Soil and Money
The Two Major Patterns that Define the History of Civilizations
If you enjoy this article from our rancher friends at Untapped Growth, please consider supporting The American Tribune by leaving a like (tap the heart at the top or bottom of the article) or upgrading your subscription to paid. Liking makes a big difference: by engaging with this post, you help amplify it and bring many new people to the TAT project.
There is much heated discussion in the modern-day town square about where exactly we fall on the spectrum of civilizational decay. In our particular sphere, the general consensus is split between two competing viewpoints.
The first viewpoint is one that acknowledges our culturally-decimated state of affairs, but refuses to go so far as to lose faith in democracy. To the holders of this view, we must simply vote harder, and all of our concerns will be addressed. This is, of course, naive, but understandable. After all, if we can’t vote our way out of this, what is there to do?
The other viewpoint holds that the modern age is positioned as a wholly unique spasm of time, uncorrelated to the ebbs and flows of history—it, in fact, mirrors the common progressive “end of history” refrain. In this nihilistic conception of the world, nothing ever happens. All that the future holds is defeat—to these people, humanity's destiny is an endless spiral downwards into ever-increasing bureaucracy and spiritual desolation.
Both of these arguments are rooted not in rationality or vitality, but in fear and projection. To be clear: we are beyond the point of voting our way out – if we ever could have – but this does not mean that history is over and we must concede defeat before the contest is settled. What it does mean is that our solutions are going to have to be creative. Discerning and enacting these solutions requires us first to establish where we are.
“A nation transitions from strong civilization to evil empire when it descends from vibrant production to imperialistic extraction. This dynamic most strongly manifests through the loss of fertile soil and the slow creep from hard money to the foreign enforcement of a fiat one.”
If our goal is to create real change, we need to understand the terrain. This, in turn, will enable the clarity of vision required to engage in the right fights.
The 3 Base Psycho-Technologies of Society
Let’s begin with brass tacks. When examining our current civilizational woes, we must first venture to define the elements that compose a successful civilization. At its base, civilization is defined by the coordination of large groups of people working together to scale and perpetuate the cultural values that define them. There are three key tools that enable this to occur:
Language: the ability to communicate about your desires with others. With technological progress – from the printing press to the telephone to the internet – so, too, has our communicative reach progressed. By extension, human coordination (and subsequent homogenization) has expanded, enabling the scaled pursuit of grand societal projects.
Fire: the ability to leverage energy in the pursuit of our collective desires. From the moment humanity harnessed fire, history has been a story of a massive and accelerating pursuit of energy – the wheel, engineering technologies, fossil fuels, and nuclear power. With each advancement comes a larger lever that increases the amplitude of change that can be enacted, for good or for ill.
Money: the synthesis of language and fire. Money grants us the ability to communicate and coordinate in a distributed manner about how strongly something is desired and who is best equipped to efficiently spend their energy in accomplishing it. It is the mechanism that distributes energy to that which its participants wish to pursue, and it is always seeking balance between what is desired and what is possible.
These are the psycho-technologies that define society. The tools themselves carry no moral value – tools are tools, yet whoever wields these weapons has immeasurable power. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent in the current climate than in the case of currency. Whether aggry beads and panos, gold, or treasury notes, foreign imperialism imposed upon smaller tribal societies by larger, more structured societies has been a common pattern throughout history. Colonies were conquered with guns, germs, and steel, but the quotidian writ was maintained through an arsenal of soft power weapons, including shape-shifting counterfeiting schemes. Counterfeiting of regional currencies facilitated the looting of local capital and appropriation of productive local enterprise, without bloodshed, extracting wealth from the colony to the imperial homeland. This, in turn, has the functional effect of destabilizing the core cultural tenets of those societies and, therefore, collapses them.
Production, not extraction, is the foundation of a well-functioning society. As nations slip into imperialism—as they always must to maintain an unnatural rate of growth—rather than value creation, the more they employ foreign extraction and the more domestic production is gutted.
Soil: The Base Productive Asset of Civilizations
At its root, soil is the base productive asset of all civilizations. After all, food is the bedrock necessity for the sustainment of human life. Until there is an overproduction of food, people cannot devote any attention to more abstracted and higher pursuits – their attentions are captured by baser, materialistic instincts. There is no division of labor, no scaling of specialization and trade, and therefore the scale required to sustain a real civilization is not possible. The first whispers of mechanization arise in an effort to make agricultural production more efficient, rendering the populace with the leeway to pursue other avenues of production. Mining and manufacturing then become the next stage of economic activity to support the agriculture industry, and from this springboard, other, more abstracted goods may be produced.
One of my favorite books, “Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations”, tracks the history of society through the lens of the soil. Whether the ancient Aztecs, Rome, China, or the US, civilizations traditionally flourish as long as they invest in the fertility of their soil bank. Once they begin extracting the soil’s future fertility by consuming its stock of carbon at unsustainable rates, the clock is ticking, and they need to expand outwards with imperialistic might if they are to sustain themselves (with the US being the starkest example of this in history).
At a certain point, they are no longer able to continue expanding outwards and managing already-conquered territory, and at this point, collapse is a single generation away. The high time-preference thinking that invariably captures empires on the decline can arise from many sources, but all the patterns of consumption and waste that an empire employs to feed itself by robbing from the future lead to the same outcome.
“At its base civilization is essentially the harnessing of energy to serve the flourishing of life, and the keystone of that life is our living soil and ecology capturing the energy of the sun to grow what we need for our life.”
To be abundantly clear, the problem is not greenhouse gasses and carbon, which are buzzwords wielded as a cudgel by endless NGOs and faceless corporations. This brand of “environmentalism”, if it can be so named, is a political weapon being used to institute energy rationing for the sake of exercising control over domestic territory and its inhabitants. The true problem that defines our imperiled agricultural systems is erosion and desertification. Our soil is being turned into mere dirt, sediment of minerals that is entirely absent of life. We stand at the precipice as industrial farming and fiat extract unreplaced fertility from the soil at scales never before seen in history are creating a crisis beyond any the world has ever seen. Because the US has managed to solidify a truly global empire using the tools mentioned above, the death throes of the American Empire will be felt from pole to pole.
When a society destroys its capacity for production, it must descend into imperialism to survive. My goal – and it is a goal that is fundamentally necessary for the restoration of the true American Project – is that we, as American citizens, lead that productive, Soil First restoration with the same vigor with which the American regime has weaponized the fiat system in its scramble to survive by extracting from the world. My hope is that in doing so, we can undo our own “Dutch disease of the US dollar” and restore the internal power of our nation and the vibrancy of its people.
Don’t lose hope as we dive deeper into the story of how we got here. Parallel to this destruction, breakthroughs in regenerative agriculture are being made that enable soil-building beyond what was previously believed possible. The challenge is: Can we bridge the chasm created by the current chaos and reclaim our mantle as productive stewards once more?
A Brief History of the US Through the Lens of Soil and Money
The United States’ ascension as a world power and its subsequent status as the “breadbasket of the world” are not unrelated, as most people tend to think of them. When telling the story of American production, the theme can be captured in a single question: “what did we do with our vast inheritance of fertile soil?”
The Days of the Settlers
While Lewis and Clark were exploring the Louisiana Purchase and the depths of the Pacific Northwest, Thomas Jefferson – esteemed founding father of America, himself – was already beginning to talk about how the drive to go west, at its core, was the pursuit of soil fertility.
When the original European settlers came to North America, they were stunned by the Edenic productivity of the land. What they did not realize, however, was that it was an intentionally cultivated food forest and prairie ecosystem stewarded by the Native Americans. Europeans only saw farming through the lens of tilling and cropping, and did not possess the ancestral tradition to appreciate the synergistic and holistic systems management style pioneered by a people who thought of themselves as a part of the ecosystem itself. The Europeans’ decidedly less integrated system of agriculture led to erosion due to tillage in Virginia and on the East, particularly the extractive, cash crop plantations of the Tidewater and Deep South, and was a problem from the day our nation was born, as Jefferson astutely observed.
As wanting as the European system of agriculture was, its effects were not the sole or even most significant accelerator of ecological collapse in North America. This collapse began in earnest with the over-trapping of beavers for their pelts, which the Native Americans participated in to acquire the “wealth” promised by the European settlers – a deal that ultimately led to their own destruction. It is critical to understand that the beaver was a keystone species. As water engineers, they slowed and trapped all of the rainfall of the west and held it in the soil, creating the lush, Edenic conditions the first European settlers so admired.
The next cut through the heart of American soil fertility was the railroads. These immense industrializing knife strokes split the migration routes of the bison, disrupting their historical continental migration patterns. Then later, the fate of the bison was sealed with their intentional genocide initiated as a political move to destroy the Native American way of life, and thus their independence from the new American system. The leaders responsible for this initiative failed to comprehend the ramifications of destroying the keystone soil builders of the Great Plains, and thereby set in motion the annihilation of the wealth of our topsoil.
The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl
While the events up until now set us on a path, the degradation of our once-rich topsoil was fully unleashed in the 1930s when the Great Depression descended upon the American industrial complex in conjunction with the Dust Bowl. Economic depression and soil exhaustion are highly correlated events, and fertility loss is not a linear process. It is an exponential decay and steady increase in system fragility until its knees suddenly buckle, putting the full breadth of its weakness on display. During the Dust Bowl, the standard practice was as follows: if your crops were struggling for moisture, you were to till the rows between them to bring up deep moisture so that they could survive until the rains came. This solution is only effective if the rains come, and this time, they failed to do so.
The water-holding capacity of organic matter in the soil had been eroded and the small and large water cycles had been disrupted. We had lost our large herds of ruminants sequestering deep carbon in the prairie soils, and the beavers were gone, no longer capturing the water and stabilizing rainfall by keeping the environment more moist. Our “generation after our soil extraction” had arrived.
World War II and Earl Butz
With the Dust Bowl, our ecological grace had officially expired, and as in the case of any Empire, we needed to salvage some elsewhere, by more artificial means. With the Second World War brewing, the festivities provided the fledgling American Regime an excellent opportunity to reinitiate national production. The carnage in Europe ironically offered salvation for a population falling into despair by rallying the citizens – including women, to the greatest extent in history – behind the manufacture of the tools of war.
Following the war, the relative lack of decimation we experienced by having our homeland an ocean away from the fighting allowed us to name our price in the rebuilding of the world. The United States was now a superpower, with the conquered nations in our debt, and this allowed us the room to route around our ecological problems and secure our place as the printers of the world reserve currency. The machines previously employed in the production of bombs meant for German entrenchments were retooled for the production of fertilizers – chemical agents that serve the purpose of increasing the efficiency of extraction, giving us a temporary lifeline.
The Rise of the Petrodollar: Leaving the Gold Standard, and the Collapse of our Local Economy
Following the years of Depression, Global War, and its surprisingly glowing aftermath, President Richard Nixon took office in 1969. By this point, the oil economy was more powerful than ever, and agriculture was firmly in its grip. Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, encouraged and energized these efforts, advocating for plowing fence row to fence row while simultaneously preaching that food is a weapon. In Butz’s estimation, we needed to produce lots of it to solidify our nation's power. The problem was that farming was no longer an “energy positive” endeavor, as Wendell Berry explains in “The Unsettling of America”. As Berry noted, we then required 3-4 units of petroleum energy to grow one unit of food energy. We were papering over our loss of our base productive asset, so, where was the energy coming from to do so? Fiat.
In 1971, Nixon announced the end of the gold standard for the US Dollar, effectively defaulting on our formerly gold-backed debts. We declared that we could no longer pay in gold because we owed more than we possessed but would pay in printed paper instead. In practice, this accelerated the fiat imperialism of the American Empire as it was henceforth able to more efficiently rob the world by paying in fiat currency it could print at its leisure, commandeering imported, real products. The rise of the petrodollar is where the energy to sustain our production came from, and our martial dominance abroad enforced its usage.
Foreign imperialism sustained this strength, but it required maintaining a state of constant growth, necessitating a constant reach for more territory – not in the form of colonies, but in trade agreements and resource rights in exchange for “peacekeeping” presence. With the Iraq War, our strategy was solidified in our quest to secure Middle Eastern oil, seize Saddam’s gold, and prevent the re-emergence of hard money so as to maintain the total dominion of the dollar. But foolish foreign entanglements – as seen in the unwinnable campaigns in Vietnam and the Middle East – always lead to a disgruntled population back home, sowing the initial seeds of domestic discontent and introducing a new imperial fragility as it tries to hold onto its power with ever-larger bluffs. The evil empire was now fully born.
We had acquired “Dutch Disease of the US Dollar”, but unlike Holland discovering a real natural resource (oil) that stagnated their national industry, we were exporting the dollar as a “natural resource”, backed by the full might of the US Military. This short-term survival strategy compounded an industrial collapse on our civilization back home on top of the already completed agrarian collapse.
Financialization and Speculation: The Dot Com Boom and 2009 Housing Crisis
Following Nixon’s decision to take America off the gold standard, and particularly with the debt-backed heyday of the “roaring” Reagan economy, America’s economy dramatically financialized, and our culture further collapsed into a Weimer-esque conflagration of euphoric and rampant economic speculation. Everyone and their Grandma began to think of themselves as day-trading marketeers and real estate virtuosos, not appreciating that their affluence was bought not with the real fruits of production but with monopoly money printed in blood.
The 80s brought a wave of financial mania with leveraged buyouts (LBOs) and pump-and-dump schemes, the 90s and early 2000s heralded the arrival of the internet and the subsequent dot com boom (and bust), and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis of 2009 brought the housing market to its knees. Rampant securitization and cheap debt led by a soaring deficit of a vaporware currency encouraged ever-more reckless, frequent, and severe economic events. No longer was our economy based on production, but on leverage, a blind surplus of value-eroding notes, and a constant chase to cozy closer to the money printer.
While the state of the currency managed to escape public notice in previous crises, the Bank Repo Crisis of 2019, followed by the COVID fiasco and subsequent full-throttle money printing, began to show the US’s most valuable weapon for the precarious ghost in the machine that it is. The economy, such that it is, has become a mere colorful descriptor of the Fed’s words. Still, the US Dollar maintains its strength compared to other global currencies, but this state of affairs can only last as long as the United States remains unchallenged.
As regional powers begin forming coalitions such as BRICS, petrodollar agreements are allowed to expire (as in Saudi Arabia), the waning efficacy of interest rate control over inflation numbers, and the unsustainable cost of our national debt, the event horizon of a sovereign debt crisis has already been passed. Inflation cannot be curbed without raising interest rates, and interest rates cannot be raised because the cost of our national debt will become unsustainable, if it’s not already. In short, we will be rendered fully insolvent, necessitating the printing of more money, and therefore more inflation.
And when this crisis occurs, the death of our soil becomes viscerally relevant, and existential in scope.
So What Can Be Done?
This is not a fevered tale of Armageddon, but rather a simple exercise in examining the lifecycle of every empire. These dynamics are a constant, though the dressing may change. Nor is this a treatise on the hopelessness of it all.
Fortunately, nature is resilient if allowed to operate as intended. Her most resilient citizen, in fact, is the human race. While these collapses and cycles occur on an archetypally-significant schedule, the ingenuity of the ultimate keystone species always finds a way.
That is the purpose of this diatribe – not to fear-monger or insist that the most important thing you do is vote – but to open your eyes to the reality of our predicament. Only then can we begin to explore solutions in earnest. The topic of solutions will require another article, but for now, I leave you with three:
Abandon the fiat dollar. Our leveraging of fiat imperialism to avoid facing our gutted national capacity to produce has, and is continuing, to destroy us. We cannot return to being a strong nation until we return to hard money and real value creation.
Raise large families of moral citizens. A nation is made up of people and without responsible and moral people competently producing value there is no nation.
Restore our soil and productive agrarian capacity through regenerative agriculture, followed by the re-industrialization of the nation as a whole
The succinctness of this list belies the fact it is a tall order during these turbulent times and will require collaboration on a scale not seen in this country for quite some time. As waning Empires lose their ability to enforce their power externally, their eyes are drawn inwards to shore up the power they retain domestically. This means the fevered importation of foreigners and the erosion of the cultural ethos that laid the groundwork for it to exist in the first place.
The memory of what it means to be a citizen is lost. This, then, is what must be regained. This citizen is not, as the dying regime would have you believe, a man who revels in his impotent “vote”, but rather a man that finds his way back to the ideals that originally made his Nation great, and who commits his life, fortune, and sacred honor to the actions required to uphold them.
“Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.” -G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
This article was written by UntappedGrowth and crew. For more information about Smoke River Ranch, you can visit our website, or follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Sign up here for any future content we put out.