It Takes A Village To Make A Healthy Soil

Annie Leonard & Tom Newmark say, "The Story of Soil Is The Story Of All Of Us" (22 April 2019, yes! yesmagazine.org). They are talking Science – isn't that talking Bible too?! 

In Genesis 1, NRSV, God made humankind in his image and likeness, Adam and Eve, and allowed them to "have dominion over" the fish, birds, cattle, wild animals, "every creeping thing" – that is why it was called the Garden of Eden, or Paradise. But they took God's word literally, and did not allow the soil to multiply itself by itself! So, poor banished children of Adam and Eve, we lost Paradise because we failed to learn conservation.

Ms Annie and Mr Newmark quote Wendell Berry as saying that the soil is "the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all." They say:

Ninety-five percent of our food is grown in it, it stores and filters our water and provides a home for the majority of life on the planet, and yet most of us rarely pay much attention to it. We dump poisonous chemicals on it, inject it with synthetic nutrients, slash it with plows, strip it of its natural diversity, and bury our trash in it.

Brilliantly, if not intentionally, in those 65 words, the female and male authors have summarized modern agriculture.

The soil grows 95% of our food, but we poison it, inject bad nutrients into it, ravage it with our plows, replace biodiversity with single crops, and poison it with our trash.

When did it occur, that change from Nurture to Vulture? Ms Annie & Mr Newmark say it could have been when humans invented Agriculture, or at "the Age of Enlightenment, when Nature became viewed as an object to be observed and controlled." Personally, I think the break from Nature began when Adam, not Eve, began to think Science over Nature. Adam had to investigate all things, to prove a hypothesis or pursue an assertion. Too intelligent for Paradise.

Today, even as Adams or Eves are doing Science, the Earth is prevented from doing its work naturally!

Ms Annie & Mr Newmark say when you promote soil health, you also promote community health. And when we nourish the very soil that continues to nourish us, we also nourish our village.

Why is plowing the field bad? The authors say when you expose the microorganisms that cause organic decay and expose all that life to oxygen and sunlight, when it rains, the good nutrients run off with the water.

Ms Annie & Mr Newmark say there should be permanent ground cover where we grow our crops to "optimize solar cycles and carbon capture" just as forests do.

Separately, Ms Annie says composting is the magic wand (my view) for turning organic waste into organic fertilizer; this is a practice that benefits the community – the village gets clean, and the soil gets dirty with rich, natural materials as healthy food for the crops and, ultimately, the humans.

We humans poison ourselves when we poison the soil where we grow our food.517