bad news for the farmers and the plants. As crops become weaker they become more vulnerable to disease, meaning farmers also become dependent on pesticides.

As this excellent short film notes, "fertilizer is the direct cause" of the diseases against which most pesticides are used.

Thus, TWO vicious cycles of dependence are created... not to mention more the effects of fertilizer run-off on groundwater, human health and river / marine life.

nationalgeographic.com/environment/ar…

Fortunately, there are other ways. #regenerativeagriculture, for example, "not only 'does no harm' to the land but actually improves it, using technologies that regenerate and revitalize the soil and the environment."

regenerationinternational.org/why-regenerati…

Usually operating on a garden scale, #permaculture piggy-backs natural processes to produce food and create fertility that grows over the years, rather than depleting. It uses fewer inputs over time, rather than more. This virtuous cycle creates resilience, not dependence.

So while the Ukraine crisis created an existential shock for the world's food supplies, the root of the problem is deeper: a profound and unnecessary addiction to something that is killing us.

It's an addiction we would be wise to kick - and thanks to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, there's no time like the present. / END