A WASTING DISEASE

There is no serious question that the chief effective causes of land degradation worldwide, and of the ecological crisis in general, are human work and population growth. Those two are directly connected, and the connection lies in the area of agriculture. Population growth as we have experienced it since the mid-twentieth century is largely a result of the vast increases in crop yields made possible by the invention of the process for fixing nitrogen in ammonia fertilizer compounds. In turn, a population of six and a half billion (and growing) has led to the large-scale conversion of previously untilled land to agricultural use; that conversion currently constitutes the greatest threat (even above global warming) to healthy ecosystems worldwide. It is apt, therefore, that contemporary agrarian writers give considerable attention to the character and quality of work and to the attitudes, healthy and unhealthy, that underlie it.

U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall writes of his grandparents and their farming community in New Hampshire: