DOWN to EARTH
We treat soil like dirt. We poison it with heavy metals, strip it of life with herbicides and over-fertilise it with artificial nitrogen. We harm it by growing only single crops, hurt it through overgrazing and seem happy to watch it disappear before our eyes as man-made erosion blows or washes it away. We even degrade it with our language; to “soil oneself” is not to get one’s hands a little dirty planting begonias or digging new potatoes.
Yet soil is the stuff of life. This thin, magical layer is what sustains all life, protects us and heals us. It could just be the most important thing on the entire planet. Which begs the question: why do we ignore it at best, and pollute or destroy it at worst? Well, as flippant as it sounds, the good earth is in need of a good PR man.
A teaspoon of healthy soil holds more living things than there are human beings, from nematodes to fungi to multitudes of bacteria. It is like a hidden universe.
“Let’s face it, soil has an image problem,” says Matthew Evans, an Australian farmer, chef, food activist and author of a new book on the marvels of the stuff that lies beneath our feet. “[Soil] doesn’t speak. It doesn’t give us visceral pleasure like a forest or a waterfall,” he writes in Soil: The incredible story of what keeps the earth, and us, healthy. “It isn’t poetic. It’s the stuff we’ve wiped our collective feet on for a couple of thousand years, and often – to our detriment – ignored.”
We have been disregarding, perhaps even disdaining, something that is not sterile or dead, but something unique, and something positively heaving with life –
