Indian spiritual leader and environmental campaigner Sadhguru has a message for Americans after Donald Trump‘s election victory, and it’s about soil.
Sadhguru is at COP29, this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference, in Baku, Azerbaijan, to deliver a rallying cry to rejuvenate soil across the world, with 52 percent of it already degraded, according to his Save Soil organization.
The spiritual leader wants to warn Americans about the “grave mistake” of not paying attention to soil health, explaining that its degradation contributes to issues ranging from loss of livelihood for farmers to a lack of nutrition in food and even to migration.
But he added that in the wake of the election, Americans will be focused more on the economy than ecology, especially as Trump has often been against too much environmental regulation in the past. Under his last presidency, he reversed, revoked or rolled back over 100 environmental rules, analysis by The New York Times found.
SavSoil
Newsweek has contacted Trump’s team via email for a response to Sadhguru’s comments.
“Whether it is President Trump or anybody else in any country, if any democratically elected leader talks about lowering the standards of living in any given nation, he’s finished, he’s out; this is the case for all countries,” Sadhguru told Newsweek.
“So right now, in the United States this is happening—the economic situation is such that slowly, to maintain the lifestyles they were used to is becoming difficult for ordinary people,” he said. “So the election shows that intent—that they want somebody who will fix this for them.”
Soil Is the ‘Foundation of Life’
Sadhguru said that the issue of soil health is more important than fuel costs, which gets spoken about more often, because it is fundamental to life.
“Soil is the largest living system, not just on this planet, in the known universe…it has trillions of species of organisms,” Sadhguru said “And a living system like that is the foundation [of] life for all of us.”
“Every life that you see walking on this planet…the root is in the microbial life, microbial life is the foundation.” He warned that “this foundation of life is sinking to such an extent that now we’re talking about soil extinction.”
However, Sadhguru said that “For people to even consider ecology as an important concern in their national talk, they must be reasonably comfortable, they cannot feel they are in strife,” and “right now, a lot of American people think they are in economic strife.”
His hope is that as a businessman, Trump “can push the country towards economic well-being and then it will be easier to talk to them.”
Sadhguru went on to say that his “fundamental mission” has been to “officiate the marriage of economy and ecology, because if they get into a conflict, the world is finished because economy will always win hands down.”
How is Soil Degradation Impacting Americans?
Sadhguru said that in the short-term, soil rejuvenation will be most notable to people for its impact on the nutritional value of the food they are eating. He added it will even impact on immigration, which was consistently one of the most important issues to voters in the run-up to the presidential election.
He said: “We’re eating more expensive food now, but there is no nourishment. For example, in the 1920s, if you consumed one orange from California—to get the same nourishment you got then, you’d have to eat eight oranges.”
Sadhguru said people would also be less likely to migrate if they could live off their own land. “If the soil was rich and people could grow their own food and live reasonably well where they are, why would they take the risk of dragging their women and children through all kinds of conditions and come to a strange place where they have no skills or language or anything to survive there?” he asked.
Addressing the Issue
Sadhguru believes that, just as there are laws governing what people can build on the land they own, it should be the case that “if you want to own agricultural land, a minimum of 3 percent organic content must be maintained.”
This is the minimum content stipulated by the United Nations for it to constitute soil.
“But the shame is that not single nation on the planet [has] a minimum of 3 percent organic content as its average,” Sadhguru said. The highest is in northwestern Europe, which is 2.4 percent, while the U.S. has an average of 1.2 percent.
Sadhguru largely blamed the modern use of fertilizer for these low numbers, saying “we got very excited like little children” when we first discovered it.
“Suppose you and I have a good diet but still, something is missing in our nutritional needs, we thought we would take a pill to compensate for that,” Sadhguru said, “but the pill felt so good that we gave up our diets and only took pills. This is what we did with our agriculture, we used some chemicals and it burst forth and we completely forgot about organic content.”
He also said that “soil is not our property,” rather, “it’s a legacy that’s come to us from previous generations and it’s out fundamental responsibility to pass it on that way to future generations.”