Our civilization depends on the soil more crucially than ever, because our
numbers have grown while available soil resources have diminished and deteriorated.
Paradoxically, however, even as our dependence on the soil has
increased, most of us have become physically and emotionally detached from
it. The majority of the people in the so-called “developed” countries spend
their lives in the artificial environment of a city, insulated from direct exposure
to nature. Many children now assume as a matter of course that food originates
in supermarkets.
Detachment has bred ignorance, and out of ignorance has come the arrogant
delusion that our civilization has risen above nature and has set itself free
of its constraints. Agriculture and food security, erosion and salination, degradation
of natural ecosystems, depletion and pollution of surface waters and
aquifers, and decimation of biodiversity — all these processes, which involve
the soil directly or indirectly, have become mere abstractions to most people.
The very language we use betrays disdain for that common material underfoot,
often referred to as “dirt.” Some fastidious parents prohibit their children
from playing in the mud and rush to wash their “soiled” hands when the
children nonetheless obey an innate instinct to do so. Thus is devalued and
treated as unclean what is in fact the terrestrial realm’s principal medium of
purification, wherein wastes are decomposed and nature’s productivity is continually
rejuvenated.
Scientists who observe the soil discern a seething foundry in which matter
and energy are in constant flux. Radiant energy from the sun streams onto the
field and cascades through the soil and the plants growing in it. Heat is
exchanged, rainwater percolates in the intricate passages of the soil, plant
roots suck up that water and transmit it to their leaves, which transpire it back
to the atmosphere. The leaves absorb carbon dioxide from the air and synthesize
it with soil-derived water to form the primary compounds of life: carbohydrates,
fats, proteins, and numerous other compounds (many of which
provide medicinal as well as nutritional value). Oxygen emitted by the leaves
makes the air breathable for animals, which feed on and in turn fertilize the
plants.
The soil is thus a self-regulating biophysical factory, utilizing its own materials,
water, and solar energy. It also determines the fate of rainfall and snowfall
reaching the ground surface — whether the water thus received will flow
over the land as runoff or seep downward to the subterranean reservoir called
groundwater, which in turn maintains the steady flow of springs and streams.
With its finite capacity to absorb and store moisture, the soil regulates all of
these phenomena. Without the soil as a buffer, rain falling over the continents
would run off immediately, producing violent floods rather than sustained
stream flow.
The soil naturally acts as a living filter in which pathogens and toxins that
might otherwise accumulate to foul the terrestrial environment are rendered
harmless and transmuted into nutrients. Since time immemorial, humans and
other animals have been dying of all manner of diseases and have then been
buried in the soil, yet no major disease is transmitted by it. The term antibiotic
was coined by soil microbiologists, who, as a consequence of their studies of
soil bacteria and actinomycetes, discovered streptomycin (an important cure
for tuberculosis and other infections). Ion exchange, a useful process of water