Soil Depletion & Salinization

This is my second action project for my “Food for Thought” class. This unit was about seeing what a global food system looks like, and to understand the human and environmental impacts of this system. For this action project we created a speech and presented it to a camera. The speech was about a topic that is threatening our global food system and my topic specifically about soil depletion and salinization. My favorite part of this action project was the different ways my project that my project could have gone with all the other varieties of topics I could have chosen. The only problem I had while making this project was that I ended up changing my topic so I started working on the action project a little late.

Irrigation can be very helpful in the moment but it is a big problem because of the massive damage it can cause in the future. The global food system heavily depends on plants, and plants grow in soil. This means that soil needs to be taken care just as well as the plants. I am trying to persuade you to fix what we messed up in the past and fix to soil as well as our future. 

Salinization in the earth’s soil is becoming an increasing issue because less youths know how to farm and change the soil. Soil has been ruined by farmers for a while now due to irrigation which lead to soil depletion and salinization. There is a lot less people that know how to fix soil depletion or salinization today than maybe 30 years ago when farming was bigger. Now all we can do to keep the future for the human race alive is to teach teens and children how to fix these problems with the soil. 

This has been happening for too long. In fact this has been going on since Mesopotamia and before. They have faced large problems with salinity as well. Mesopotamia is what Iraq used to be in the past. Mesopotamians used to have sudden floods from the highlands of Anatolia, so they decided to create an irrigation system that would not only help their crops but also solve flooding. Their irrigation system started in the Euphrates and drained out into the Tigris river. They would use some of that water to drain into their farms. It worked really well but that was because they never had a drought.

We can learn from the Mesopotamians and stop irrigation. We don’t think that anything will go wrong until it does but maybe we should start thinking about the future. The Abbasid Caliphate started to expand itself into other places around Europe around 762 AD. One of the places they traveled to was Mesopotamia where they saw the many flaws of their irrigation system. The only way they could think of to fix it was to tear it down completely and renovate it. We can show that we learned from this by not using irrigation or at least have certain laws that protect the soil from salinization and soil depletion. I’m not saying that what the Mesopotamians had wasn’t a good idea though. 

To compromise losing irrigation we can use fresh water sources like certain rivers or lakes to give the plants something to drink. While the salinization in the soil deteriorates we should plant plants that don’t need too much water to survive that way if the salt takes the water from the plant the plant won’t mind as much. An example of some of those plants are may different types of common beans. 

It’s not that hard to make these small changes. All you need to solve these problems is a commitment to help save the future for our children and the earth itself. Salinization is like a poison to plants. Like my teacher says, It sucks, meaning that it is sucking the water and the life out of plants. We want to keep on living and the best way to do that is to help other living organisms. Plants are the only reason that we have lived for so long so why not return the favor and keep them alive. It’s the Humane thing to do. 

Works Cited 

Ancient Irrigation. (1999, May). Retrieved May 13, 2016 

USDA. “Soil Quality Resource Concerns: Salinization”.nrcs.usda. January 1998. May 13 2016. 

"Irrigation Salinity." Office of Environment and Heritage. State of New South Wales and Office of Environment and Heritage, 26 Sept. 2013. Web. 13 May 2016.