What the Soil Knows

The soil is a long continuum, a multi-hued fabric clothing landscapes planet-wide. Not only does the soil traverse space, it connects also across time; in all terrestrial ecosystems, soil has been there from their origins, evolving slowly in response to happenings there. The soil thus knows, for example, the land’s successive plant communities, the winds and waters that reshaped its surface, the grazing animals and teeming microbes long decayed. And patiently, surreptitiously, it has recorded human insults and kindnesses upon it. The soil therefore is a repository of lands’ long-unfolding narratives – stories that, if we might read them, and heed them, can help us decipher what has come before, and more crucially, offer inklings of how we might yet learn to live more harmoniously with the land community. The soil is old and wise; it is a registry of what has worked well in the past; a seedbed of what is yet to be. But who will hear these narratives? And who will find the words to tell them? Such story-listening and story-telling must be a community venture, enfolding artists and scientists, gardeners and naturalists, farmers and urbanites, old and young. Crucially, the community must include Indigenous people, for they have lived the longest with the soil and listened to its stories buried deepest in time. Reading soils’ narratives is no easy task for us, now mostly disconnected from the land; but navigating with foresight the perils of an eroding biosphere may depend on our re-acquiring that artful skill.

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