ABSTRACT
The “missing link” is an apt concept here. We've lost our bond and our contact to the soil. We “experience” everything in our engineered world in real time, but we're no longer affected. We see things like hunger in other countries, landslides, floods, or the effects of climate change like drought and storms on the news, but we don't connect it with our own behavior. We don't know (or we ignore the possibility) that our consumer activity and our hunger for energy directly influences soil degradation on other parts of the planet. Our resource and energy requirements dissolve the land (e.g., as seen in dam projects like in Karanjukar, or coal mining areas). Our belief in progress includes an acceptance of this destruction. The same way that we are only marginally aware (i.e., via the media, but not because we feel directly affected) that bee and butterfly populations are declining, we can't imagine the ground falling out from underneath us. The problems of the third world are long off and far away from us until waves of migrants knock at the door. But for the most part, the problems are our own doing when we declare the soil a commodity, investment object, or income guarantee.
