It’s a little early for the wave of October horror movies, but a new video from MinuteEarth is way more terrifying than the usual slasher flicks anyway. Ignore the cheery delivery, the friendly stick figures, and the upbeat music — they all are just there to dress up my personal paranoia: erosion.
I’m actually kind of serious about this. Erosion is insidiously boring, which keeps us from seeing how dangerous it really is. On the list of the most boring things, erosion comes just after hold music and just before other people’s dreams. But the fact is that without the few inches of topsoil we use to grow our food, the world would fall into apocalyptic chaos, and that topsoil is eroding. Fortunately, as MinuteEarth explains, there are things we can do about this problem (I don’t think Soylent, the sponsor of the video, is a particularly realistic solution).
If we don’t act to preserve the farmland we have, we’ll end up cutting down more forests to grow food, releasing tons of earth to erosion. It’s enough to make one soil himself.
