There is no frontiers left

Restoration of Natural conditions is instrumental, not a goal 

The world's food supply is threatened in so many different ways, all of which can only be addressed by changing the way we use the earth's resources. Seen in broader perspective, we have - through decades of passivity - left behind us the easy solutions, as of which many today are out of reach.

Humans affect ecosystems both directly and indirectly, and the effects varies from minimal to catastrophic. Through fossil fuel combustion, humans have disturbed the making of the breathable air, changed the quality of the soil and water and, altered the types and distributions of plants and animals around the globe.

It is estimated that today 150-200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become extinct within the next 24 hours. This is nearly 1,000 times the natural background rate and is greater than anything the world has experienced since the vanishing of the dinosaurs.

A statistical approach to extinction data reveals that 100 to 1,000 species is lost per million per year, due to human-caused habitat destruction and climate change.

Species are becoming extinct of two main reasons: Loss of habitat and loss of genetic variation. A loss of habitat can happen naturally. The Dinosaurs, for instance, lost theirhabitat about 65 million years ago.

We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide. The health of ecosystems upon which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever before.

The consequences for the stability of ecosystems around the world are serious and is even a direct threat that can affect human health. The interactions between animals, plants, humans and the environment make up a complex web.

Disruptions to any part of this biological architecture can have significant, cascading effects. For instance, we need food to survive. More than three-quarters of the world’s food crops rely on the activities of bees, wasps, butterflies and other pollinators, but 10 percent of insect species today are under threat.

The primary threats to biodiversity is expanding urban areas and devoting more land to agriculture or livestock. Pollution, poaching, overfishing, forestal felling and burning and climate change. In many cases, these changes are working in tandem to destroy animal and insect habitats or force species to migrate to other regions, where they may be ill-suited to survive.

All these effects can act singularly, though they more frequently act in concert with one another within ecosystems. But it is these effects that qualify man to the rank as a common destructor of ecosystems and threatens to expose the entire planet to the 6th mass extermination.

A century of deterioration: Climate changes will concentrate people in megacities (with far to little water resources) and surrounded by famished soil

In this dystopian future scenario, we encounter (has chosen by doing very little or nothing) - many humans will have to migrate because of the climate. (Climate refugees)

The figures vary between 200 million in 2050 to one billion in 2100. But the number depends to some extent on how much global warming is slowed down, and how well populations in the hardest hit areas will adapt to climate change in the coming years.

Where the negative consequences of climate change ravages the globe - rapidly shrinking ice masses - both in the Arctics - and globally icecaps below 2500 m, extreme drought in both Africa and the Middle East - Today, the changing weather phenomena pose the greatest threat to global stability.

Today, social and religious conflicts just reinforce this problem.

At the same time, climate change will most often strike those who have contributed the least to them, and the rich countries that have contributed the most should therefore help create better conditions for the affected to stay in their own homes.

The development conditions for the next three decades will still deteriorate. If you summarize the perspectives on a global scale, it just seems to be getting worse and worse.

Trends for regional demographic developments, climate change as a result of pollution with greenhouse gases along with geophysical changes - burning of forest areas and destruction of the conditions for ancient bio cultures in the oceans, have for many years been constantly degraded, and in the coming years the changes of the basis of life on this planet will speed up.

It is not possible to increase the cultivated area enough. Nor does it appear that there are many opportunities to increase the harvest yield, especially much per hectare. area unit in modern industrialized agriculture due to cultivation method exhausts the soil, which means we have to look for other solutions.

Immediate action is required, technological and tactical solutions in broad international cooperation - in the field - all sorts of boarder crossing initiatives is required to strengthen both food supply, water supply, the biological diversity and the chance of having support from the natural systems to balance the necessary improved utilization rate in relation to a simultaneous restoration of nature, strengthening the natural systems, bio diversity and offering just a fundamental protection of the nature we all are part of.

The continuity of agricultural production capacity is directly impacted by global warming, because of changes in the precipitation patterns soil dries up during the expanded dry periods, leading to increased erosion of the top layer, and still more extreme patterns of drought and flooding.

As the natural vegetation in agricultural zones and on grassland is replaced by plants developing less root systems, degradation of soil fertility and annually precipitation is inevitable unless we make the necessary changes.

Traditional cultivation methods - smoothing contours in landscapes, draining watercourses and drying out wetlands contributes negatively to this development.

Initiatives that

- strengthens the soil's resistance to drying out

- supports retaining of excess water

- lead to changes in plowing techniques to follow elevations in landscapes rather than crossing curves

- optimizing weather conditions by planting more contiguous areas with natural occurring species, enriching the rhizosphere with natural root systems to extend the depth of soil rather than shorten the layer,

is absolutely necessary just to maintain local supply ability of traditional agricultural products, as the absolute majority of the food in the non-industrialized countries is produced locally.

If the problem of declining productivity and rising demand is to be overcome, primary production must increase on a local scale in all developing countries.

However, as both the world’s ecosystems, biodiversity and associated goods and services also are under increased pressure - from loss of crop diversity, overexploitation of fishing waters, deforestation, degradation and losses of arable land - adding water shortage, the impact of climate changes seriously is challenging the solutions.

Worldwide, large areas of all continents today are experiencing land degradation, with particularly high incidence along the west coast of the Americas, across the Mediterranean region of Southern Europe and North Africa, in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa and throughout Asia.

The problem is exacerbated by that upmost half of the world’s degraded lands are found in areas with the highest incidence of poverty, which also remains overwhelmingly rural.

Shared water management, restoration of natural processes across boarders, managed preservation of wild life in combination with changes in agricultural cultivation methods towards more natural methods is the only feasible way forward to meet the food crisis upfront on a medium-short term.

Ensuring that food supplies - including water - can be maintained for an exponentially growing population globally is an overwhelming challenge facing humanity.

To resist these threats we need methods and ability to register, follow up upon and organize soil degradation solutions on a global scale, that not only differentiate local problems, but unravel the spatial extent, rate and impact of the problems in a global context, and are able to combine funding, know-how and instrumentalization of initiatives.

Concentrating on how to ensure adequate soil quality, and implementation of improvement of cultivation with natural methods is an obvious way forward.

Naturally we also need technology that support continuously monitoring of soil quality.

Technologically the challenge here is to develop how precise objectives and quantitative indices of assessing fertility indicators within soil can be automated, and methods to implement long-term soil management solutions on major supply areas in principal eco-regions.

The global demand for food is increasing - ever faster - in terms of quantity, quality and reliability of supplies. As more than 90% of our nutritions is cultivated in - or by - a practically (not reproducible by industrial processes) non-renewable natural resource – the soil.

To keep up with global food demand, estimates is calling 6m hectares (14.8m acres) of new farmland needed every year, and that's just to cope up with the demands - in a world where the better half of all deaths in children under 5 years are attributable to undernutrition - and actually malnutrition and starvation takes the life of a child every 12 seconds (and adds up 180 more by the end of this article).

Instead, 12m hectares a year are lost through soil degradation.

Conservation practices is required to respond to the global problems from soil degradation, that is, if the world is just to be able to feed more than the 9 billion people we are by 2050, and by the historical population growth, at end of this century we must nourish staggering 27 billion people.

Forget about moving to Mars within the century, it is an absurdand idea and unworkable solely for biological reasons.

As soil is a complex ecosystem, and even has its own environment which we call the rhizosphere, and it comprises the foundation for life on earth.

The rhizosphere is similar to an information super highway because of the proximity of nodes and storage, which include roots, and organisms in the soil, and the methods for transferring data using exudates and communities.

The upper soil layers is medium for an invisible and unimaginably large network of cohesive and extensive organisms - intermediate stages between life and reproductive chemistry - that exudes chemical signal substances

The biodiversity, just below ground surface, is by scale nearly of an endless extent into invisible dimensions of microscopic richnesses: Millions of microorganisms live and reproduce in just a few grams of topsoil, this is the fundamental ecosystem essential for life on earth as it is fertilizing this planet, adding nutrients on a literally restrained hourglass.

Soil can't be reproduced, it takes billions of years to develop under the right conditions.

Like the atmosphere embraces the planet, like a thin blanket of air - and has a decisive influence on weather and climate, the rhizosphere lies scattered over the planet and forms the foundation of life.

To feed the exponential growing number of stomachs of people coming into this world well everyday, a better understanding of soil microbiology is essential, especially when agricultural production is to meet the needs of a world population growing by such rates.

In many regions globally, the microbial population actually is under threat, and not promoted by agricultural practices, as many aspects of both traditional and industrial farming actually kill the soil.

It is a huge - fairly unexplained dimension of life and chemistry that fertilizes the ground and creates fertile ground for advanced plants such as moss and seedling leaves, grasses and super-advanced daffodils - and trees with many thousands of years on their backs - to thrive on this planet.

Inhabitants of this endless and minuscule part of the world - and microscopic biome - consist of a peculiar mix of both well-known and unknown actors, who all helps to pave the way for life to continue its progress upon land, by transforming the dry minerals into dripping rainforests and flowering prairies and offer edible and highly processed food for wildlife, which in turn will help to expand the ecological boundaries, literrally across time and space within the rhizosphere.

We usually say that soil fertility comprises three interrelated components:

- physical fertility

- chemical fertility

- biological fertility.

Biological fertility, the organisms that live in the soil and interact with the other components, varies greatly depending upon conditions and it is highly complex and dynamic. It is the least well-understood fertility component.

In addition to soil fertility, soil microorganisms play essential roles in the nutrient cycles that are fundamental to life on the planet. Fertile soils team with soil microbes. There may be hundreds of millions to billions of microbes in a single gram of soil.

The most numerous microbes in soil are the bacteria, followed in decreasing numerical order by the actinomycetes, the fungi, soil algae and soil protozoa.

So, as soil a resource we can't substitute, and missing out the protection of soil leads to the end of mankind. Literally.

Continue to destroy the soil and we will all starve...

The living world of today is depending on whether these top 5 to 10 inches of Earth is fertile, considering it has taken billions of years to kick start the necessary bioturbation.

Why is it then that we treat such a precious resource as soil like dirt?

How to support broader species diversity

The necessary solution puts an end to the need for moving bee colonies over far distances. Instead, we should step aside and let the bees make the most of their capacity to search the landscape and go where the flowers are as their natural pollinators.

The solution therefor calls for four major steps to make the problem go away:

1. We must stop using bees from all over the world - since inbreed and vulnerabilities against microbiotics and delution of gen pools are killing the natural diversity
2. We must use a wider variety of crops (local immune crops)
3. We must let weeds grow on crop margins
4. And most challenging: Wild major (connected) habitats must be maintained (meaning left) everywhere near agricultural land.

All part of a greater solution...

Many efforts in solving our damaging influence on the climate and biotops suggest that planting trees is the solution. But this is not the answer.

Since 1970's China already have edged its deserts with billions of trees to restrict their deserts to spread. But the environmental effects are not solely accommodated by carbon dioxide consuming forestation.

As of now the set backs often are due to vulnerability by mono cultures, lack of habitats for natural life and the necessary ground- and surface water to support forestation in the scale of billions of trees.

Many environmental problems are caused by overconsumption of the water resources causing ground level to sink, river deltas to vanish, and extermination of life in the upper two feet of the surface of earth due to fertilizing, ploughing and growing monocultures leaving the natural habitats to vanish or ultimately dissolve in the ocean.

To ensure viable success of returning land to the natural processes, nature must be allowed do the work. We can best help by step aside the habitats, so they can evolve by the intrinsic structures of nature.

It takes: Trees, worms, bees, space, time and the necessary cultural accommodations to recover the natural processes.

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