Comments on: Salt Crisis

Salt Crisis

ninazer0 — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 15:29:25 -0800

Not just a condiment, salt is a major force shaping our world. In Australia, what do you get when you combine ancient salt-pans with European farming practices? In one state alone, we're losing a football field an hour to the salinity crisis. What do you farm when all you have is salt?

By: ninazer0

ninazer0 — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 15:30:46 -0800

Bah. The "what do you farm" link should have gone here...

By: Eekacat

Eekacat — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 15:46:21 -0800

Where are we gonna work (when the trees are all gone?) . I like the Mojo Nixon/Jello Biafra version of this song.

By: grouse

grouse — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 16:14:16 -0800

What do you farm when all you have is salt? I'm guessing... salt?

By: randomination

randomination — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 16:27:02 -0800

Smoked salt. Sorry, I have no other words for a world in which salt which has been sitting in smoke for a bit is considered a gourmet condiment. If you're interested in that, I have some rubber chair feet rolled around in crumbs of burnt toast you might like the taste of.

By: danb

danb — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 16:29:39 -0800

Salt: A World History

By: ninazer0

ninazer0 — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 16:43:13 -0800

Smoked salt. And spiced salt! Good lord! What kind or freak would want their food to taste salty or smokey or spicey? Inconceivable!

By: weapons-grade pandemonium

weapons-grade pandemonium — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 16:47:25 -0800

The ultimate question is, "What do you salt when you have no more farms?"

By: Steven C. Den Beste

Steven C. Den Beste — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 17:07:39 -0800

Genetic engineering has already created a breed of rice which can grow in soil which is too salty for normal rice. There's every reason to believe that the same genetic modification would work for other crops. (That particular breed of rice also is much more resistant to drought.)

By: porpoise

porpoise — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 17:10:13 -0800

Australian Murray River Pink Salt.

By: fixedgear

fixedgear — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 17:10:30 -0800

Two thumbs up for Kurlansky's book. When you are done with that you can read Cod.

By: veggieboy

veggieboy — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 17:19:08 -0800

That Kurlansky book was OK, but it was no "Cod" or "Basque History of the World."

By: Blazecock Pileon

Blazecock Pileon — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 17:27:51 -0800

There's every reason to believe that the same genetic modification would work for other crops. Really? If only genetic engineering was as easy as this sentence implies!

By: Jimbob

Jimbob — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 17:50:04 -0800

SCDB also appears unaware that the attempts to grow rice in south-eastern Australia could well be blamed for much of the current crisis on the Murray River.

By: Joakim Ziegler

Joakim Ziegler — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 17:56:40 -0800

we're losing a football field an hour to the salinity crisis

Well, switch to another sport, or just play video games, I suppose.

By: quin

quin — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 17:57:18 -0800

w-g p : The ultimate question is, "What do you salt when you have no more farms?" The earth.

By: rough ashlar

rough ashlar — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 18:00:33 -0800

Really? If only genetic engineering was as easy as this sentence implies! posted by Blazecock Pileon at 5:27 PM PST On the USS Clueless, it is that simple.

By: Meatbomb

Meatbomb — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 18:04:12 -0800

I blame Anne Murray.

By: dhartung

dhartung — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 18:05:14 -0800

Jared Diamond's Collapse devotes much of its chapter on Australia to the mobilized salt problem. Diamond devotes a chapter to rebuttals of what he calls "one-liner responses". Steven's response is typical of the "We humans is smart" crowd, what Diamond glosses as "Technology will solve all our problems." He calls this an expression of faith about the future ... based on a ssupposed track record of technology having solved more problems than it created in the recent past. Underlying this expression of faith is the implicit assumption that, from tomorrow onward, technology will function primarily to solve existing problems and will cease to create new problems. Those with such faith also assume that the new technologies will succeed, and that they will do so quickly enough to make a big difference soon.... But actual experience is the opposite of this track record. [Some technologies succed, most don't. Those that do take a long time before widespread adoption.] New technologies, whether or not they succeed in solving the problme that they were designed to solve, regularly create unanticipated new problems. Technological solutions to environmental problems are routinely many times more expensive than preventive measures to avoid the problem in the first place.... Most of all, technology just increases our ability to do things, for better or for worse. I had known that Australia had salinity issues with most of its agricultural land. I didn't know until I read Diamond how long-term those issues are and how structurally difficult they will be to solve, even for a first world society like Australia that is, at the moment, economically and socially healthy. The salt problem isn't just a problem for one farmer, you see -- it's a problem for all the farmers downhill from his farm, and all the farmers who depend on the low salinity of the freshwater supply in the whole of the Murray-Darling basin. The salt mobilized from a single farm's poor agricultural practices -- and we're not talking now, we're talking about the last 150 years -- will continue to flow down"stream" underground for on the order of 500 years. A farm as yet unaffected may have a limited agricultural lifespan. Even so, the entire drainage basin will gradually see the salinity of its waters increase and the available fresh water decrease.

By: dirtynumbangelboy

dirtynumbangelboy — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 18:47:42 -0800

randomination writes "Smoked salt. Sorry, I have no other words for a world in which salt which has been sitting in smoke for a bit is considered a gourmet condiment." Er, what's wrong with you? Salt is essential to taste as well as bodily functions. Smoke--depending on the type of wood used--adds a fantastic amount of flavour. In what world is it not a good idea to combine the two?

By: ab3

ab3 — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 19:17:41 -0800

How odd! I was just watching the Good Eats special one hour episode on salt, "Eat This Rock!" yesterday... lots of good information there. Alton Brown is a fan of the smoked kind too!

By: jonmc

jonmc — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 19:51:36 -0800

what, no pepper?

By: Steven C. Den Beste

Steven C. Den Beste — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 20:20:07 -0800

Here's the announcement about that modified rice. What they did was study a desert specialist called the "resurrection plant". They learned that the source of its abilities seemed to be a particular sugar called trehalose. Several unrelated desert specialists all turned out to have high levels of that sugar. So they ended up incorporating a couple of genes (from E. Coli, it turns out) which gave the ability to synthesize trehalose and incorporated it into rice with a tag that made the gene only express in rice stalks. (It doesn't express in the grain.) Once they got it right, it bred true and it tolerates salt and drought very well. The gene and modification technique they used should work equally well with other crops, and it seems likely that trehalose would have the same effect in them -- though of course we won't know for sure until someone tries it. This was developed at Cornell. They patented it, and have put the patent into the public domain.

By: stbalbach

stbalbach — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 20:54:21 -0800

From Something New Under the Sun (2000):

By 1980 salinization had corroded agriculture on about %25 of all irrigated land in India, Pakistan, the USA and Egypt. By the 1990's, salinization seriously affected about 10 percent of the worlds irrigated lands. By 1996 it ruined land as fast an engineers could irrigate new land, so that the world's total irrigated land remained roughly at a constant.

By: mrbill

mrbill — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 21:01:39 -0800

The previously-referenced "Salt: A World History" is an AWESOME book. Highly recommended.

By: stbalbach

stbalbach — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 21:13:49 -0800

Salinization (which is caused by irrigation) is ruining land globally as fast or faster than new lands can be irrigated. This is a new trend that started in the 1990s. Kind of like taking fish out of the ocean faster than they can reproduce, or slash and burn farming. Eventually there is a "peak" when the bell curve goes the other way. Then we start eating soylent green.

By: wtfchuck

wtfchuck — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 22:26:22 -0800

I'll take it with a grain of salt, might even throw a pinch over my left shoulder.

By: ninazer0

ninazer0 — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 22:56:51 -0800

Unfortunately, I think it still takes potable water to make Soylent Green, and it's potable water we're running out of the fastest. Steve CDB: I don't think genetic engineering is going to help in this instance when the issue is mostly the method rather than the crop. Australia did once have an inland sea, so no matter how salt-resistant the plants might be, as soon as you put water into the soil, there's going to be an issue. And, just as unfortunately, the attitude of some farmers is "I've farmed this way for years. It was good enough for my father and his father and so on," which is why I feel a twinge of hope when someone takes a different approach to the situation and turns a problem into a bonus.

By: Smart Dalek

Smart Dalek — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 06:16:07 -0800

Rock salt, or Saindhav (once known generically as Bombay salt), is the New Black. Despite its pinkish hue, it's actually called "black salt", due to it's unique flavor. The secret? Minute traces of dissolved sulphur.

By: asok

asok — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 11:22:34 -0800

It is strange to be 500km inland, in the middle of a plain that stretches to the horizon with nary a tree in sight and smell briney air. Refreshing and yet deeply wrong as there is no turqiose surf to take a dip in. I am sure the current drought isn't helping things. It would be nice to believe that we can engineer our way out of the salinity problem, but I find it unlikely that a quick fix will be possible. Salting the land has been a method of genocidal war-mongerers for good reason. I like the idea that if we were given the individual ability to ge plants to survive in our local environment, we would solve all these issues due to the potential of human ingenuity. However, how do we protect ourselves from making plants that cause more problems down the line? As dhartung quotes from Jared Diamond, prevention is much more likely to be effective than technological solution. Australia (and the rest of the world) is in dire need of a shake-up as regards proper use of environmental resources, rather than mis-use. Howard, residing comfortably in the pocket of coal and uranium interests, is not going to be the one to do it.

By: Heywood Mogroot

Heywood Mogroot — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 11:52:08 -0800

I really wished I lived in SCDB's world. It reminds me of the content of Donald Fagen's "I.G.Y.".

By: wilful

wilful — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 15:14:32 -0800

What size and shape football field? I mean, in WA it would be a footy oval, which is substantially larger than a soccer pitch. Actually, the salinity crisis has been massively overblown for the Murray-Darling basin. While it is still an important economic factor, it is not the doom and gloom that we were all thinking only a decade back. Salt interception schemes have worked, together with substantial and ongoing catchment rehabilitation works, so the rate of expansion has greatly slowed. We wont be facing the spectre of abandonment of large areas of productive land. I understand that the situation is far worse in WAs wheatbelt.

By: pompomtom

pompomtom — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 22:02:14 -0800

We wont be facing the spectre of abandonment of large areas of productive land. ...due to salt... in the near future... probably...

By: spazzm

spazzm — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 03:18:01 -0800

So if Australia is devastated by salt, can we dress in leather and ride around the desert in bad-ass cars?