As our markets implode and wave after wave of bad financial news hits the wire, wild-eyed investors search in vain for a “safe haven” from risky, highly leveraged investments; high risk investing started with complex investment instruments like credit default swaps and mortgage-backed securities, but has now filtered throughout the marketplace, moving to equities, and now to the dollar and treasury bonds.  Physical gold, showing extreme volatility and bankster manipulation, is also considered a safe haven by many.

But, just as these safe havens for fictitious capital appear, they rapidly dissolve back into the nebulous world of fake money and paper pushing that now characterizes our over-leveraged capital markets.  Capital markets, it seems, offer very few safe havens for the investor.  Even commodities markets are shrouded in uncertainty, as the dual specter of deflation-inflation threatens to shift the value of goods and money, respectively, to nearly nothing.  Our inability to predict the future makes investing difficult indeed.

Investments in soil health, however, always yield returns for communities, governments, and nations as a whole.  Healthy, active soil is the key to producing all of the things which a strong economy, and ultimately a thriving civilization, depend: fiber for fabric, wood for building materials and fuel, vegetables, oil, meat, milk, and eggs.

Capital investment in soils does not mandate the use of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and other toxins that will, sooner or later, destroy the living web of organisms within the soil profile.  Instead, investing in soils is about management.  And the important questions are: What management practices promote a dynamic biological community within the soil?  How can we promote mineral cycling and effective water infiltration, especially in degraded and eroded lands?  What is the economic return on investment of one practice versus another, and what is the shortest path to adoption?

Those managing the enormous chunks of money floating around in the ether of the financial markets should take note: soils are our past, present and future.  An investment in sustainable soil management (notwithstanding the smoke and mirrors of the carbon credit market) is a direct investment into the well-being of our planet.  My own intuition, however, tells me that governments and even less so investors, are incapable of either understanding or acting upon the soils mandate.  It is incumbent upon a community-based movement to mobilize the social and economic capital ourselves, in whatever way we can.  For those of us in developed countries, this may be a possibility; for those in under-developed nations, it certainly stretches the imagination as to how this could possibly be achieved.