I was looking at this same material just yesterday and it makes grim reading all across the world. Cutting down vast swaths of forests is leaving us with too little rain in many areas and when the rain comes down, it washes away every piece of topsoil that there is, because this is so hard baked and dry, without having any sustenance to give to anything planted in it. You can see this visibly if you walk into the landscape on the Northern side Keith - that is if you are able to distinguish it. I remember back as a child in Africa all the farmers in an area coming together and specifically filling in erosion gullies and planting trees to help the cycle and soil recover. We've known about this for a long time bu we (humankind) persisted in following policies that consistently impoverished soil quality even more.
Kottke in that underground classic, The Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and The Seed of the Future said: "Because civilized people do not know what they are, they talk politics, religion and science and pursue material wealth while the basis of their life on earth, the soil, slips away beneath their feet."
So now we have oil scarcity (peak oil?) and climate change and food sources severely stressed in our quest to keep on motoring and madman as leaders most of the time
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Monbiot was recently asking plaintively: "Peasant farmers offer the best chance of feeding the world. So why do we treat them with contempt?" The premise is that studies show that small farms are consistently way more productive than large comoditized farming conglomerates - different than what we all thought these past years, excepting that our fearless leaders put the kibush on small farms with trade policies and subsidy policies and food control policies and now the chickens are really coming home to roost
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