RUSH: I know you people have a lot to deal with. The Drive-By Media is doing its damnedest to create an economic depression. Your fat, obese kids cannot learn diddly-squat in school. They might be learning diddly, but not squat. Everything you like to eat is bad for you. There are two Americas. One of them is full of illegal aliens who can get driver’s licenses and benefits easier than you can. Gas prices are blowing your budget. Your house values going to hell. ATM fees are too high. The boys are picking on Hillary. Bill is out attacking the black guy. Global warming is destroying the planet, while you’re freezing to death with home heating bills up the wazoo! Now let me add one more to this crisis — and this has the potential to cause a painful, miserable, premature death. It was a story yesterday: ‘Planet is Getting Skinned.’ It was in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. ‘Mother Earth used to be covered with three feet of topsoil, but farmers,’ greedy farmers, on the take via subsidies, ‘who selfishly refuse to stop tilling the land, are tearing up the top layer of earth so fast, they have put the entire planet at risk.’
It’s yet another environmental nightmare. We’re losing approximate 1% of our dirt every year. So the theory is in a hundred years it will all be gone. We’re running out of dirt. If there’s no more dirt, there are no more farms. If no more farms, no more food. No more food no more mankind. No more food no more animals! They will eat us after they run out of vegetation. We are doomed either way. We’re running out of damn dirt. Now, this story has been all over the Drive-By Media, and the official climatologist of the EIB Network, Dr. Roy Spencer, University of Alabama Huntsville, sends me a note. He said, ‘Rush, I heard you refer to a news story about the loss of topsoil. This issue has been around…’ By the way, some of this is scientific. I’m going to have to break this down for some of you, including some of you not just in Rio Linda but beyond. Dr. Spencer does happen to treat these subjects in a very scientific fashion, so stand by. He said, ‘This issue has been around for decades, and some alarmists have said we’re going to run out of topsoil long before we run out of fossil fuels,’ and I can tell you, since I’ve been growing up, I’ve heard this. I remember being taught in school that this was a big threat, that this was a giant crisis.’
You know, I remember getting educated on how farmers should plow the fields on mountainsides to avoid the topsoil being washed away. You plow around the mountain and its circumference rather than vertically, up and down, so as to not create rows. You create ‘columns,’ so to speak. They were worried about it then. I’m 57. This was when I was — ah, 50 years ago, 45, 50 years ago. We have to ask ourselves, though: ‘What would the brilliant scientist Julian Simon say?’ (interruption) Who’s Julian Simon? You don’t remember Julian Simon? Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb back in the seventies predicted the doom and gloom and the loss of humanity due to overpopulation in the year 2000, that all the people would eat up and destroy all the resources. Julian Simon made him a bet. They picked out some minerals and commodities, and Simon bet that there would be more of them and cheaper by a certain date, and he won every one of them. Ehrlich didn’t know what he was talking about. So you always consult: What would Julian Simon say? ‘He probably would say…’ This is where he gets scientific.
‘He’d probably say that if we ever reached the point where dirt is not in abundance, all we need to do is start putting all of that organic matter that we ate back into the fields.’ Now, I realize some of you ask, ‘Organic matter that we ate? What is Rush talking about?’ Stick with me on this. ‘The organic matter that we ate,’ that he suggests putting back in the fields, ‘is known as biosolids. Biosolids is a polite term for sewage sludge. Need I go further?’ Well, what is sewage sludge? In other words, Dr. Simon would suggest that if we find a period of time where dirt is not in abundance, just spread a bunch of crap out there and the problem will be solved — and the Lord knows, folks: That’s a commodity we are never, ever going to run out of. Part of my stimulus package, where I’m going to retire debt, I’m going to require something. I’m going to retire debt. I’m going to get all your credit card debt, your home mortgage payments. No work. You’re going to get your salary are no work, health care and all that, but I’m going to require that you do something. Poop it up, because we can’t go forward as a country if we do not have adequate dirt out there for the farmers to plant foods in. So that will be your only requirement.
It’s going to be a poop quota! It will not be tied to how much food every pooper eats, but there’s going to be a quota to make sure and we’re going to need this to be a growth area, and so… (interruption) Look, you laugh about this. People have been doing this for years in their gardens. The soil expires in the gardens, and they go out there. They call this fertilizer. Some people have, Snerdley. I’ve got a story on it here at an educational website. I can put the link on the website. You think I’m making this up? (interruption) No, no, no. It is that they use biosolids in their gardens. Don’t take it any further than that. What in the world are you conjuring up image-wise? (interruption) They have! People have been ‘using,’ not ‘doing.’ Don’t misunderstand here. They’ve been using biosolids in their gardens. You know this. You’re a big flower guy. You’re a big landscape guy. (interruption) Any manure works, as long as it’s organic, and it all is. Think about that next time you go buy your carton of organic milk, which is a point I have made. So that will be my only request and requirement of the citizens of the country, to poop it up to replace the topsoil.