Concerned for the environment, he became a student of ecology and agriculture and was influenced by books such as Bread From Stones,[1][2] which showed that plants grow better in soils generated by mimicking natural soil-forming processes that take millennia, such as the advance and retreat of glaciers scouring the Earth's crust, or rock weathering of volcanic lava.
In the 1960s, Hamaker cultivated an interest in soil and climate issues, and began publishing articles about how the health of an individual, society and planetary ecology thrive only as an interdependent whole.
In 1975, Newsweek ran an article entitled "The Cooling World" that foretold the decimation of agricultural productivity based on a dramatic decrease in the Earth's temperature.
He calculated that remineralizing the soil with river, seashore, mountain and glacial rock dust would enable American agriculture to produce four times as much food or the same amount with a 25% reduction in cost, without the need for pesticides or chemical fertilizers.
In 1982, he produced with Californian ecologist Donald A. Weaver The Survival Of Civilization: Carbon Dioxide, Investment Money, Population – Three Problems Threatening Our Existence, which was re-published by Remineralize The Earth in 2002[19] and in 2006 by SoilandHealth.org.
The book which initially sold 14,000 copies, concerned the threat of an imminent ice age, remineralizing the world's soils on a local and global scale and reforesting the planet to return atmospheric carbon dioxide to a normal interglacial level near 280 ppm, to help slow the glacial advance.
His message, dubbed the Hamaker Thesis, was that due to modern agricultural and agro-forestry practices, the soils were running out of minerals, causing the dying and burning of forests worldwide and nutrient deficiencies in food.
The book and its message was well received by soil and nutritional scientists and regarded as a blueprint for restoring the planet's ecological integrity by the worldwide remineralization movement.
When mixed with compost, the dust created rich, deep soils which could produce high growth vegetation free from pests and predators, at an accelerated rate.
Hamaker explained the 100,000-year cycle of major ice ages by postulating that the greenhouse effect takes place mainly in the tropics, which receives the most sun, instead of in polar regions.
Hamaker also believed that increased tectonic activity occurring with snow and ice buildup, could heat up tropical oceans through sea floor volcanism, and in addition to the intensified greenhouse effect, be a prime cause of the El Nino phenomenon.
In 1983, Nicholas Shackleton and other UK scientists published an article in Nature which stated that the last glacial period began when the CO2 in the atmosphere reached about 290ppm, and that the world was already ahead of that figure at a critical 343-345 ppm.
He was citing Sir George Simpson's 1938 analysis on ice ages[34] and later commentary by Richard Somerville and Lorraine Remer of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in their article in the Journal of Geophysical Research: "It's that cloud that you have to worry about because it's reflecting 80% of the sun's energy back into space and it's never becoming effective in warming the Earth.
Remineralize the Earth began promoting the regeneration of soils and forests worldwide with finely ground rock dust as a sustainable alternative to chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
In Campe's letter to Newsweek magazine in October 2006, she warned that global warming could trigger an ice age[44] and that soil remineralization and reforestation were the solutions.
In 2009, the Global Coral Reef Alliance invited RTE to produce a chapter for the DVD ROM book The Green Disk: New Technologies for A New World, being distributed to all U.N. delegates at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen during December 2009.
[56] But the SEER centre has been frustrated in their hopes to provide scientific proof of their claims for higher yields and enriched crops, through the use of rock dust.
Their 3-year flagship research programme with Glasgow University (2009) found that rock dust made no difference to crop yield or nutrient-content in the test conditions.
Weaver considered Hamaker a broad synthesist in the fields of ecology and climate, who recognized how the forests and the trees integrated with the whole biological-tectonic-climatic Earth system.
Weaver explained that Hamaker was convinced that humanity was rushing into the next glacial period due to carbon dioxide build-up after the normal interglacial soil demineralization and retrogressive vegetational succession, as summarized by Johannes Iversen and Svend Andersen, state geologists from Denmark in the book The Holocene by Neil Roberts.
[citation needed] In the 1980s, a contemporary of Hamaker, Alden Bryant,[70][71] founded a campaign organization called Earth Regeneration Society with former IBM engineer Fred Wood, Barbara Logan and others, advocating global soil remineralization, reforestation, carbon dioxide reduction and a new energy movement.
[76] In the late 1980s, Peter von Fragstein of the University of Kassel, Germany, began researching remineralization with many different rock types as a slow-release fertilizer and to deter insects.
Hamaker's research also complemented work by Bill Mollison[77] on permaculture, John Jeavons[78] and Masanobu Fukuoka on sustainable organiculture, Emilia Hazelip on synergistic agriculture and Rudolf Steiner on biodynamic farming.
It further brought interest from science writer Philip Callaghan[79] who developed the rock dusting theme in his work on paramagnetism, a field related to radionics, biophotonics, bio-energetics, bio-resonance, Schumann waves, magnetometeorology and subtle energy.
In 2005, Allan Yeomans documented in Priority One, the potential to bring atmospheric carbon to pre-industrial levels within 5 years, through remineralization of the world's agricultural lands.
The group confirmed that a branch of geology called agrogeology, originating at the University of Guelph, was evolving, since Von Straaten published the book Agrogeology: The Use of Rocks for Crops and Rivera produced the book and video, Manual Práctico ABC de la Agricultura Orgánica y Harina de Rocas,[91] which described how to regenerate overcultivated soils with rock dust.
[93] Hamaker conducted the groundwork for a mass movement of people concerned about the health of the world's soils, sustainable forests, climate change and improved nutrition from food.
More than a mini ice age in 2013–2041, Hamaker's immediate concern was the shortening of the growing season from the coming glacial period, which he believed could be forestalled through rock dusting, resulting in more abundant yields at harvest.
He believed the coming glacial period would preceded by an interglacial-to-glacial transition phase already underway since the 1970s, and strongly advocated an intensive global co-operative soil remineralization effort to maintain the quantity of food while improving its quality.
To achieve this, he recommended simultaneous remineralization of dying forests and soils, also needed to grow bio-fuels, as part of a goal to return excessive carbon dioxide to stable interglacial levels of 280 ppm.