There are three peaks occurring in our lifetime. Peak oil is the least worrying one. There's
peak water which, unlike oil, has no substitutes. NZ genius
Brent Clothier talks to bFM about peak soil:
"The thing that makes New Zealand's economy tick is agriculture, and so you could say that that 20 percent of our GDP actually relies on the top 15 centimetres of our soil."
In order to preserve our economic base, we need to declare war on erosion. Thanks to years of chopping and burning down the forests that once held this land together:
"It's actually natural capital that you can't get back... We've lost a lot of soil organic matter, and that's the glue that holds our soil together... We live in a windy climate, prone to a bit of wind erosion. We're in a rainy climate, so we're prone to water erosion. And also we have some very steep land, so... that's why the silt ends up in our estuaries."
