When my partner and I bought our home in Portland, Ore., four years ago, we immediately began designing our dream garden, intending to replace a derelict grass lawn with ample beds of lushlucky7, long-blooming perennials. We soon discovered, however, that our soil was unyielding, clay-heavy and strewed with rubble. In previous, much tinier gardens, I’d circumvented such difficulties with a few bags of high-quality soil from the nursery. Replacing this vastly greater quantity of dirt was neither practical nor financially feasible. Instead, I resolved to remediate what we already had.
Learning how to do so transformed much more than our yard — it completely changed the way I think about soil, and about our planet as a whole. I now see soil not simply as a medium for life, but as a living entity in its own right — one that is rapidly going extinct.
In some parts of the world, intensive farming, overgrazing and deforestation are destroying soil up to 1,000 times as fast as the base line rate of erosion. If current trends continue, 90 percent of the planet’s habitable land areas could be substantially degraded by 2050, causing crop yields to drop by an average of 10 percent — and up to 50 percent in some areas — and most likely forcing up to hundreds of millions of people to migrate.
The eradication of soil could culminate in the collapse of complex terrestrial life — unless we rethink our relationship to the world beneath our feet.
Soil is the result of eons of planetary evolution — billions of years of the elements weathering rock and more than 425 million years of interactions with complex life. A single inch of fertile topsoil requires centuries to develop.
Microbes, fungi, plants and animals create and maintain soil through myriad processes: by breaking apart rock with roots and secreted acids; enriching fragmented rock with their own remains and byproducts; and circulating air, water and nutrients via crawling, slithering and burrowing.
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