SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
soil
Desertification Doesn’t Just Look Like a Desert: It Looks Like a Flood
In many of the world's most arid and semi-arid regions, rain is no longer arriving as a blessing but as disaster; to understand why, we need to look at the ground rather than the sky.
Jun 17, 2026
The arrival of rain as a blessing is among the oldest human stories there is.
In Botswana, water and wealth are two names for the same blessing. Pula is the name of Botswana’s national currency, indicating the drought stricken land’s emotional relationship to water.
We see the emotional representation of rain in African American blues traditions, rainmaking rituals in West Africa, monsoon folk songs across South Asia, and Indigenous rain-dance ceremonies. Across cultures for millennia, rain has equaled relief.
But today, human-driven land degradation is rewriting that story.
What if instead of waiting for landscapes to collapse to pay the costs, we invested in the resilience of those very landscapes?
In many of the world's most arid and semi-arid regions, rain is no longer arriving as a blessing but as disaster.
To understand why, we need to look at the ground rather than the sky.
When the Sponge Hardens
If we look at the Earth's surface now, versus 100 years ago, we'll see that most of the land has been transformed from natural ecosystems to concrete, agricultural, and productive land. This is the process of desertification.
You may think of desertification through familiar cultural images such as advancing sand dunes swallowing settlements, cracked earth stretching to the horizon, and vegetation fading into absence. But the defining characteristic of desertification is not simply a lack of water. It is the loss of a landscape's ability to hold water.
Healthy soil functions like a sponge. Built from organic matter, fungal networks, plant roots, insects, and billions of microorganisms, it can absorb and store enormous quantities of water. When rain falls, much of it infiltrates the ground, replenishing soil moisture and underground aquifers. The water moves slowly through the landscape and across layers of soil, sustaining rivers and vegetation long after the storm has passed.
However, degraded soil behaves differently.
Decades of intensive cultivation, overgrazing, vegetation loss, repeated tillage, and use of synthetic inputs reduce soil organic matter and weaken the soil food web. As soil structure deteriorates, the ground becomes compacted and hardens. Pores that once allowed water to penetrate collapse. Rain can no longer soak in. So, when a heavy rainfall arrives, the water cannot penetrate the ground and flushes all that lays on the surface.
Instead of absorbing the water, the soil lets it run downhill. Small rivulets become torrents. Topsoil is stripped away. Gullies form. Streams rise rapidly, and rivers burst their banks. The same rainfall that would once have been absorbed by the landscape becomes a destructive flood.
Farmers and Communities on the Frontlines
At Commonland, we work with communities to restore landscapes that have been identified as degraded—places where decades of ecological decline have reduced the land's ability to support communities, livelihoods, and biodiversity. We aim to provide those communities and local organizations with the means to reverse the cycle of degradation and contribute to regenerating the landscapes they live in and depend on. However, reversing the effects of decades of landscape degradation is not an easy ride.
Over the past 18 months, two of those landscapes, on opposite sides of the world in Spain and South Africa, have delivered the same warning: Without healthy ecosystems, our social, economic, and financial systems collapse.
In the Spanish town of Grazalema, where around 1,500 people are nestled in the mountains of Cádiz, the 2026 January rains shattered records. The landscape, as a result of decades of intensive land use, had lost much of its ability to absorb and regulate water. Aquifers filled rapidly. Water began emerging through the ground itself, threatening the ancient karstic system on which the village sits. Gullies opened across farmland, roads disappeared, and the entire town was evacuated for 10 days.
We have funded the degradation of the systems that protect us, while calling it productivity. The rains are now sending the invoice.
For local farmers, the damage was not only immediate but cumulative. Fields were washed out or left waterlogged, making planting impossible. Topsoil was stripped away, taking with it both fertility and future yield potential. Livestock grazing areas were damaged or cut off, feed stores were lost or became inaccessible, and seasonal cycles were disrupted beyond repair for the year.
“The economic damages for all our activities have been very high,” says Carmen Bueno, owner of the regenerative farm Tambor del Llano. Bueno is also a member of Asociación Serranías Vivas, a local association that brings together farmers, land managers, and rural stakeholders working to restore and protect the Sierra de Cádiz landscape through more sustainable land use and coordinated landscape restoration efforts.
More than 8,000 kilometers away, another landscape faced a sadly similar story.
In May 2026, catastrophic flooding tore through the Langkloof and Baviaanskloof valleys on South Africa’s Eastern Cape. After months of droughts drying up the land, the floods washed everything away: from fields, to tarmac roads, as well as wetlands. For many households, this meant more than infrastructure loss—it meant isolation. Local communities could not move out of their house, let alone the valleys; food and water supplies could not be accessed; farm produce could not reach markets; and tourism bookings collapsed overnight. Repair work, where possible, became slow and costly, held back by washed-out routes and limited resources in already stretched communities.
“These are communities that were already living on the margins,” said Justine Rudman-Koekemoer, co-director and financial manager of Living Lands, an organization working to restore landscapes and support the rural communities who depend on them. "There are no easy routes in or out, no quick fixes. Recovery will be slow and expensive, and it will not happen without outside help." Today, fundraising efforts are underway to rebuild essential damaged infrastructure from the floods.
The hit associated with these events is felt across everyone living in the landscape, from the local communities whose houses were flooded, including the farmers who lost their harvests, to the public infrastructure that needs to be repaired and rebuilt.
However, those losses also have a ripple effect across the broader financial and private sectors, which often fail to account for the climate and nature risk they are exposed to. As a result of these events, loans from banks are likely to be delayed or defaulted, insurance payouts are likely to be requested, and investments into businesses lost.
These devastating events raise an essential question: What if instead of waiting for landscapes to collapse to pay the costs, we invested in the resilience of those very landscapes?
Landscape Restoration as Risk Mitigation
In the financial world, risk and return are two sides of the same coin; the rate of return is determined based on the risk of losing that money.
Over the past decades, investments toward nature were often framed as opportunities for investors to make a commercial return. However this rarely holds true, and most investments continue to flow toward extractive industries, outpacing investment in nature-based solutions by more than 30 to 1: In 2022, roughly $7.4 trillion was spent on extractive activities, and only $220 billion was spent on regenerative activities.
But what if we turned the logic for investing in nature on its head and started to present landscape restoration as a risk mitigation strategy for investors. Given that all the loans, insurance, and investments are tied to enterprises and people based in landscapes, they are directly exposed to the risk related to the health of these very landscapes.
The risk landscape desertification creates isn't abstract. Over 80% of Europe's natural habitats are now in poor or bad condition, leaving the continent more vulnerable to floods, droughts, and ecological instability. Restored wetlands, regenerated soils, and resilient forests aren't symbolic gestures—they're working infrastructure that slows water, stores carbon, and absorbs shocks before those shocks become disasters for people on the ground, and financial losses for capital providers.
Those who work degraded land understand this without needing the statistics. In Grazalema, southern Spain and in the Baviaanskloof, South Africa, farmers and land stewards have watched extreme rainfall turn bare, depleted soil into disaster—fields washed away, roads severed, local economies set back years by a single storm. They know, from direct experience, that land isn't just a commodity but a living system everything else depends on.
It’s now the private and financial sectors’ turn to recognize and value those risks by investing in mitigation solutions. In practice, they can begin by estimating the costs that climate change and environmental degradation could create in the landscapes where they invest or source products. This estimate can then help determine how much investment should be directed toward preventing desertification and restoring those landscapes. Landscape restoration could then become a risk mitigation strategy with an allocated budget for implementing the restoration of those landscapes.
The Invoice the Rains Are Sending
We have funded the degradation of the systems that protect us, while calling it productivity.
The rains are now sending the invoice.
What we are facing is not a choice between conservation and growth, but between repeatedly paying for destruction after the fact or investing in the systems that prevent it in the first place.
Restoration is not a cost to be minimized. It is the most reliable form of resilience we have and the only one that strengthens the system it protects.
Nature restoration is not a discretionary environmental cost; it is resilience infrastructure in its most fundamental form.
To recognize it as such, we need to move beyond fragmented, short-term funding and unlock access to large scale funding from the public, private, and financial sectors to the organizations and individuals on the ground that are on the frontline of landscape restoration.
Restoration is not a cost to be minimized. It is the most reliable form of resilience we have and the only one that strengthens the system it protects.
The task ahead is to ensure that we do not let degradation become the author of the story we tell about rain.
When the rains come, let us still look to the sky in relief.
Keep ReadingShow Less
As Federal Leaders Are Failing on PFAS, States Must Step up—Here’s How
I encourage leaders to look to Maine as a model to follow: Maine has emerged as a national leader in addressing PFAS contamination through comprehensive state-level initiatives that demonstrate the urgent need for federal action.
May 31, 2025
The Environmental Protection Agency is rolling back critical protections that ensure safe drinking water. These regulations help ensure that our water is free of PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals,” an especially hazardous form of industrial chemicals that linger in the environment indefinitely.
PFAS are damaging to human health at even the lowest doses. Exposure to PFAS can contribute to serious illnesses including kidney cancer, liver disease, thyroid disorders, or autoimmune disorders. There are no current treatments to remove PFAS from the body.
Despite the evidence of these dire health risks, the administration is shirking their responsibility to protect people across the country from PFAS exposure.
At the end of the day, we should all be able to agree that the health and safety of our communities starts with clean water and safe food, and make this work a priority.
Now, it is more urgent than ever for state and local leaders to step up, fill this gap, and protect their communities from PFAS exposure. It’s a massive undertaking, but fortunately, there is a clear path forward.
Advocates and experts across the country have already begun to chart the way—because they’ve had to. Even though prior PFAS regulations were important, they’ve never been enough to fully protect our water, our land, or our bodies from pollution.
I encourage leaders to look to Maine as a model to follow: Maine has emerged as a national leader in addressing PFAS contamination through comprehensive state-level initiatives that demonstrate the urgent need for federal action. We're the first state to require manufacturers to report intentionally added forever chemicals in products. Perhaps most significantly, the state is working toward the elimination of PFAS from consumer products, addressing the problem at its source rather than merely managing its consequences. Maine's regulatory approach has implemented some of the nation's most protective drinking water standards for PFAS compounds, recognizing that even minute concentrations pose serious health risks.
My own work in Maine has focused on advancing programs to monitor, test, and limit PFAS in our water and food supply. Over the years, we’ve realized that establishing strong drinking water standards is just the beginning of ridding our communities of PFAS. Now, we’re tackling contamination in the food supply by working with farmers to test their land and crops and make the technical changes necessary to produce safe crops and livestock.
Our state's PFAS Advisory Fund provides critical support to farmers whose agricultural operations have been devastated by PFAS contamination, primarily through the historical application of contaminated biosolids to farmland. Complementing this effort, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA) established their PFAS Emergency Relief Fund to offer direct assistance to organic producers facing immediate financial hardship from crop losses and farm closures due to contamination.
Maine has also taken the bold step of banning the land application of sludge, eliminating a primary pathway for PFAS contamination of agricultural soils.
These comprehensive regulations serve multiple critical purposes: protecting the health of farmers who work the land and face direct exposure to contaminated soils, safeguarding consumers with safe food, and preserving our most treasured and irreplaceable resources—soil and water.
I urge more local leaders to champion these initiatives with your own representatives. Every town and state has a unique political landscape, and some of these programs might not advance easily. We need new innovation and lots of legwork to develop and advance the right solutions for everyone. But at the end of the day, we should all be able to agree that the health and safety of our communities starts with clean water and safe food, and make this work a priority.
Where the federal government won’t protect us, we will take action ourselves—by raising awareness, pushing for strong state-level responses, and stopping PFAS contamination before it causes further harm.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The USDA and Corrupt Organic Certifiers Are Betraying Farmers and Consumers
Corporate agribusinesses are playing fast and loose with the rules by choosing friendly compliant certifiers—and when they are caught in the act, the USDA often fails to take action.
Oct 13, 2024
Some of the oldest and largest U.S. Department of Agriculture-accredited certifiers have partnered with corporate agribusiness to change the working definition of organics, allowing large livestock factories; certified, uninspected imports; and soilless hydroponic produce grown in giant industrial greenhouses to be certified organic.
Organic certifiers are mixing lobbying, marketing, and activism with their certification responsibilities, and taking payola from the clients they certify. They are also certifying “producer groups” in Eastern Europe, Central America, and Asia without inspecting and certifying each individual farm.
This is against the law and an egregious conflict of interest—and it’s crushing U.S. farmers in the marketplace while raking in billions of dollars in profit for these large certifiers.
The corrupt practices employed by these certifiers have left authentic organic farmers, who focus on sound soil stewardship and humane animal husbandry based on pasture, highly disadvantaged in the marketplace.
In 1990, Congress passed the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA), tasking the USDA with oversight of dozens of certifiers to ensure their independence and harmonization of standards.
Fast forward to today and the USDA is now allowing a handful of the largest certifiers to collude with corporate agribusiness to industrialize or import the organic food supply at the expense of high standards and the livelihoods of U.S. farmers who adhere to them.
As executive director of OrganicEye, an organic industry watchdog, I’ve witnessed family-scale organic farmers who abide by the USDA’s organic standards get crushed in the marketplace by dubious organic imports allowed into the U.S. without the certification or inspection that federal law requires.
In September, OrganicEye requested that the USDA Office of Inspector General investigate the National Organic Program for failing to prevent corporate influence—including financial payments made to certifiers over and above inspection fees—and failing to enforce other USDA regulations that prevent conflicts of interest, thus lowering the quality of certified organic food.
OrganicEye recently filed a third formal legal complaint against a certifier, Florida Organic Growers (FOG), and their certification arm, Quality Certification Services (QCS), for accepting contributions, conference sponsorships, and other payments over and above certification fees from operations they oversee.
FOG has joined two of the other largest “independent” certifiers in the country, California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF) and Oregon Tilth, in selling out hard-working produce and livestock farmers by certifying giant industrial operations, many allegedly flagrantly breaking the law. Legal complaints against all three are currently pending.
When money changes hands between agribusiness clients and the profiting organizations that certify them, we call that “payola,” classically defined as corruption. These certifiers are acting as agents of the USDA. And the regulators in Washington responsible for auditing them are looking the other way.
Large organic certifiers should not be partnering with corporate agribusiness and cashing in on the growth of organics, especially while other certifiers are upholding the traditionally high standards.
In its first action to reign in certification abuses, OrganicEye filed an administrative law complaint against CCOF, the nation’s largest certifier, in November 2023 to address this out-of-control certification system.
We’ve seen organizations like CCOF, Oregon Tilth, and FOG morph from being among the founding farmer-led groups facilitating the growth of organic farming in the U.S. to multimillion-dollar business enterprises certifying multibillion-dollar corporate agribusinesses.
Recent IRS filings show these certification giants have reaped tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue while “masquerading” as tax-exempt public charities, with the vast preponderance of income derived from service fees paid by their business clients.
In addition to the controversies surrounding certification of livestock factories, a number of prominent certifiers, along with the industry’s primary lobby group, the Organic Trade Association, executed a stealthy campaign in 2017 that resulted in regulators allowing mammoth hydroponic greenhouses (soilless production) to be certified as organic, despite statutory and regulatory language requiring careful soil stewardship before a farm can be certified as organic under the USDA program.
That rich, organically-curated soil microbiome is the foundation of organic farming practices, resulting in superior nutrition density and flavor. That’s lacking in hydroponics, which uses liquid fertilizers derived from materials like conventional soybean meal.
The corrupt practices employed by these certifiers have left authentic organic farmers, who focus on sound soil stewardship and humane animal husbandry based on pasture, highly disadvantaged in the marketplace. With many small organic farms struggling economically—and hundreds more being forced out altogether—the devastating impacts are clear.
It doesn’t have to be this way. And not all certifiers are behaving badly.
For example, Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association is universally viewed as one of the most ethical certifiers. They do not approve hydroponic greenhouses or factory farms as organic.
Since OrganicEye began publishing its research concerning alleged improprieties at the nation’s largest certifiers, we have received numerous inquiries from farmers indicating interest in switching certifiers.
We hope that our research inspires ethical farmers and certified organic business operations to consider switching their allegiance and economic patronage to certifiers who share their values and interpretations of federal law.
In the meantime, consumers and eaters can use the same guide that we have prepared for farmers to help identify some of the most creditable organic food in the marketplace. Federal law requires every package with the word “organic” on the front label to include the name of the certifier supervising the production process. This is commonly found on the back or side panel near the ingredient list.
With the USDA delegating so much authority to certifiers, there are now effectively two organic labels: corporate brands affiliated with OTA lobbyists and certified by their members, motivated by profit and industry growth, and other ethical brands that have not lost touch with the foundational precepts of the organic movement.
OrganicEye is offering free consulting and other resources to farmers around the country who are switching their patronage to certifiers who share their values rather than undercutting their livelihoods.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular