In his book, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, former priest Matthew Fox writes of a dream he had one night during an exhausting conference. The dream said to the people that the earth is dying. Agricultural practices in North America remove topsoil at the rate of six billion tons per year. It takes ten thousand years to produce an inch of topsoil.
Most agricultural areas have, at best, six inches of topsoil.
It is said that, unless something changes radically, the state of Iowa could be desert land by the year two thousand twenty and, in fifteen years, all the planet's fertile land will be reduced by one third. The forests are disappearing. A third of the forests in North America will disappear in fifteen years. Each year a forest the size of half of California disappears. And the air goes.