[dramatic music]
* *
- Greetings. Bill Nye here.
Chicago-style, best hot dog on the planet.
Some say it's the relish.
Others swear by the mustard, but for me,
it's all about the wonderful combination of flavors
all in a fresh-baked bun with wheat grown
on the Great Plains just a few miles from here.
I'm glad I snagged one, because this hot dog is under attack.
Yeah, I said it.
In fact, hot dogs everywhere are about to become extinct,
the beef, the bun, the condiments, all of it
threatened by a disaster that will wipe out
our food supply from the ground up.
Maybe I should have grabbed some chips.
I'm in Chicago,
where everyone knows it's windy,
and today it's really living up to its name,
but this is no draft off Lake Michigan.
This is an environmental calamity
born in the American heartland, and it's heading our way.
This catastrophe will turn day into night,
rich soil into dry dust.
Get ready for the biggest, baddest dust storms
the world has ever seen.
[siren wailing]
Oh, man, here we go again.
[dramatic music]
* *
[cow lows]
* *
- Greetings, friends.
Welcome back to the Disaster Institute,
where we chronicle the great cataclysms that have happened
in the past, are happening now,
or could happen at any moment.
Tonight, a disaster unique in this great hall of ours.
Some catastrophes strike in a few minutes.
Others take a few days, but this one,
it will last for years, decades, maybe even forever,
relentless doomsday storms, not of rain and floods,
but of wind and earth that will strip the life from the land
turning our fertile planet into a starved,
desiccated wasteland.
* *
Hey, cool scythe.
For you non-artisan farmers out there,
it's a tool used to harvest wheat and other grains.
Of course, this guy uses it for something--
I think you know what he uses it for.
* *
This is a story about storms of dust,
epic storms that will sandblast the land
and scrub humankind off the face of the Earth.
* *
We're about to take a ride on our Disaster Simulator.
I want you to experience this disaster firsthand
from three points of view:
A young shop owner and other survivors taking shelter
as noon turns into night,
a scientist who sees visions of dust by peering into water,
and we'll travel to the point of view of the past,
90 years ago, when the dust storms
first arrived and destroyed farmlands
where the world's grains were grown.
Grains, like wheat and corn, are staples on kitchen tables
all around the world.
Bread, pasta, popcorn, cookies, tortillas, couscous, beer.
Grains are in almost everything.
They're one of the first crops we humans cultivated.
Grains feed us, our livestock, and the global economy.
No grains, no civilization.
* *
Our story begins here, in the not-so-distant future,
what people call the Great Plains,
millions of acres of farmland in the American Midwest.
People also call it the breadbasket,
because the grains here nourish people everywhere,
and what nourishes the grains?
Mountain Dew Code Red.
No, I'm kidding.
The grains are nourished by the Sun,
the soil, and the water,
and water is precisely where the trouble starts.
She's a hydrologist,
a scientist who studies the water
on and beneath the surface of the Earth.
Right now she's measuring the groundwater level
under this cornfield.
It's one of hundreds of measurements
she's been making in the area over the past few months,
and she's alarmed by what she's found.
Groundwater levels are dropping way faster
than normal, dangerously so.
The Ogallala Aquifer is vanishing,
and that could spell disaster for the entire world.
The Oma-Lady Gaga what?
[birds chirping]
[dramatic music]
* *
- The Ogallala Aquifer.
An aquifer is like a great lake hidden underground.
This one was created by melting glaciers and rainfall
over the last few thousand years.
The Ogallala Aquifer isn't just tricky to pronounce.
It's also one of the biggest aquifers on the planet,
100 trillion gallons of fresh, clean water
just ours for the taking.
And that's the problem.
We've been taking it since the 1940s
to irrigate farms across eight enormous midwestern states.
This water source supports nearly 20%
of grain agriculture worldwide.
Our hydrologist confirms that water levels
are dropping fast, too fast.
Where is all that water going?
* *
Industrial agriculture, the large-scale production
of food crops and livestock, requires a lot of water.
This gentleman is the CEO
of one of the biggest agribusinesses in the world,
and business has never been better,
but record profits require record amounts of water.
The company has been pumping the aquifer day and night
to feed its thirsty crops.
It's also been selling off huge amounts of water
to other huge industrial farming operations.
They are literally sucking the ground dry.
They suck.
If there ever was an act of cow, this is it.
[dramatic music]
[cow lowing]
Act of cow symbolizes the human negligence
that can trigger a disaster or make one worse.
It's inspired by a bovine named Daisy,
who as legend has it kicked over a lantern
and started the Great Chicago Fire.
[cow lows]
You might think hoarding all this water is unlawful.
You might think Jennifer Hudson won
her season of "American Idol."
- Jennifer Hudson was robbed, obviously,
but what we're doing is completely legal.
- Unfortunately, both of those things are true.
Much of the Ogallala Aquifer underlies land
that is privately owned, and the handful
of corporations that own that land can pump the water
to their heart's content.
According to the law, it's their water, not ours.
The thing is,
nature doesn't much care for human laws,
and this reckless pursuit of profit
will have devastating consequences.
Negligence and greed, the main ingredients
for this act of cow.
Another reason they're pumping all that water, drought.
The warming climate has caused a major drop in rainfall
in this part of the country.
Scorching temperatures are making the land drier.
As the drought deepens, water rationing begins,
but the damage has been done.
Massive crop failures are turning fertile lands
into barren deserts.
And when the prairie winds come hotter and stronger,
they blow dirt high into the air,
and just as ODB always said,
"Dirt? Dirt don't hurt."
Right?
Wrong.
[wind whistling]
The Great Plains are so windy because they're so flat,
no trees, hills, or other terrain to provide friction.
In fact, this part of the American Midwest
is one of the windiest places on Earth.
Normally, that relentless wind isn't a problem,
but when drought dries up the land
and turns soil into dirt
that wind becomes the weaponizing force
that creates vast, unstoppable storms of dust.
Our hydrologist and other scientists
are all too familiar with the doom
that dirt and wind can bring.
They sound the alarm about the dangerous conditions
on the Great Plains.
Rising temperatures caused by climate change,
severe drought, and dwindling water supplies
are all out of control.
If we don't work to conserve our water,
protect the soil from over farming,
and slow climate warming
we could be facing an environmental disaster
like the infamous Dust Bowl of the 1930s
or worse.
- I wall of dust stretching from eastern...
- For most people not alive during the 1930s,
the term "Dust Bowl" might not mean a lot,
like our young shop owner here,
who just opened for business after relocating to Chicago.
- Because of frequent droughts
in the region and an expansion of...
- What she doesn't know is that this entire region
was once in the grips of an environmental disaster
that lasted for ten long years.
Dust Bowl?
You mean "The Grapes of Wrath,"
the book many of us pretended to read in high school?
That big drought where a bunch of desperate farmers
moved to California.
That was like 90 years ago.
The world's completely different now.
We're not dragging plows behind horses anymore.
We have irrigation, modern technology.
We should be finding better ways to farm the land,
not listening to some retread history lesson.
But history won't be ignored, and the land won't be fooled.
What most people don't realize
is that the Dust Bowl of the 1930s
wasn't just about drought.
It was about huge storms of dust,
and they're happening again,
apocalypse right here on American soil.
[all screaming]
That's 100 million tons
of Mother Nature's weaponized dust...
- Ahh! - I got you.
[wind whistling]
With gale force winds of 50 miles an hour or more,
and it does not look happy.
[wind whistling]
To the people of Chicago
it seems like the end of the world.
What is happening? Where did this come from?
When will it stop?
- [coughing]
- [coughs] Thank you.
Whew.
[breathing heavily]
Oh, wow.
[sirens wailing]
[morose music]
* *
And there are more storms where that came from.
[dust cloud rumbling]
[horns honking]
- Ahh! Ahh!
[indistinct shouting]
[sirens wailing]
- [grunting]
[wind howling]
[tense music]
- [sobbing]
- America's breadbasket is bare.
If we don't find a new source of grains,
the country will starve.
[wind whistling]
Welcome to the new normal.
Man, midnight at noon!
Let's get out of here.
- Go! Let's go!
[wind howling]
[wind whistling]
- [panting]
Oh, man. Augh. Augh.
Oh...oh.
[wind howling]
[panting]
Hey, guys.
At this point, you might be thinking,
"Bill, please, the Great Plains becoming a desert,
Chicago buried in dust, no more hot dogs ever."
That's right.
This is an environmental collapse,
and it's happening right now.
If we have any hope of making it
through this Dust Bowl reboot,
we'll need to know how we survived the first one.
[coughs]
[wind howling]
America's heartland is in the grips
of a modern-day Dust Bowl,
and it's not as cute and retro as it sounds.
Huge swaths of the country are withering.
Some are saying it's the end times,
and they just might be right.
Oh, thank you.
The American Midwest is only the beginning.
The entire planet is now in jeopardy
as storm conditions spread to other continents.
So how did it get this bad?
Didn't we learn anything the first go around?
Back then was a lot like today.
Our civilization was grappling with a global pandemic,
the Spanish flu, but with the virus burning out,
people were going out and feeling optimistic.
Sure, there was a lot of political upheaval,
and there were wannabe tyrants, but the economy was booming.
Millionaires were being made.
I'm talking about almost a century ago.
- Oh, man.
- It's the 1920s.
The League of Nations is founded.
Women finally get the right to vote.
Alcohol is made illegal for some reason.
The first Ponzi scheme is hatched
by a guy named Charles Ponzi.
Jazz music and the foxtrot are all the rage.
Gatsby gets great. Flappers go a-flappin'.
They're calling it the Roaring Twenties,
because people are working hard and playing hard,
and everything seems possible through modern technology,
powered flight, radio, and horseless carriages.
- You know, when I see old movies from back then,
it seems unreal.
Maybe it's the black and white or the clothes
or the old-time dance moves, but I have to remind myself,
those people were just as real as you and I,
their fears as real as ours, their dreams as big as our own.
It all began in the American heartland,
where a great farming boom was taking place.
Acreage was cheap and plentiful,
and real estate speculators were getting rich
selling dreams to new arrivals.
That part of the country was renowned for its fertile soil,
but the region was also notorious
for periods of drought.
Irrigation and aquifers were still a long way off.
"Not to worry," said the land speculators.
"Everybody knows that the rain follows the plow."
I'm serious.
Call it superstition or call it pseudoscience,
but people really believed that plowing a field
could coax water to fall from the sky.
It was even promoted by many scientists
and government officials.
* *
They had acts of cow back then too.
The idea that the rain follows the plow may seem ridiculous,
but remember, most of us humans have believed
something ridiculous at one time or another,
like the Earth is flat, or smoking is good for you,
or I could have played pro hockey.
- [scoffs]
- Each harvest brought greater abundance,
which lured more would-be farmers.
In just a few short years
40 million acres of prairie land
in the Southern and Central Great Plains
were plowed and churned and remade into fields
of wheat, corn, and other crops.
Families who came to the plains
with nothing to their name
were now landowners with their own homes.
It seemed like the good harvest would never end.
Agriculture had remade the heartland.
Dreams were coming true,
but nightmares were just around the corner.
The early 1930s brought a prolonged drought
with no end in sight.
No one was worried at first.
It turned out the rain didn't follow the plow.
What did follow was the scorching sun
turning the rich, dark soil into brown, dry dirt.
And then the fierce prairie winds came,
as they always did.
No one paid it much attention.
Winds were a fact of life,
but now they became a fact of death.
* *
Imagine what that first dust storm must have been like.
You've got to remember, nobody had ever seen
anything like it before.
* *
When the duster ended, people began the long ordeal
of clearing out the dirt
and salvaging what remained of the crops.
For the farmers, the only thing that mattered
was that it was behind them, but it wasn't.
It would happen again and again.
* *
What was going on? Was it God's wrath?
Most people said it was just bad weather.
Bad weather. Oh, that's cute.
The dusters were brutal and relentless.
At one point, they came every day for 38 straight days.
Months bled into years.
Hundreds of thousands of people eventually fled
in search of a better life someplace else.
With nowhere to call home, these desperate farm families
were seen as unwelcome intruders,
refugees in their own country.
The plains and the people living on them
were literally filling with dirt.
Dust pneumonia was rampant.
Thousands died.
A handful of scientists suspected
that the dust storms were not a natural phenomenon.
What if people had something to do with it?
Most folks thought that idea was ridiculous.
Humans can affect the environment
on such a huge scale?
In just a few years,
there were hundreds of dust storms,
each one a destroyer of land and lives,
but the biggest duster of all would be the one
that changed history forever.
It came to be known as Black Sunday.
* *
- * This Dust Bowl just don't want to end *
- The relentless dust storms of the 1930s raged on
for months, years.
It seemed like it couldn't get any worse,
but on Sunday, the 14th of April, 1935,
it got worse.
The day went down in history as Black Sunday,
when a tsunami of dust swept across the High Plains
and turned a sunny afternoon into midnight.
* *
- And on the following day,
the world would hear the region referred to
for the very first time as the Dust Bowl.
The storm first blasted
the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles,
where winds reached 60 miles an hour,
and the darkness was so complete
people couldn't see their own hands
in front of their faces,
- * But vacant eyes and children's cries *
* *
* This Dust Bowl blues won't get me down *
- The Black Sunday mega storm blew 300 million tons
of dust across the Midwest
all the way to the East Coast of the United States.
In New York City, the dust blocked out the Sun,
like a solar eclipse, for five hours.
Dust enshrouded the Statue of Liberty.
Red dust from Black Sunday found its way into the clouds.
That winter red snow fell on New England.
In Chicago, Black Sunday dumped 6,000 tons of dust
onto the very windy city.
[somber music]
The dusters continued battering the plains
for five long years.
An ecosystem that took thousands of years to form
was blown away in less than a decade.
[wind howling]
If you're scoring along with us,
the Dust Bowl did more damage to the environment
than every volcano, earthquake, tidal wave,
tornado, and hurricane since the beginning
of recorded history combined.
And now, today, history is repeating itself,
and this time, it's gonna get even worse,
end of the world worse.
Would you like to know what happens next?
- Mm-hmm.
- Mm-mm, mm-mm.
- The Great Plains are stripped bare
by the relentless dust storms.
The U.S. heartland eventually withers,
and the nation is forced to look elsewhere to feed itself.
China ramps up production to meet the demand,
but over farming and drought conditions
caused by a rapidly warming world
bring about yet another Dust Bowl in the Far East.
China can no longer afford to export its food
to the increasingly desperate United States
and focuses on feeding its own citizens.
- [speaking Chinese]
- Nearly 100 million people migrate away
from the growing dust storms, plunging China into chaos,
as cities struggle to accommodate
the hungry newcomers.
Tensions run high as food runs short,
and hundreds of thousands of people starve to death.
The U.S. and China are just the first two dominoes to fall.
As the two main food exporters collapse,
other nations soon follow.
Starvation and unrest put our backs against the wall,
and the human race finds itself having
to make tough decisions
about who eats and who starves.
* *
With the ever-multiplying dust storms and drought
there's less and less water to go around as well.
The Ogallala Aquifer dries up along with other aquifers,
lakes, and reservoirs around the world.
Many nations simply run out of water.
In a last-ditch effort a group of hydrologists
figures out how to efficiently desalinate seawater,
but it's too little too late.
I think it was the late, great Bob Marley who said--
and I paraphrase--
"A hungry mob is an angry mob."
There's only so much the police and the military
can do to control the madness.
Our civilization, the entire human endeavor,
is reduced to, well, a handful of dust.
So how could we have prevented these doomsday dust storms
in the first place?
How do we stop the beginning of the end of the world?
- [coughing]
[wind whistling]
- [coughing]
- Ah! - [gasps]
[all shouting]
- As our disaster simulation comes to an end,
Earth is choking on dust storms the size of continents,
and I've dug myself out of a powdery grave.
Whew.
I did not see that coming, but now that I think about it,
dirt weighs a lot.
A cubic meter of dirt weighs about 3,500 pounds,
almost two tons.
That felt more like four or five.
[tense music]
Talk about biting the dust. Get it?
He gets it, just not a big laugher, this guy.
So how do we prevent a modern-day Dust Bowl?
To answer that we need to understand
what really caused the first Dust Bowl.
Was it a few exceptionally dry years
followed by some really strong winds,
some sort of polar vortex?
Was it Mother Nature at work,
or did we cause this catastrophe?
Come on. Let's hit the lab.
Sorry, Grim Jim, but you ain't invited.
You know, not many people know
that the Grim Reaper's given name is James.
[dramatic music]
* *
Now, I know what you might be saying.
Hey, science guy, aren't those just two pots of dirt?
First of all, don't sass me when I'm in my lab coat.
Secondly, the difference between these two pots
of earth is the difference between feast and famine.
This is dirt. It's sand and silt.
Water either runs off the compacted surface
or it drips right through.
Dirt is what gets on the floor and on your knees.
Nothing's growing here.
Now, this, this is what makes everything possible,
the food in your belly, the clothes on your back,
the money in your wallet, "The Great British Bake Off,"
because this isn't just dirt.
It's the stuff of life. This is soil.
* *
Soil is alive.
It's an ecosystem all its own, chock-full of living things,
like nematodes, mites, ticks, weevils,
fungi, and bacteria, lots and lots of bacteria.
There are more living things in this handful of soil
than in all the humans on the planet,
all told as many as 10 billion
little living things right here.
Soil is complex.
It's creating the perfect conditions
for plants to grow and thrive.
If we're not careful,
soil dies and turns back into dirt.
That's exactly what happened
during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
In fact, the seeds of the Dust Bowl
were planted a long time ago, literally.
* *
One of our early ancestors, like our friend Kor here,
had a remarkable realization.
Instead of eating all the fruits and seeds
from a nutritious plant,
you could hold onto a few seeds
and carefully place them in the ground.
There they would grow into new plants.
Sometimes the biggest leap begins
with an accidental step.
Isn't that right, old friend?
- [grunting]
- Hmm, cool.
By around 10,000 years ago
we really had it going on with our gardening skills.
Most of us stopped the hunter, gatherer, scavenger lifestyle
and settled down to till the soil
and grow our food right where we lived and slept.
Without a doubt, this was a huge idea.
We could work the same land year after year,
generation after generation.
More importantly, that finally meant
we could install home entertainment centers.
Back then, the scythe was a symbol
of harvest and abundance.
* *
Hey, James Francis Reaper,
I told you, man, get out of here.
[thunder rumbles]
[light music]
Settled agriculture changed our planet
and our diet forever.
We figured out how to grow just about everything.
If we saw it in the wild, it tasted good,
and it didn't kill us,
we made it work in our backyard.
Backyards grew into farms,
then into bigger and bigger farms,
with more and more crops crowded side by side.
We even learned how to crossbreed plants
to create new and more robust crops.
* *
By the 1930s we'd already been farming
the planet for quite a spell.
So when people saw the chance to snatch up a piece of land
to call their own, how could they resist?
Everything was dandy until the rain didn't show up
for a few years in a row.
It wasn't entirely your fault, man.
You were just doing what seemed to come naturally.
When you looked at the prairie,
it looked like the grass grows about yea-deep.
How could you have known that you were tearing
into an ancient ecosystem that had been holding the soil
in place for thousands of years?
* *
There's more to prairie grass than meets the eye.
* *
Most of the prairie grass plant,
it turns out, exists out of sight
with roots extending deep into the earth.
These deep, hidden root systems evolved
over tens of thousands of years to thrive in a landscape
where water comes along only now and then.
Prairies develop where it's too wet for desert-style life,
yet too dry to support a dense forest.
Now, these grasses go down almost 15 feet, 5 meters.
You can see why wheat and corn and other crops
couldn't hold the prairie soil together.
Their roots are too shallow.
They didn't evolve to survive here.
This isn't their turf.
But when those new crops were first planted,
they sure could soak up the nutrients in the soil.
Farmers figured that out.
So they plowed the prairie everywhere
to plant their crops.
What they didn't know was
that they were destabilizing an entire ecosystem,
killing ancient roots that held the soil together.
When the rain stopped, and the winds picked up,
as was bound to happen,
the soil dried out and took to the sky.
[dramatic music]
* *
On Mars, there is no grass, no soil as such,
just a lot of red dirt.
Dust storms can grow so vast
that they engulf the entire planet.
I know what you're thinking,
"We're not farming on Mars, Bill."
Nevertheless, there are lessons to be learned there.
If we are not careful, our beautiful, blue marble
could end up a dry, brown ball.
As my dad always said,
"Just don't end up like your Uncle Mars."
The Dust Bowl was the first example
of wide-scale, human-caused climate change,
and it nearly destroyed American agriculture.
So how did we get out of that mess?
How did we restore the heartland that feeds us now,
and how can we avoid causing the same disaster again?
Well, for that, we'll need science.
* *
- When the black blizzards hit the Great Plains
farmers and many meteorologists were shocked.
They had no idea why this was happening,
but a handful of scientists recognized
if the farmers didn't change their ways
the precious soil would soon die and blow away.
Farmers were thinking of soil as an inanimate medium,
like a mineral to be mined,
rather than a living ecosystem to be nurtured.
At first, no one would listen to a bunch of science nerds,
but eventually, as the disaster worsened,
people were willing to accept the facts.
I guess listening to the experts
was less bad than death.
I was being sarcastic.
Get back to your cubicle, James.
A task force was created by the U.S. government
to rethink how we farmed the land.
They invested in new ways to maximize each harvest
while minimizing the impact on the environment.
At one point, the government mounted
an effort to save the topsoil.
It was called Operation Shelterbelt.
To be fair, back then,
we were still new at naming operations.
The project called for planting trees
to block the winds and prevent erosion.
By 1941, the Shelterbelters had planted 220 million trees
stretching 100 miles.
It was the largest effort to address
a climate problem ever attempted.
Using nature to protect nature, genius!
Or should I say, tree-nius.
[laughs] Sorry.
Not sorry, not sorry.
Wind-blocking tree walls are a concept still being used
to this day on modern farms
all over the Great Plains and beyond.
The newly established Department of Agriculture
taught farmers a new way to plow their fields.
Furrows that run straight up and down a slope
can be easy to plow, but when it rains,
they become water channels that wash away seeds
and topsoil like rivers.
Watch.
This is not good.
With guidance, farmers learned how to shape the soil
into terraces and then how to plow their fields
with furrows following the contours of the land,
running at right angles to the slopes of hills.
This protects topsoil.
Watch.
[light music]
* *
It might seem obvious,
but I guess it wasn't at the time.
Billions of tons of soil were lost
due to destructive plowing patterns,
but within a few years,
contour farming reduced topsoil losses by more than 65%.
Soil conservation methods restored a large swath
of the Great Plains.
In total 11.3 million acres
of dusted-over farm fields were revived,
but it couldn't all be saved.
To this day dunes of dirt from the original Dust Bowl
still cover millions of acres of abandoned land.
* *
All of these changes were made in just a few years.
Some worked. Some didn't.
And then we found a way to tap into the vast source
of water that was literally right beneath our feet.
Ten years after the Dust Bowl came to an end
we started drilling down into the Ogallala Aquifer.
Industrial-scale extraction of the aquifer
made irrigation possible and continues
to hydrate the entire region,
but we're draining the aquifer at least six times faster
than rain is able to refill it.
You might think this story is about dust and dirt,
but it's really about water.
Some scientists think the groundwater could be gone
within ten years, and once that water runs out,
the Great Plains will once again be facing ruin.
And it's not just in our own backyard.
Aquifers around the world are in danger of running dry,
but scientists are finding better ways
to distribute groundwater, and even refill them.
The best example of this
channels floodwater into aquifers,
which limits damage to populated areas
while replenishing our underground lakes.
Practices like these are working
in places like California,
where water tables would have dropped
hundreds of feet deeper without aquifer management,
but this doesn't mean we've solved the problems
created in the 1930s.
A new generation is at risk of repeating history,
but they've got hindsight on their side.
* *
Which brings us to the modern-day Dust Bowl.
It doesn't have to go down that way.
We can remember what the soil has taught us
and put new and better systems in place
to protect the land and the water.
We can replace water-intensive crops
with scientifically bred, drought-tolerant ones.
We can restore and preserve even more grassland,
which will keep the soil moist and alive.
We can rotate crops,
giving the land a chance to regenerate,
but none of this matters if we don't have water.
We must give the Ogallala Aquifer protected status
and treat it as the finite global resource that it is.
The water down there doesn't belong
to the corporations that own the land above it.
It belongs to all of us. It's not 90 years ago.
We understand a lot more, and we can do a lot better.
Let me give you a hand. - Thanks.
* *
- I'm hungry. How about a hot dog?
- Sure, hot dog sounds good.
* *
[dramatic music]
- So what have we learned?
The way we feed ourselves is important,
and it affects the environment.
For most of human history
we wandered from place to place in search of food.
Our ancestors rarely knew
where their next meal was coming from,
and hunger was never far behind.
Can you imagine what they'd make of our modern world
with its 24-hour drive-throughs
and 100 different brands of breakfast cereal?
If we want to avoid going back to the hunter,
gatherer, scavenger lifestyle,
we need to respect the soil beneath our feet,
and we need to protect our most precious resource.
It isn't oil or diamonds or gold.
It's two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen.
It's water.
We've got to be careful with it.
We've only been human for a few hundred thousand years.
We only invented agriculture around 10,000 years ago.
It's important to keep in mind
farming isn't natural.
Do it badly, and you get the Dust Bowl.
Do it well, and you feed the world.
[dramatic music]
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