Save Our Topsoil

 

2021

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The super soil of the American farm belt has been eroded and washed away, blown away, and degraded by a century of plowing and mono-cropping. More and more fertilizer is required to grow our vast fields of corn, wheat, and soy. 

The coming worldwide food shortages -- previewed this very Year of Our Lord 2022 -- are going to get much, much worse if we don't find a way to repair the damage to our topsoil. 

Science Fiction to the Rescue!

2030

Conversations were underway with all - literally all in the world - of the credible people on the sargassum plague in the tropical Atlantic and the Caribbean. Ocean scientists of every stripe were talking to Lucas about their specialty’s view of the megablooms.  Seagoing vessel designers, marine biologists, satellite analysts, NOAA, Eurocean, Jamstech, Ocean U. and ICOIS sargassum specialists were all in one-on-one conversations with Lucas, responding to his ideas about harvesting megatons of the slightly bitter floating weeds and processing them, not for food but to be blended into a new kind of mulch for the deteriorated soils of the world to restore their fecundity. Applied in adequate amounts, sargassum could reverse the destruction of productive farmland beginning to choke worldwide food production. 

Much breakthrough engineering had been proposed to cope with the plague that was clogging thousands of miles of Atlantic sea lanes and casting tons of rotting vegetation on beaches from Aruba to Recife on the nose of Brazil, from Casa Blanca to Freetown in Sierra Leone.  Lucas renamed the phenomenon, “the humble seaweed that will save the world,” always saying it in the rhythms of the Beatitudes. 

“I see fleets of ships churning through the sargassum,” said Lucas, “ripping it out of the ocean with vertical scythes, combing the masses of living creatures in the subsurface jungles into freezers for later processing. The leaves, stems and float bladders of the algae will be chipped and shredded on the ships and compressed into dry bales. The harvest paths will be offshore and in sight of land to raise the morale of the beach businesses.

The Sargassum Plague in the Atlantic is REAL. 

I'm coming for your beaches.

GOT 'em!

And It's Getting Worse Every Year

Oh, and sargassum on the beach STINKS to low heaven.

To save the heavenly beaches around the Caribbean from stinky sludge will require heroic action. When it comes to describing heroes, sci-fi is really good. To enact heroic measures requires innovation, resolve and sacrifice, much harder than turning over the problem to sci-fi superheroes. 

Have You Heard Any of Our Fine Politicians Proposing Solutions?

*Topsoil gone