Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
County
ed and plowed. Soil
nitrogen and organic carbon drifted steadily downward, and with it yields and
pro
—
and in the nation for that matter
—
had been identi
ts. Faced with this problem, farmers implemented a dramatic innovation in
soil-nutrient management. Rather than revisiting ancient strategies, farmers (and the
industrial nation behind them) appropriated cheap fossil-fuel energy to import
enormous amounts of synthetically manufactured nitrogen into their
.
93
Being a non-renewable resource, dependence on these chemical fertilizers syn-
thesized from fossil fuels already entailed problems of sustainability. Besides this,
they became aggravated later on by the impacts of pollution resulting from
excessive and inef
elds
”
cient use of new industrialized cropping systems, that became
territorially disjointed from livestock breeding and forestry.
94
Yet before the 1950s
the dif
culties found in the acceleration of the nutrient throughput remained a major
issue for European and American farmers, who kept applying manure as a basic
resource and used mineral or chemical fertilizers as a complement.
95
During the
spectacular economic growth in the second half of the 20th century, on the contrary,
the application to the soil of higher doses of synthetic fertilizers was not only aimed
at maintaining acceptable levels of yields, but also to continually increase them up
to what was proved feasible. The complete substitution of manure by synthetic
fertilizers put an end to the old integrated management of cropland, livestock
breeding and forestry, thus entirely upsetting the agrarian social metabolism, and
turning farms into an extended network of diffuse pollution and landscape
degradation.
96
Once again we found that economic growth and ecological degradation became
the two faces of the same coin. As John McNeill has written,
Environmental
change of the scale, intensity and variety witnessed in the twentieth century
required multiple, mutually reinforcing causes. The most important immediate
cause was the enormous surge of economic activity. Behind that lay the long booms
in energy use and population. The reasons economic growth had the environmental
implications that it had lay in the technological, ideological and political histories of
the twentieth century
“
.
97
The spread of the so-called green revolution added to the
”
diffusion of electri
cation and forest industrial mass-production and transport, thus
allowing a further range of Southern and Central European countries to quickly
converge with the United Kingdom and the United States. As the example of
Austria shows, catching up in terms of GDP per capita went hand in hand with the
convergence in energy consumption and global pollution (Fig.
2.9
):
93
Cunfer (
2004
).
94
Galloway et al. (
2004
).
95
Tisdale and Nelson (
1956
).
96
Marull et al. (
2008
).
97
McNeill (
2000
).
