Soil salinity is a major threat to the sustainability of agricultural production systems and has defeated civilisations whenever the cost of remediation exceeded the benefits. Among the reasons for this is the complexity of the plant-water-soil nexus and that the causes of salinity are often separated from the damage in time and space. a more concerted effort, perhaps initiated by a philanthropist, is needed to show merchants and agencies how a range of payments for ecosystem services can be turned into true markets in an aggregate way so the ‘knowledge of what can be done can be transformed into benefit’.