Soil as an Organism
Brenda Cooper
2014-04-14 00:00:00
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The desert near my parent’s home in Mesa, Arizona can do well with very little water while parched farmland turns into a spiderweb of empty cracks with the same amount of rainfall. 

As the climate changes, soil changes. When the balance transforms dramatically, we can get flood or drought, and the soil – described by the World Wildlife foundation as, “the fragile skin of the Earth,” can change consistency or place and richness. It can become incapable of sustaining the same life that it was once in balance with.

Soil is complex.  It’s made of eroded rocks, silt, sand, dead plants, living organisms, water and air.  Soil composition varies from place to place, but always the basic elements are in a dance and the points of balance matter.

This series is about gardening the Earth, and if there is anything gardeners know, it’s to tend to the soil.

The US Department of Natural Resources suggests that we change our way of thinking, and begin to treat soil as an organism, that we imagine it as something that can experience health and disease, as something that can be nurtured.  Something living.  This is directly in line with the concept of humans as caretakers of the environment.  So let’s explore some ways to do that:





Soil is critical.  So is learning more about the world we walk on.  Doing research for this blog series and general research on fracking, I’ve learned that there are living organisms far below the surface, some as far as two miles below the surface.

We know almost nothing about these organisms, but to me they seem to be yet more proof of the tenacity of life.  Perhaps they are the type of life that we will find on Mars some day, or even living on the moon.  Perhaps they perform functions we need in order to have the right balance in the soil on the slopes above our houses.

Climate change management is about the air that we breathe, but it’s also about water and land, about the soil on which we walk and on which we depend for food. It’s about the earth we live on, and the land that we don’t want to have thundering down onto our heads and turning our houses to splinters.



Links:

WWF Threats:  Soil Erosion and Degradation

USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service: Soils

Latest Aerial Imagery of the Oso Landslide, Seattle Times, April 1, 2014

Ecologists turn to planned grazing to revive grassland soil: the Salt: NPR, August 5th, 2013, by Luke Runyon

Soil as Carbon Storehouse:  New weapon in Climate Fight?, Yale Environment 360, March 2014, by Judith D. Schwartz

Forterra

Designing for the sixth extinction, Project 2013, by Alexandra Daily Ginsberg

Learning from my soil: the 2014 garden dialogue, Resilience, February 25th, 2014, by Claire Schosser

What lies beneath: Tiny organism thrive below Earth’s surface, Livescience, December 29, 2013, by Tia Ghose




Images:

http://blogmidwestlabs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/soil12.jpg