various degradations result... from industrial procedures and technologies alien to both agriculture and nature.
Soil that is used and abused in this way is as nonrenewable as (and far more valuable than) oil. Unlike oil, it has no technological substitute — and no powerful friends in the halls of government.
They imply that our economic problems pale in comparison to deeper issues that could easily and rapidly be in play.
For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food. That is a mistake. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billions of dollars to the agribusiness corporations.
If folks don't begin to get real, in other words, neither standard economics nor the most incredible accumulation of wealth and technology in all of history will do us much good. We can't eat VaR; we can't digest nuclear weapons.
Their warning is gentle but to the point.
This is a political issue, certainly, but it far transcends the farm politics we are used to. It is an issue as close to every one of us as our own stomachs.
