The surest route

The world is running out of phosphorus, a major component of fertiliser.   We humans mine it, spread it on our fields, and then allow it to leach out of the soil into rivers and then oceans, where it remains, lost to us.

We can't synthesise it artificially, so once the mines run out, that's it.   In our zeal for increasing the 'profitability' of our farming systems, we've reduced the system to its bare bones, and sacrificed it's sustainability.

It doesn't have to be like this.   It turns out there is a way of capturing phosphorus before it becomes lost to us.

It's called wildlife.

As we find so often, we live inside carefully balanced, complex systems, and those things we thought were pests, unnecessary, or nice to haves turn out to be crucial.

What makes ecosystems stable is richness - their complexity, multiplicity and variety.   That means that wherever we humans seek to create new systems of our own, from cities to small businesses, we should look to enrich what surrounds us.

It's our best insurance policy, and the surest route to profit.  Just not the quickest.