I understand this. I also understand the true cost of it all. There are times to use them and times to not. More often than not if you think all the way through it , the best answer is to have them as a very minor supplement.
On avaerage only absorb between 30-70% of the N that gets applied. Most applications account for somewhere between 40-60% absorption. That how N works for industrial Ag. Similar for a lawn. I intercrop clover with my turf grass and between that and my septic I donât have to put a fucking thing on it. I over seed when I can, and let it grow long enough to seed seed occasionally. Keep it mowed. No salt and the only pesticide/herbicide used is grub control and a very, very occasional herbicide if something is a real problem that I donât have a better solution for(becoming more and more rare).
My pony with that was itâs not salts that grow plants in nature, itâs soil. You can use salts to help soil,
No one is covering the cost of the waste stream of these salts. The water stream is the dead zones in our water ways, and itâs expensive to reclaim them from the water. Itâs much cheaper to mine more. That doesnât mean itâs the best course of action, and we are supposed to be talking about whatâs best is a real world scenario.
The corporations already try to commoditization everything. When they get us to trash enough of the soil and water they can have even more control over commoditizing those. The poorest person on this planet can walk around and find a seed, plant it in the soil and grow a plant. I would like to keep it that way for the rest of my life, and hopefully my great grand holder. Etc.
How long have humans been around? How long were we able to revolve and thrive without fertilizing this way? When did we first observe the dead zone in the gulf? At what rate is it growing? Itâs not hard to do the math and see how bad we are fucking stuff up, and how quickly it is accelerating.
As we and our technology progress exponentially, so does a lot of the damage it does and itâs impact on the rest of the ecosystem. We have reached a point where we have changed things more quickly and drastically than the organisms and ecosystems around them can keep up. Kind of like when dust from an asteroid blotted out the sunâŚenvironmental changes that happen faster than the organisms can keep up with.
Itâs not hard math to see the true cost of this. The planet will be fine, it will still be here, evolving. Most of the creatures that call it home, including us, it will not be a hospitable life for. Thatâs the truth of it. The planet is fine. We wonât kill the planet. We wonât kill nature. We make it miserable for us and organisms who find similar environments comfortable and amenable to life.
