ne of them and we'll see mass destruction that far exceeds the effects of any of our technological devices.

Those are three things that make our planet — alone, apparently, among all the others in our solar system — able to sustain life. Without air, you die in minutes; without water, in days; and without food, in weeks.

Not only has our urban life cut us off from direct contact with the land, but it has caused most of us to take for granted the three things, the absence of which will destroy civilization. It's unfortunate that the superficial sophistry that passes for public discussion these days has relegated conservation to the epithets like "tree-huggers." We had better all be tree-huggers and environmentalists if we wish our posterity to survive.

Those ideological ignoramuses falsely labeled "conservatives" often scoff at the problem of population because they do not know the difference between land that will grow food crops and land that won't. Much of the land on this planet will not grow food crops because it's too steep or too dry or too wet. Thus, growing population plus loss of topsoil equals a train wreck about to happen in the not-too-distant future.

One of the ancient writers remarked that a man could cross North Africa from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and never leave the shade of a tree. Try it now. North Africa is one of the great desert regions of the world. Closer to home, the part of the island on which Haiti is located was once lush and tropical, but today is an ecological disaster. People know how to convert good land into bad land. Strip the land of its plants, and erosion will eliminate your topsoil as well as silt up your rivers and coastal waters. There are no factories that make topsoil.

Many people today are as superstitious as any generation that ever lived. They believe in the magic of technology. Oh, don't worry about that, technology will solve that problem. No, it won't. Much of technology is more enemy than friend because so much of it is devoted to destruction and to superficial things. You can't eat a computer or an iPod, and looping around the planet in a space shuttle contributes nothing to human survival.

Part of this problem is that too many people no longer know what the purpose of human life is. They've been sold on the idea that the purpose of life is to make money; that the measure of success is making money; that whatever helps someone to make more money is good, and whatever deters someone from making money is bad. Thus, you get industrial agriculture instead of farms; corporate monopolies instead of family-owned businesses; mass production of junk and usury instead of permanent things and frugal lifestyles; speculation in paper instead of investment in real businesses; and massive pollution of the sea, the ground water, the rivers and the air.

Our civilization is a lot more fragile that most people suppose. We ignore agriculture because the supermarkets are full of food, but instead of that food being grown on nearby farms, it is all transported long distances. What will happen to the price of that food when the cost of oil, which is a diminishing resource, breaks the $100 barrier? You really wouldn't want to be in New York City two weeks after food shipments had been halted, or if food becomes a luxury available only to the rich.

A good start toward changing direction from destruction to preservation would be to turn off the political babble and go buy a book by Wendell Berry. He's the wisest man in America at this time.