[Editor’s note: Today, the 23rd annual U.N. climate talks begin in Bonn, Germany, and this week Civil Eats continues to explore agriculture’s role in causing—and mitigating—climate change. This is an edited excerpt from David Montgomery’s new book, Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life. See also our Q&A with Montgomery about his climate optimism.]

I confess I never thought I’d write an optimistic book about the environment. For many years, I was a dark green ecopessimist convinced humanity was rushing headlong into self-inflicted disaster. While I still harbor some such fears, I’ve become far more positive about our long-term prospects. Over the past few years, I’ve traveled extensively, meeting visionary farmers who are restoring life and fertility to their land. These experiences convinced me that it’s possible not only to restore soil on a global scale, but to do so remarkably fast.

At least I hope it is, since we face the confluence of the end of cheap oil, continued population growth, and a changing climate over the coming century. How farming will adapt remains uncertain, as political, economic, and environmental interests push competing visions, policies, and agendas. No matter how all this plays out, it will shape the fate of nations and define the world we leave for generations to come.

My perspective on this issue started to change a decade ago, after I did something some colleagues might consider unpardonable—I wrote a book about soil and titled it Dirt. You see, soil scientists consider it blasphemous to call soil dirt. This is because there are very important differences between soil and dirt. For one, soil is full of life, dirt is not. So why would a geologist like me write an irreverently titled book about the importance of what covers up rocks? While my primary focus of study is how landscapes are shaped by natural processes and changed by people, over the course of examining the evolution of landscapes around the world, I came to see how soil erosion and degradation influenced human societies.

Some geologists argue that people, directly and indirectly, now move more earth around than nature herself. Earth scientists have even proposed a new epoch, the Anthropocene, or “Age of People.” Although we argue about when this epoch started, it is perfectly clear that of all our world-changing inventions, the plow was, and remains, one of the most destructive.

Yes, you read that correctly. The plow. That iconic symbol of our agricultural roots that helped launch civilization as we know it. The plow enabled few to feed many and set the table for the rise of commerce, city-states, and hierarchical societies with priests, princes, politicians, and all the rest of us who don’t farm. The problem, in a nutshell, is that the plow makes land vulnerable to erosion by wind and rain.

Through fieldwork spanning three decades and six continents, I realized that long-cultivated regions that had lost their topsoil remained impoverished as a result. Telltale signs are etched in ragged gullies and slopes with subsoil exposed at the surface. The poor fertility of the soil that remains on the land is harder to see.

However, it’s worth noticing—and reversing. For restoring the soil can help address the fundamental challenges of water, energy, and climate, as well as a number of important environmental and public health problems. Nitrogen pollution, born of our dependence on fertilizers, is affecting urban water supplies in the Midwest and creating a great dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico off the mouth of the Mississippi River. Algal blooms from excess phosphorus in agricultural runoff kill fish in the Great Lakes.

Direct exposure to insecticides and indirect effects of herbicides that kill their food source contribute to crashing populations of pollinators, like bees and Monarch butterflies, with dire implications for crop production and biodiversity. Wholesale reliance on agrochemicals directly affects human health, too, as increased risk of depression and certain cancers are associated with pesticide exposure. Restoring healthy, fertile soil would cast a broad net, helping to address all these problems. So how feasible is it?

After writing Dirt, I received invitations to speak about the history of soil loss and degradation at more farming conferences than I can remember. This gave me opportunities to travel to places I wouldn’t otherwise go (geologists usually gravitate toward mountains rather than to flat farmland), and the chance to meet innovative farmers I wouldn’t normally encounter. At first, I didn’t fully appreciate this opportunity. But after hearing one story after the next of how farmers revived degraded land, I started seeking out their opinions on this pressing issue. In doing so, I began to realize that I shared more common ground with farmers than I thought. Many of them saw the destructive effects of plowing as clearly as I did, if not more so.

In 2010, Guy Swanson invited me to speak at a farming conference in Colby, Kansas. His company sells an attachment to no-till planters that helps farmers reduce the amount of fertilizer they use. No-till farmers don’t plow, they use specialized planters that open a narrow slot in the soil about the width of a kernel of corn. Seeds drop down into the slot, disturbing much less of the surrounding soil than plowing it up would.

Swanson’s system injects a uniform amount of fertilizer adjacent to and below each just-planted seed, putting nutrients right where plants need them—and only there. This uses far less fertilizer than spraying it all over the field. The farmer saves money and fewer chemicals run off to pollute streams, lakes, and oceans. That sounds like a win-win, except of course to fertilizer companies. Swanson had seen me talk at a no-till farming conference and wanted me to come speak about the civilization-killing problem of soil erosion to potential customers contemplating a shift to no-till methods and precision fertilizer use.

As I ended my talk, I looked out on a sea of baseball hats. One elderly fellow in the middle stood up, stuffed his hands down into his pockets, and said he’d taken one look at me and didn’t think I could possibly say anything worth listening to. I braced myself for what was to come. But then he surprised me. He said the more I’d talked, the more sense I’d made. He’d seen what I was talking about on his farm. It no longer had the rich fertile topsoil his grandfather had plowed. Something needed to change if his own grandchildren were going to prosper working his land.

Time and again, at one farming conference after another, instead of walking out or lobbing verbal grenades at me, farmers readily acknowledged the possibility that plowing resulted in long-term damage to the soil. A surprising number said they knew this to be true from firsthand experience. Older farmers would share stories about how their soil quality had gone downhill over their lifetimes, too slowly to notice year to year, but plain as day in retrospect. One after another piped up to say that they’d noticed their soil decline under the now-conventional marriage of the plow and intensive fertilizer and agrochemical use.