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By Sonya Patel Ellis
‘The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks’ penned Tennessee Williams in the conclusion of his phantasmagorical drama Camino Real (1953), a line that struck me at the height of the epidemic and through the cynical political chaos of the past few years as a hopeful metaphor for love, kindness, beauty and nature conquering all.
Into the pedosphere - Greek πέδον pedon “soil” or “earth” and σφαΐρα sphaira “sphere”.
Can plants break rock? Indeed they can, as part of the billions of years old process of mechanical weathering (the physical cracking of rocks and minerals) and chemical weathering (the chemical decomposition or dissolution of them) through plant root growth and plant acids as well as water and wind abrasion, ice wedging, pressure release, changes in temperature, hydrolysis, oxidation and carbonation.
Once a rock has been broken down, the process of erosion transports bits of its compositional minerals away, freeing them to combine with plants, animal remains, fungi, bacteria and other organisms to create soil – the pedosphere or mantle of Mother Earth. No rock is hard enough to resist the forces of weathering and erosion. In fact whole continents have been largely shaped this way, as have many of the world’s most extraordinary natural wonders – the Grand Canyon for example – some hundreds of millions of years ago. In direct correlation, some of the planet’s most ancient soil harks back to these times too.
The point at which I learned how long it takes the red-brown, plant-nurturing iteration of soil we are familiar with today to form was a real awe-inspired moment for me, not only in the way in which I now view the dirt beneath my feet but also the added layer of complexity and marvel it brings to the study of plants. Although clay-rich primeval soil developed soon after the formation of Earth around 4.6 billion years ago, scientists now believe that it was not until over 450 million years ago, during the Ordovician period, that soil fertility became a factor, the magic formula involving the first terrestrial plants, aided by fungal mycorrhizae in their roots, rapidly sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Plants then converted the CO2 into glucose and oxygen via the similarly mind-blowing process of photosynthesis, while mycorrhizae exchanged moisture and mineral nutrients they had gathered from the soil for carbon by way of plant sugars. The first plants also gave back to soil in the form of humus, the dark organic upper layer produced by the microbial decomposition of vegetable and animal matter. Ancestral earthworms – thought to trace their evolution back some 200 million years and now standing at over 6,000 species spread across every continent except Antarctica – along with other above-and-below-ground organisms and creatures then helped till the earth, improving aggregation and porosity. All in all, a symbiotic win-win for plant and fungal growth, soil health, carbon sequestration and the support of numerous other life forms on Earth, including we humans.
Thanks to the relatively young study of soil science we now know that, under natural conditions, it can take up to 1,000 years to make just 2.5cm (1-inch) of topsoil – the upper layer of soil that contains the most organic matter and microorganisms – the exact rate being dependent on factors such as parent material, climate, topography, living organisms and time attributed to weathering. A stop-in-your-tracks fact when you consider how nonchalantly we brush dirt off our shoes or excavate large tracts of it to build our metropolises.
Some of the most ancient known soil is thought to date back to 3.7 billion years ago, found in a metamorphic rock formation in southwestern Greenland when it was exposed beneath a retreating ice cap. Similarly ancient soil has also been located in parts of the African continent, considered to be relatively tectonically stable through geologic time.
The most ancient soil doesn’t equate with the most fertile soil, however. Soil this old doesn’t have the necessary composition of air, water, minerals and organic matter to support plant life. Fertile soil teems with essential nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (primary macronutrients known as NPK), calcium, magnesium and sulphur (secondary macronutrients) and iron, manganese, zinc, copper, boron, molybdenum, chlorine and nickel (micronutrients or trace nutrients) plus the non-mineral elements of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.
The process by which it collects all these elements together often involves the large-scale transference of sediment and organic matter hence why some of the most fertile soil throughout history is found in or around river basins and floodplains, or on a substrate known as loess formed by the accumulation of wind-blown dust or by the grinding and melting action of glaciers from the last Ice Age.
It’s no coincidence then that the great plains of the American Midwest, Eastern Europe, northern China and the Argentine Pampas form the backbone of the world’s agricultural production where loess blankets the continental bedrock in some places hundreds of metres thick and thousands of years of natural grassland have contributed to the organic content; the soil here is known as mollisol and covers just 7 per cent of the world’s ice-free land.
Or that the ‘cradle of civilisation’ was seeded and grew to fruition in the quarter-moon-shaped ‘Fertile Crescent’ of the Middle East, fed as it was by the Tigris, Euphrates and Nile Rivers. Although situated in a dry, arid region, the irrigation provided by these vital water sources via natural annual flooding and manmade ingenuity helped to water crops and initially improve the soil with mineral-rich silt.
Fertile Crescent peoples developed farming and herding, domesticating wild wheat and barley and peas, and rearing sheep, goats, pigs and cows, some of the world’s staple crops and livestock to this day. With increased agriculture came an explosion in population and food surpluses to feed non-farming societal strata: metal workers, scribes, accountants and politicians. And so it went on until the present day.
What our ancient ancestors, or indeed modern science until relatively recently, didn’t fully understand, is that without consistent regeneration, the fertility, health and ecological function of soil will eventually be depleted. Too much of one mineral – an overload of salt in the Nile Delta region for instance – and many plants including key crops cannot survive. Too little organic matter due to soil disturbance, deforestation, monoculture, erosion or climate change and soil’s essential structure and ecosystem can be invariably destroyed. And too blatant a disregard for the immense biodiversity of living organisms that create healthy soil – vertebrates, invertebrates, bacteria, fungi, lichens and plants – and the whole thing will quite literally turn to dust.
Soil is not infinite, as many civilisations have found as they literally ploughed themselves out of existence. This includes such soil-related crises as the Dust Bowl of the American and Canadian prairies in the 1930s where a failure to employ dry and farming practices to prevent wind erosion is attributed as a major cause of the drought-related ecological, agricultural and economic devastation that followed. Or soil depletion in Africa where reports show that up to 40 per cent of soils are suffering from some sort of soil degradation including erosion, desertification and loss of nutrients.
If we continue to harvest more nutrients than we replace it will take hundreds of years to restore. With the world population currently standing at 7.8 billion and set to rise to what is thought to be its capacity – 10 billion – by 2050 in regards to the Earth’s natural resources, we need to collectively start nurturing and replenishing our soil before it runs out so it continues to give back.
‘The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks’ penned Tennessee Williams in the conclusion of his phantasmagorical drama Camino Real (1953), a line that struck me at the height of the epidemic and through the cynical political chaos of the past few years as a hopeful metaphor for love, kindness, beauty and nature conquering all.
Into the pedosphere - Greek πέδον pedon “soil” or “earth” and σφαΐρα sphaira “sphere”.
Can plants break rock? Indeed they can, as part of the billions of years old process of mechanical weathering (the physical cracking of rocks and minerals) and chemical weathering (the chemical decomposition or dissolution of them) through plant root growth and plant acids as well as water and wind abrasion, ice wedging, pressure release, changes in temperature, hydrolysis, oxidation and carbonation.
Once a rock has been broken down, the process of erosion transports bits of its compositional minerals away, freeing them to combine with plants, animal remains, fungi, bacteria and other organisms to create soil – the pedosphere or mantle of Mother Earth. No rock is hard enough to resist the forces of weathering and erosion. In fact whole continents have been largely shaped this way, as have many of the world’s most extraordinary natural wonders – the Grand Canyon for example – some hundreds of millions of years ago. In direct correlation, some of the planet’s most ancient soil harks back to these times too.
The point at which I learned how long it takes the red-brown, plant-nurturing iteration of soil we are familiar with today to form was a real awe-inspired moment for me, not only in the way in which I now view the dirt beneath my feet but also the added layer of complexity and marvel it brings to the study of plants. Although clay-rich primeval soil developed soon after the formation of Earth around 4.6 billion years ago, scientists now believe that it was not until over 450 million years ago, during the Ordovician period, that soil fertility became a factor, the magic formula involving the first terrestrial plants, aided by fungal mycorrhizae in their roots, rapidly sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Plants then converted the CO2 into glucose and oxygen via the similarly mind-blowing process of photosynthesis, while mycorrhizae exchanged moisture and mineral nutrients they had gathered from the soil for carbon by way of plant sugars. The first plants also gave back to soil in the form of humus, the dark organic upper layer produced by the microbial decomposition of vegetable and animal matter. Ancestral earthworms – thought to trace their evolution back some 200 million years and now standing at over 6,000 species spread across every continent except Antarctica – along with other above-and-below-ground organisms and creatures then helped till the earth, improving aggregation and porosity. All in all, a symbiotic win-win for plant and fungal growth, soil health, carbon sequestration and the support of numerous other life forms on Earth, including we humans.
Thanks to the relatively young study of soil science we now know that, under natural conditions, it can take up to 1,000 years to make just 2.5cm (1-inch) of topsoil – the upper layer of soil that contains the most organic matter and microorganisms – the exact rate being dependent on factors such as parent material, climate, topography, living organisms and time attributed to weathering. A stop-in-your-tracks fact when you consider how nonchalantly we brush dirt off our shoes or excavate large tracts of it to build our metropolises.
Some of the most ancient known soil is thought to date back to 3.7 billion years ago, found in a metamorphic rock formation in southwestern Greenland when it was exposed beneath a retreating ice cap. Similarly ancient soil has also been located in parts of the African continent, considered to be relatively tectonically stable through geologic time.
The most ancient soil doesn’t equate with the most fertile soil, however. Soil this old doesn’t have the necessary composition of air, water, minerals and organic matter to support plant life. Fertile soil teems with essential nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (primary macronutrients known as NPK), calcium, magnesium and sulphur (secondary macronutrients) and iron, manganese, zinc, copper, boron, molybdenum, chlorine and nickel (micronutrients or trace nutrients) plus the non-mineral elements of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.
The process by which it collects all these elements together often involves the large-scale transference of sediment and organic matter hence why some of the most fertile soil throughout history is found in or around river basins and floodplains, or on a substrate known as loess formed by the accumulation of wind-blown dust or by the grinding and melting action of glaciers from the last Ice Age.
It’s no coincidence then that the great plains of the American Midwest, Eastern Europe, northern China and the Argentine Pampas form the backbone of the world’s agricultural production where loess blankets the continental bedrock in some places hundreds of metres thick and thousands of years of natural grassland have contributed to the organic content; the soil here is known as mollisol and covers just 7 per cent of the world’s ice-free land.
Or that the ‘cradle of civilisation’ was seeded and grew to fruition in the quarter-moon-shaped ‘Fertile Crescent’ of the Middle East, fed as it was by the Tigris, Euphrates and Nile Rivers. Although situated in a dry, arid region, the irrigation provided by these vital water sources via natural annual flooding and manmade ingenuity helped to water crops and initially improve the soil with mineral-rich silt.
Fertile Crescent peoples developed farming and herding, domesticating wild wheat and barley and peas, and rearing sheep, goats, pigs and cows, some of the world’s staple crops and livestock to this day. With increased agriculture came an explosion in population and food surpluses to feed non-farming societal strata: metal workers, scribes, accountants and politicians. And so it went on until the present day.
What our ancient ancestors, or indeed modern science until relatively recently, didn’t fully understand, is that without consistent regeneration, the fertility, health and ecological function of soil will eventually be depleted. Too much of one mineral – an overload of salt in the Nile Delta region for instance – and many plants including key crops cannot survive. Too little organic matter due to soil disturbance, deforestation, monoculture, erosion or climate change and soil’s essential structure and ecosystem can be invariably destroyed. And too blatant a disregard for the immense biodiversity of living organisms that create healthy soil – vertebrates, invertebrates, bacteria, fungi, lichens and plants – and the whole thing will quite literally turn to dust.
Soil is not infinite, as many civilisations have found as they literally ploughed themselves out of existence. This includes such soil-related crises as the Dust Bowl of the American and Canadian prairies in the 1930s where a failure to employ dry and farming practices to prevent wind erosion is attributed as a major cause of the drought-related ecological, agricultural and economic devastation that followed. Or soil depletion in Africa where reports show that up to 40 per cent of soils are suffering from some sort of soil degradation including erosion, desertification and loss of nutrients.
If we continue to harvest more nutrients than we replace it will take hundreds of years to restore. With the world population currently standing at 7.8 billion and set to rise to what is thought to be its capacity – 10 billion – by 2050 in regards to the Earth’s natural resources, we need to collectively start nurturing and replenishing our soil before it runs out so it continues to give back.
Sonya Patel Ellis is a writer, editor and artist exploring the interconnectedness between plants and people and author of The Botanical Bible, The Heritage Herbal and The Garden Birdwatchers Bible.
By Sonya Patel Ellis
‘The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks’ penned Tennessee Williams in the conclusion of his phantasmagorical drama Camino Real (1953), a line that struck me at the height of the epidemic and through the cynical political chaos of the past few years as a hopeful metaphor for love, kindness, beauty and nature conquering all.
Into the pedosphere - Greek πέδον pedon “soil” or “earth” and σφαΐρα sphaira “sphere”.
Can plants break rock? Indeed they can, as part of the billions of years old process of mechanical weathering (the physical cracking of rocks and minerals) and chemical weathering (the chemical decomposition or dissolution of them) through plant root growth and plant acids as well as water and wind abrasion, ice wedging, pressure release, changes in temperature, hydrolysis, oxidation and carbonation.
Once a rock has been broken down, the process of erosion transports bits of its compositional minerals away, freeing them to combine with plants, animal remains, fungi, bacteria and other organisms to create soil – the pedosphere or mantle of Mother Earth. No rock is hard enough to resist the forces of weathering and erosion. In fact whole continents have been largely shaped this way, as have many of the world’s most extraordinary natural wonders – the Grand Canyon for example – some hundreds of millions of years ago. In direct correlation, some of the planet’s most ancient soil harks back to these times too.
The point at which I learned how long it takes the red-brown, plant-nurturing iteration of soil we are familiar with today to form was a real awe-inspired moment for me, not only in the way in which I now view the dirt beneath my feet but also the added layer of complexity and marvel it brings to the study of plants. Although clay-rich primeval soil developed soon after the formation of Earth around 4.6 billion years ago, scientists now believe that it was not until over 450 million years ago, during the Ordovician period, that soil fertility became a factor, the magic formula involving the first terrestrial plants, aided by fungal mycorrhizae in their roots, rapidly sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Plants then converted the CO2 into glucose and oxygen via the similarly mind-blowing process of photosynthesis, while mycorrhizae exchanged moisture and mineral nutrients they had gathered from the soil for carbon by way of plant sugars. The first plants also gave back to soil in the form of humus, the dark organic upper layer produced by the microbial decomposition of vegetable and animal matter. Ancestral earthworms – thought to trace their evolution back some 200 million years and now standing at over 6,000 species spread across every continent except Antarctica – along with other above-and-below-ground organisms and creatures then helped till the earth, improving aggregation and porosity. All in all, a symbiotic win-win for plant and fungal growth, soil health, carbon sequestration and the support of numerous other life forms on Earth, including we humans.
Thanks to the relatively young study of soil science we now know that, under natural conditions, it can take up to 1,000 years to make just 2.5cm (1-inch) of topsoil – the upper layer of soil that contains the most organic matter and microorganisms – the exact rate being dependent on factors such as parent material, climate, topography, living organisms and time attributed to weathering. A stop-in-your-tracks fact when you consider how nonchalantly we brush dirt off our shoes or excavate large tracts of it to build our metropolises.
Some of the most ancient known soil is thought to date back to 3.7 billion years ago, found in a metamorphic rock formation in southwestern Greenland when it was exposed beneath a retreating ice cap. Similarly ancient soil has also been located in parts of the African continent, considered to be relatively tectonically stable through geologic time.
The most ancient soil doesn’t equate with the most fertile soil, however. Soil this old doesn’t have the necessary composition of air, water, minerals and organic matter to support plant life. Fertile soil teems with essential nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (primary macronutrients known as NPK), calcium, magnesium and sulphur (secondary macronutrients) and iron, manganese, zinc, copper, boron, molybdenum, chlorine and nickel (micronutrients or trace nutrients) plus the non-mineral elements of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.
The process by which it collects all these elements together often involves the large-scale transference of sediment and organic matter hence why some of the most fertile soil throughout history is found in or around river basins and floodplains, or on a substrate known as loess formed by the accumulation of wind-blown dust or by the grinding and melting action of glaciers from the last Ice Age.
It’s no coincidence then that the great plains of the American Midwest, Eastern Europe, northern China and the Argentine Pampas form the backbone of the world’s agricultural production where loess blankets the continental bedrock in some places hundreds of metres thick and thousands of years of natural grassland have contributed to the organic content; the soil here is known as mollisol and covers just 7 per cent of the world’s ice-free land.
Or that the ‘cradle of civilisation’ was seeded and grew to fruition in the quarter-moon-shaped ‘Fertile Crescent’ of the Middle East, fed as it was by the Tigris, Euphrates and Nile Rivers. Although situated in a dry, arid region, the irrigation provided by these vital water sources via natural annual flooding and manmade ingenuity helped to water crops and initially improve the soil with mineral-rich silt.
Fertile Crescent peoples developed farming and herding, domesticating wild wheat and barley and peas, and rearing sheep, goats, pigs and cows, some of the world’s staple crops and livestock to this day. With increased agriculture came an explosion in population and food surpluses to feed non-farming societal strata: metal workers, scribes, accountants and politicians. And so it went on until the present day.
What our ancient ancestors, or indeed modern science until relatively recently, didn’t fully understand, is that without consistent regeneration, the fertility, health and ecological function of soil will eventually be depleted. Too much of one mineral – an overload of salt in the Nile Delta region for instance – and many plants including key crops cannot survive. Too little organic matter due to soil disturbance, deforestation, monoculture, erosion or climate change and soil’s essential structure and ecosystem can be invariably destroyed. And too blatant a disregard for the immense biodiversity of living organisms that create healthy soil – vertebrates, invertebrates, bacteria, fungi, lichens and plants – and the whole thing will quite literally turn to dust.
Soil is not infinite, as many civilisations have found as they literally ploughed themselves out of existence. This includes such soil-related crises as the Dust Bowl of the American and Canadian prairies in the 1930s where a failure to employ dry and farming practices to prevent wind erosion is attributed as a major cause of the drought-related ecological, agricultural and economic devastation that followed. Or soil depletion in Africa where reports show that up to 40 per cent of soils are suffering from some sort of soil degradation including erosion, desertification and loss of nutrients.
If we continue to harvest more nutrients than we replace it will take hundreds of years to restore. With the world population currently standing at 7.8 billion and set to rise to what is thought to be its capacity – 10 billion – by 2050 in regards to the Earth’s natural resources, we need to collectively start nurturing and replenishing our soil before it runs out so it continues to give back.
‘The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks’ penned Tennessee Williams in the conclusion of his phantasmagorical drama Camino Real (1953), a line that struck me at the height of the epidemic and through the cynical political chaos of the past few years as a hopeful metaphor for love, kindness, beauty and nature conquering all.
Into the pedosphere - Greek πέδον pedon “soil” or “earth” and σφαΐρα sphaira “sphere”.
Can plants break rock? Indeed they can, as part of the billions of years old process of mechanical weathering (the physical cracking of rocks and minerals) and chemical weathering (the chemical decomposition or dissolution of them) through plant root growth and plant acids as well as water and wind abrasion, ice wedging, pressure release, changes in temperature, hydrolysis, oxidation and carbonation.
Once a rock has been broken down, the process of erosion transports bits of its compositional minerals away, freeing them to combine with plants, animal remains, fungi, bacteria and other organisms to create soil – the pedosphere or mantle of Mother Earth. No rock is hard enough to resist the forces of weathering and erosion. In fact whole continents have been largely shaped this way, as have many of the world’s most extraordinary natural wonders – the Grand Canyon for example – some hundreds of millions of years ago. In direct correlation, some of the planet’s most ancient soil harks back to these times too.
The point at which I learned how long it takes the red-brown, plant-nurturing iteration of soil we are familiar with today to form was a real awe-inspired moment for me, not only in the way in which I now view the dirt beneath my feet but also the added layer of complexity and marvel it brings to the study of plants. Although clay-rich primeval soil developed soon after the formation of Earth around 4.6 billion years ago, scientists now believe that it was not until over 450 million years ago, during the Ordovician period, that soil fertility became a factor, the magic formula involving the first terrestrial plants, aided by fungal mycorrhizae in their roots, rapidly sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Plants then converted the CO2 into glucose and oxygen via the similarly mind-blowing process of photosynthesis, while mycorrhizae exchanged moisture and mineral nutrients they had gathered from the soil for carbon by way of plant sugars. The first plants also gave back to soil in the form of humus, the dark organic upper layer produced by the microbial decomposition of vegetable and animal matter. Ancestral earthworms – thought to trace their evolution back some 200 million years and now standing at over 6,000 species spread across every continent except Antarctica – along with other above-and-below-ground organisms and creatures then helped till the earth, improving aggregation and porosity. All in all, a symbiotic win-win for plant and fungal growth, soil health, carbon sequestration and the support of numerous other life forms on Earth, including we humans.
Thanks to the relatively young study of soil science we now know that, under natural conditions, it can take up to 1,000 years to make just 2.5cm (1-inch) of topsoil – the upper layer of soil that contains the most organic matter and microorganisms – the exact rate being dependent on factors such as parent material, climate, topography, living organisms and time attributed to weathering. A stop-in-your-tracks fact when you consider how nonchalantly we brush dirt off our shoes or excavate large tracts of it to build our metropolises.
Some of the most ancient known soil is thought to date back to 3.7 billion years ago, found in a metamorphic rock formation in southwestern Greenland when it was exposed beneath a retreating ice cap. Similarly ancient soil has also been located in parts of the African continent, considered to be relatively tectonically stable through geologic time.
The most ancient soil doesn’t equate with the most fertile soil, however. Soil this old doesn’t have the necessary composition of air, water, minerals and organic matter to support plant life. Fertile soil teems with essential nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (primary macronutrients known as NPK), calcium, magnesium and sulphur (secondary macronutrients) and iron, manganese, zinc, copper, boron, molybdenum, chlorine and nickel (micronutrients or trace nutrients) plus the non-mineral elements of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.
The process by which it collects all these elements together often involves the large-scale transference of sediment and organic matter hence why some of the most fertile soil throughout history is found in or around river basins and floodplains, or on a substrate known as loess formed by the accumulation of wind-blown dust or by the grinding and melting action of glaciers from the last Ice Age.
It’s no coincidence then that the great plains of the American Midwest, Eastern Europe, northern China and the Argentine Pampas form the backbone of the world’s agricultural production where loess blankets the continental bedrock in some places hundreds of metres thick and thousands of years of natural grassland have contributed to the organic content; the soil here is known as mollisol and covers just 7 per cent of the world’s ice-free land.
Or that the ‘cradle of civilisation’ was seeded and grew to fruition in the quarter-moon-shaped ‘Fertile Crescent’ of the Middle East, fed as it was by the Tigris, Euphrates and Nile Rivers. Although situated in a dry, arid region, the irrigation provided by these vital water sources via natural annual flooding and manmade ingenuity helped to water crops and initially improve the soil with mineral-rich silt.
Fertile Crescent peoples developed farming and herding, domesticating wild wheat and barley and peas, and rearing sheep, goats, pigs and cows, some of the world’s staple crops and livestock to this day. With increased agriculture came an explosion in population and food surpluses to feed non-farming societal strata: metal workers, scribes, accountants and politicians. And so it went on until the present day.
What our ancient ancestors, or indeed modern science until relatively recently, didn’t fully understand, is that without consistent regeneration, the fertility, health and ecological function of soil will eventually be depleted. Too much of one mineral – an overload of salt in the Nile Delta region for instance – and many plants including key crops cannot survive. Too little organic matter due to soil disturbance, deforestation, monoculture, erosion or climate change and soil’s essential structure and ecosystem can be invariably destroyed. And too blatant a disregard for the immense biodiversity of living organisms that create healthy soil – vertebrates, invertebrates, bacteria, fungi, lichens and plants – and the whole thing will quite literally turn to dust.
Soil is not infinite, as many civilisations have found as they literally ploughed themselves out of existence. This includes such soil-related crises as the Dust Bowl of the American and Canadian prairies in the 1930s where a failure to employ dry and farming practices to prevent wind erosion is attributed as a major cause of the drought-related ecological, agricultural and economic devastation that followed. Or soil depletion in Africa where reports show that up to 40 per cent of soils are suffering from some sort of soil degradation including erosion, desertification and loss of nutrients.
If we continue to harvest more nutrients than we replace it will take hundreds of years to restore. With the world population currently standing at 7.8 billion and set to rise to what is thought to be its capacity – 10 billion – by 2050 in regards to the Earth’s natural resources, we need to collectively start nurturing and replenishing our soil before it runs out so it continues to give back.
Sonya Patel Ellis is a writer, editor and artist exploring the interconnectedness between plants and people and author of The Botanical Bible, The Heritage Herbal and The Garden Birdwatchers Bible.
By Sonya Patel Ellis
‘The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks’ penned Tennessee Williams in the conclusion of his phantasmagorical drama Camino Real (1953), a line that struck me at the height of the epidemic and through the cynical political chaos of the past few years as a hopeful metaphor for love, kindness, beauty and nature conquering all.
Into the pedosphere - Greek πέδον pedon “soil” or “earth” and σφαΐρα sphaira “sphere”.
Can plants break rock? Indeed they can, as part of the billions of years old process of mechanical weathering (the physical cracking of rocks and minerals) and chemical weathering (the chemical decomposition or dissolution of them) through plant root growth and plant acids as well as water and wind abrasion, ice wedging, pressure release, changes in temperature, hydrolysis, oxidation and carbonation.
Once a rock has been broken down, the process of erosion transports bits of its compositional minerals away, freeing them to combine with plants, animal remains, fungi, bacteria and other organisms to create soil – the pedosphere or mantle of Mother Earth. No rock is hard enough to resist the forces of weathering and erosion. In fact whole continents have been largely shaped this way, as have many of the world’s most extraordinary natural wonders – the Grand Canyon for example – some hundreds of millions of years ago. In direct correlation, some of the planet’s most ancient soil harks back to these times too.
The point at which I learned how long it takes the red-brown, plant-nurturing iteration of soil we are familiar with today to form was a real awe-inspired moment for me, not only in the way in which I now view the dirt beneath my feet but also the added layer of complexity and marvel it brings to the study of plants. Although clay-rich primeval soil developed soon after the formation of Earth around 4.6 billion years ago, scientists now believe that it was not until over 450 million years ago, during the Ordovician period, that soil fertility became a factor, the magic formula involving the first terrestrial plants, aided by fungal mycorrhizae in their roots, rapidly sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Plants then converted the CO2 into glucose and oxygen via the similarly mind-blowing process of photosynthesis, while mycorrhizae exchanged moisture and mineral nutrients they had gathered from the soil for carbon by way of plant sugars. The first plants also gave back to soil in the form of humus, the dark organic upper layer produced by the microbial decomposition of vegetable and animal matter. Ancestral earthworms – thought to trace their evolution back some 200 million years and now standing at over 6,000 species spread across every continent except Antarctica – along with other above-and-below-ground organisms and creatures then helped till the earth, improving aggregation and porosity. All in all, a symbiotic win-win for plant and fungal growth, soil health, carbon sequestration and the support of numerous other life forms on Earth, including we humans.
Thanks to the relatively young study of soil science we now know that, under natural conditions, it can take up to 1,000 years to make just 2.5cm (1-inch) of topsoil – the upper layer of soil that contains the most organic matter and microorganisms – the exact rate being dependent on factors such as parent material, climate, topography, living organisms and time attributed to weathering. A stop-in-your-tracks fact when you consider how nonchalantly we brush dirt off our shoes or excavate large tracts of it to build our metropolises.
Some of the most ancient known soil is thought to date back to 3.7 billion years ago, found in a metamorphic rock formation in southwestern Greenland when it was exposed beneath a retreating ice cap. Similarly ancient soil has also been located in parts of the African continent, considered to be relatively tectonically stable through geologic time.
The most ancient soil doesn’t equate with the most fertile soil, however. Soil this old doesn’t have the necessary composition of air, water, minerals and organic matter to support plant life. Fertile soil teems with essential nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (primary macronutrients known as NPK), calcium, magnesium and sulphur (secondary macronutrients) and iron, manganese, zinc, copper, boron, molybdenum, chlorine and nickel (micronutrients or trace nutrients) plus the non-mineral elements of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.
The process by which it collects all these elements together often involves the large-scale transference of sediment and organic matter hence why some of the most fertile soil throughout history is found in or around river basins and floodplains, or on a substrate known as loess formed by the accumulation of wind-blown dust or by the grinding and melting action of glaciers from the last Ice Age.
It’s no coincidence then that the great plains of the American Midwest, Eastern Europe, northern China and the Argentine Pampas form the backbone of the world’s agricultural production where loess blankets the continental bedrock in some places hundreds of metres thick and thousands of years of natural grassland have contributed to the organic content; the soil here is known as mollisol and covers just 7 per cent of the world’s ice-free land.
Or that the ‘cradle of civilisation’ was seeded and grew to fruition in the quarter-moon-shaped ‘Fertile Crescent’ of the Middle East, fed as it was by the Tigris, Euphrates and Nile Rivers. Although situated in a dry, arid region, the irrigation provided by these vital water sources via natural annual flooding and manmade ingenuity helped to water crops and initially improve the soil with mineral-rich silt.
Fertile Crescent peoples developed farming and herding, domesticating wild wheat and barley and peas, and rearing sheep, goats, pigs and cows, some of the world’s staple crops and livestock to this day. With increased agriculture came an explosion in population and food surpluses to feed non-farming societal strata: metal workers, scribes, accountants and politicians. And so it went on until the present day.
What our ancient ancestors, or indeed modern science until relatively recently, didn’t fully understand, is that without consistent regeneration, the fertility, health and ecological function of soil will eventually be depleted. Too much of one mineral – an overload of salt in the Nile Delta region for instance – and many plants including key crops cannot survive. Too little organic matter due to soil disturbance, deforestation, monoculture, erosion or climate change and soil’s essential structure and ecosystem can be invariably destroyed. And too blatant a disregard for the immense biodiversity of living organisms that create healthy soil – vertebrates, invertebrates, bacteria, fungi, lichens and plants – and the whole thing will quite literally turn to dust.
Soil is not infinite, as many civilisations have found as they literally ploughed themselves out of existence. This includes such soil-related crises as the Dust Bowl of the American and Canadian prairies in the 1930s where a failure to employ dry and farming practices to prevent wind erosion is attributed as a major cause of the drought-related ecological, agricultural and economic devastation that followed. Or soil depletion in Africa where reports show that up to 40 per cent of soils are suffering from some sort of soil degradation including erosion, desertification and loss of nutrients.
If we continue to harvest more nutrients than we replace it will take hundreds of years to restore. With the world population currently standing at 7.8 billion and set to rise to what is thought to be its capacity – 10 billion – by 2050 in regards to the Earth’s natural resources, we need to collectively start nurturing and replenishing our soil before it runs out so it continues to give back.
‘The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks’ penned Tennessee Williams in the conclusion of his phantasmagorical drama Camino Real (1953), a line that struck me at the height of the epidemic and through the cynical political chaos of the past few years as a hopeful metaphor for love, kindness, beauty and nature conquering all.
Into the pedosphere - Greek πέδον pedon “soil” or “earth” and σφαΐρα sphaira “sphere”.
Can plants break rock? Indeed they can, as part of the billions of years old process of mechanical weathering (the physical cracking of rocks and minerals) and chemical weathering (the chemical decomposition or dissolution of them) through plant root growth and plant acids as well as water and wind abrasion, ice wedging, pressure release, changes in temperature, hydrolysis, oxidation and carbonation.
Once a rock has been broken down, the process of erosion transports bits of its compositional minerals away, freeing them to combine with plants, animal remains, fungi, bacteria and other organisms to create soil – the pedosphere or mantle of Mother Earth. No rock is hard enough to resist the forces of weathering and erosion. In fact whole continents have been largely shaped this way, as have many of the world’s most extraordinary natural wonders – the Grand Canyon for example – some hundreds of millions of years ago. In direct correlation, some of the planet’s most ancient soil harks back to these times too.
The point at which I learned how long it takes the red-brown, plant-nurturing iteration of soil we are familiar with today to form was a real awe-inspired moment for me, not only in the way in which I now view the dirt beneath my feet but also the added layer of complexity and marvel it brings to the study of plants. Although clay-rich primeval soil developed soon after the formation of Earth around 4.6 billion years ago, scientists now believe that it was not until over 450 million years ago, during the Ordovician period, that soil fertility became a factor, the magic formula involving the first terrestrial plants, aided by fungal mycorrhizae in their roots, rapidly sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Plants then converted the CO2 into glucose and oxygen via the similarly mind-blowing process of photosynthesis, while mycorrhizae exchanged moisture and mineral nutrients they had gathered from the soil for carbon by way of plant sugars. The first plants also gave back to soil in the form of humus, the dark organic upper layer produced by the microbial decomposition of vegetable and animal matter. Ancestral earthworms – thought to trace their evolution back some 200 million years and now standing at over 6,000 species spread across every continent except Antarctica – along with other above-and-below-ground organisms and creatures then helped till the earth, improving aggregation and porosity. All in all, a symbiotic win-win for plant and fungal growth, soil health, carbon sequestration and the support of numerous other life forms on Earth, including we humans.
Thanks to the relatively young study of soil science we now know that, under natural conditions, it can take up to 1,000 years to make just 2.5cm (1-inch) of topsoil – the upper layer of soil that contains the most organic matter and microorganisms – the exact rate being dependent on factors such as parent material, climate, topography, living organisms and time attributed to weathering. A stop-in-your-tracks fact when you consider how nonchalantly we brush dirt off our shoes or excavate large tracts of it to build our metropolises.
Some of the most ancient known soil is thought to date back to 3.7 billion years ago, found in a metamorphic rock formation in southwestern Greenland when it was exposed beneath a retreating ice cap. Similarly ancient soil has also been located in parts of the African continent, considered to be relatively tectonically stable through geologic time.
The most ancient soil doesn’t equate with the most fertile soil, however. Soil this old doesn’t have the necessary composition of air, water, minerals and organic matter to support plant life. Fertile soil teems with essential nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (primary macronutrients known as NPK), calcium, magnesium and sulphur (secondary macronutrients) and iron, manganese, zinc, copper, boron, molybdenum, chlorine and nickel (micronutrients or trace nutrients) plus the non-mineral elements of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.
The process by which it collects all these elements together often involves the large-scale transference of sediment and organic matter hence why some of the most fertile soil throughout history is found in or around river basins and floodplains, or on a substrate known as loess formed by the accumulation of wind-blown dust or by the grinding and melting action of glaciers from the last Ice Age.
It’s no coincidence then that the great plains of the American Midwest, Eastern Europe, northern China and the Argentine Pampas form the backbone of the world’s agricultural production where loess blankets the continental bedrock in some places hundreds of metres thick and thousands of years of natural grassland have contributed to the organic content; the soil here is known as mollisol and covers just 7 per cent of the world’s ice-free land.
Or that the ‘cradle of civilisation’ was seeded and grew to fruition in the quarter-moon-shaped ‘Fertile Crescent’ of the Middle East, fed as it was by the Tigris, Euphrates and Nile Rivers. Although situated in a dry, arid region, the irrigation provided by these vital water sources via natural annual flooding and manmade ingenuity helped to water crops and initially improve the soil with mineral-rich silt.
Fertile Crescent peoples developed farming and herding, domesticating wild wheat and barley and peas, and rearing sheep, goats, pigs and cows, some of the world’s staple crops and livestock to this day. With increased agriculture came an explosion in population and food surpluses to feed non-farming societal strata: metal workers, scribes, accountants and politicians. And so it went on until the present day.
What our ancient ancestors, or indeed modern science until relatively recently, didn’t fully understand, is that without consistent regeneration, the fertility, health and ecological function of soil will eventually be depleted. Too much of one mineral – an overload of salt in the Nile Delta region for instance – and many plants including key crops cannot survive. Too little organic matter due to soil disturbance, deforestation, monoculture, erosion or climate change and soil’s essential structure and ecosystem can be invariably destroyed. And too blatant a disregard for the immense biodiversity of living organisms that create healthy soil – vertebrates, invertebrates, bacteria, fungi, lichens and plants – and the whole thing will quite literally turn to dust.
Soil is not infinite, as many civilisations have found as they literally ploughed themselves out of existence. This includes such soil-related crises as the Dust Bowl of the American and Canadian prairies in the 1930s where a failure to employ dry and farming practices to prevent wind erosion is attributed as a major cause of the drought-related ecological, agricultural and economic devastation that followed. Or soil depletion in Africa where reports show that up to 40 per cent of soils are suffering from some sort of soil degradation including erosion, desertification and loss of nutrients.
If we continue to harvest more nutrients than we replace it will take hundreds of years to restore. With the world population currently standing at 7.8 billion and set to rise to what is thought to be its capacity – 10 billion – by 2050 in regards to the Earth’s natural resources, we need to collectively start nurturing and replenishing our soil before it runs out so it continues to give back.
Sonya Patel Ellis is a writer, editor and artist exploring the interconnectedness between plants and people and author of The Botanical Bible, The Heritage Herbal and The Garden Birdwatchers Bible.
By Sonya Patel Ellis
‘The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks’ penned Tennessee Williams in the conclusion of his phantasmagorical drama Camino Real (1953), a line that struck me at the height of the epidemic and through the cynical political chaos of the past few years as a hopeful metaphor for love, kindness, beauty and nature conquering all.
Into the pedosphere - Greek πέδον pedon “soil” or “earth” and σφαΐρα sphaira “sphere”.
Can plants break rock? Indeed they can, as part of the billions of years old process of mechanical weathering (the physical cracking of rocks and minerals) and chemical weathering (the chemical decomposition or dissolution of them) through plant root growth and plant acids as well as water and wind abrasion, ice wedging, pressure release, changes in temperature, hydrolysis, oxidation and carbonation.
Once a rock has been broken down, the process of erosion transports bits of its compositional minerals away, freeing them to combine with plants, animal remains, fungi, bacteria and other organisms to create soil – the pedosphere or mantle of Mother Earth. No rock is hard enough to resist the forces of weathering and erosion. In fact whole continents have been largely shaped this way, as have many of the world’s most extraordinary natural wonders – the Grand Canyon for example – some hundreds of millions of years ago. In direct correlation, some of the planet’s most ancient soil harks back to these times too.
The point at which I learned how long it takes the red-brown, plant-nurturing iteration of soil we are familiar with today to form was a real awe-inspired moment for me, not only in the way in which I now view the dirt beneath my feet but also the added layer of complexity and marvel it brings to the study of plants. Although clay-rich primeval soil developed soon after the formation of Earth around 4.6 billion years ago, scientists now believe that it was not until over 450 million years ago, during the Ordovician period, that soil fertility became a factor, the magic formula involving the first terrestrial plants, aided by fungal mycorrhizae in their roots, rapidly sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Plants then converted the CO2 into glucose and oxygen via the similarly mind-blowing process of photosynthesis, while mycorrhizae exchanged moisture and mineral nutrients they had gathered from the soil for carbon by way of plant sugars. The first plants also gave back to soil in the form of humus, the dark organic upper layer produced by the microbial decomposition of vegetable and animal matter. Ancestral earthworms – thought to trace their evolution back some 200 million years and now standing at over 6,000 species spread across every continent except Antarctica – along with other above-and-below-ground organisms and creatures then helped till the earth, improving aggregation and porosity. All in all, a symbiotic win-win for plant and fungal growth, soil health, carbon sequestration and the support of numerous other life forms on Earth, including we humans.
Thanks to the relatively young study of soil science we now know that, under natural conditions, it can take up to 1,000 years to make just 2.5cm (1-inch) of topsoil – the upper layer of soil that contains the most organic matter and microorganisms – the exact rate being dependent on factors such as parent material, climate, topography, living organisms and time attributed to weathering. A stop-in-your-tracks fact when you consider how nonchalantly we brush dirt off our shoes or excavate large tracts of it to build our metropolises.
Some of the most ancient known soil is thought to date back to 3.7 billion years ago, found in a metamorphic rock formation in southwestern Greenland when it was exposed beneath a retreating ice cap. Similarly ancient soil has also been located in parts of the African continent, considered to be relatively tectonically stable through geologic time.
The most ancient soil doesn’t equate with the most fertile soil, however. Soil this old doesn’t have the necessary composition of air, water, minerals and organic matter to support plant life. Fertile soil teems with essential nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (primary macronutrients known as NPK), calcium, magnesium and sulphur (secondary macronutrients) and iron, manganese, zinc, copper, boron, molybdenum, chlorine and nickel (micronutrients or trace nutrients) plus the non-mineral elements of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.
The process by which it collects all these elements together often involves the large-scale transference of sediment and organic matter hence why some of the most fertile soil throughout history is found in or around river basins and floodplains, or on a substrate known as loess formed by the accumulation of wind-blown dust or by the grinding and melting action of glaciers from the last Ice Age.
It’s no coincidence then that the great plains of the American Midwest, Eastern Europe, northern China and the Argentine Pampas form the backbone of the world’s agricultural production where loess blankets the continental bedrock in some places hundreds of metres thick and thousands of years of natural grassland have contributed to the organic content; the soil here is known as mollisol and covers just 7 per cent of the world’s ice-free land.
Or that the ‘cradle of civilisation’ was seeded and grew to fruition in the quarter-moon-shaped ‘Fertile Crescent’ of the Middle East, fed as it was by the Tigris, Euphrates and Nile Rivers. Although situated in a dry, arid region, the irrigation provided by these vital water sources via natural annual flooding and manmade ingenuity helped to water crops and initially improve the soil with mineral-rich silt.
Fertile Crescent peoples developed farming and herding, domesticating wild wheat and barley and peas, and rearing sheep, goats, pigs and cows, some of the world’s staple crops and livestock to this day. With increased agriculture came an explosion in population and food surpluses to feed non-farming societal strata: metal workers, scribes, accountants and politicians. And so it went on until the present day.
What our ancient ancestors, or indeed modern science until relatively recently, didn’t fully understand, is that without consistent regeneration, the fertility, health and ecological function of soil will eventually be depleted. Too much of one mineral – an overload of salt in the Nile Delta region for instance – and many plants including key crops cannot survive. Too little organic matter due to soil disturbance, deforestation, monoculture, erosion or climate change and soil’s essential structure and ecosystem can be invariably destroyed. And too blatant a disregard for the immense biodiversity of living organisms that create healthy soil – vertebrates, invertebrates, bacteria, fungi, lichens and plants – and the whole thing will quite literally turn to dust.
Soil is not infinite, as many civilisations have found as they literally ploughed themselves out of existence. This includes such soil-related crises as the Dust Bowl of the American and Canadian prairies in the 1930s where a failure to employ dry and farming practices to prevent wind erosion is attributed as a major cause of the drought-related ecological, agricultural and economic devastation that followed. Or soil depletion in Africa where reports show that up to 40 per cent of soils are suffering from some sort of soil degradation including erosion, desertification and loss of nutrients.
If we continue to harvest more nutrients than we replace it will take hundreds of years to restore. With the world population currently standing at 7.8 billion and set to rise to what is thought to be its capacity – 10 billion – by 2050 in regards to the Earth’s natural resources, we need to collectively start nurturing and replenishing our soil before it runs out so it continues to give back.
‘The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks’ penned Tennessee Williams in the conclusion of his phantasmagorical drama Camino Real (1953), a line that struck me at the height of the epidemic and through the cynical political chaos of the past few years as a hopeful metaphor for love, kindness, beauty and nature conquering all.
Into the pedosphere - Greek πέδον pedon “soil” or “earth” and σφαΐρα sphaira “sphere”.
Can plants break rock? Indeed they can, as part of the billions of years old process of mechanical weathering (the physical cracking of rocks and minerals) and chemical weathering (the chemical decomposition or dissolution of them) through plant root growth and plant acids as well as water and wind abrasion, ice wedging, pressure release, changes in temperature, hydrolysis, oxidation and carbonation.
Once a rock has been broken down, the process of erosion transports bits of its compositional minerals away, freeing them to combine with plants, animal remains, fungi, bacteria and other organisms to create soil – the pedosphere or mantle of Mother Earth. No rock is hard enough to resist the forces of weathering and erosion. In fact whole continents have been largely shaped this way, as have many of the world’s most extraordinary natural wonders – the Grand Canyon for example – some hundreds of millions of years ago. In direct correlation, some of the planet’s most ancient soil harks back to these times too.
The point at which I learned how long it takes the red-brown, plant-nurturing iteration of soil we are familiar with today to form was a real awe-inspired moment for me, not only in the way in which I now view the dirt beneath my feet but also the added layer of complexity and marvel it brings to the study of plants. Although clay-rich primeval soil developed soon after the formation of Earth around 4.6 billion years ago, scientists now believe that it was not until over 450 million years ago, during the Ordovician period, that soil fertility became a factor, the magic formula involving the first terrestrial plants, aided by fungal mycorrhizae in their roots, rapidly sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Plants then converted the CO2 into glucose and oxygen via the similarly mind-blowing process of photosynthesis, while mycorrhizae exchanged moisture and mineral nutrients they had gathered from the soil for carbon by way of plant sugars. The first plants also gave back to soil in the form of humus, the dark organic upper layer produced by the microbial decomposition of vegetable and animal matter. Ancestral earthworms – thought to trace their evolution back some 200 million years and now standing at over 6,000 species spread across every continent except Antarctica – along with other above-and-below-ground organisms and creatures then helped till the earth, improving aggregation and porosity. All in all, a symbiotic win-win for plant and fungal growth, soil health, carbon sequestration and the support of numerous other life forms on Earth, including we humans.
Thanks to the relatively young study of soil science we now know that, under natural conditions, it can take up to 1,000 years to make just 2.5cm (1-inch) of topsoil – the upper layer of soil that contains the most organic matter and microorganisms – the exact rate being dependent on factors such as parent material, climate, topography, living organisms and time attributed to weathering. A stop-in-your-tracks fact when you consider how nonchalantly we brush dirt off our shoes or excavate large tracts of it to build our metropolises.
Some of the most ancient known soil is thought to date back to 3.7 billion years ago, found in a metamorphic rock formation in southwestern Greenland when it was exposed beneath a retreating ice cap. Similarly ancient soil has also been located in parts of the African continent, considered to be relatively tectonically stable through geologic time.
The most ancient soil doesn’t equate with the most fertile soil, however. Soil this old doesn’t have the necessary composition of air, water, minerals and organic matter to support plant life. Fertile soil teems with essential nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (primary macronutrients known as NPK), calcium, magnesium and sulphur (secondary macronutrients) and iron, manganese, zinc, copper, boron, molybdenum, chlorine and nickel (micronutrients or trace nutrients) plus the non-mineral elements of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.
The process by which it collects all these elements together often involves the large-scale transference of sediment and organic matter hence why some of the most fertile soil throughout history is found in or around river basins and floodplains, or on a substrate known as loess formed by the accumulation of wind-blown dust or by the grinding and melting action of glaciers from the last Ice Age.
It’s no coincidence then that the great plains of the American Midwest, Eastern Europe, northern China and the Argentine Pampas form the backbone of the world’s agricultural production where loess blankets the continental bedrock in some places hundreds of metres thick and thousands of years of natural grassland have contributed to the organic content; the soil here is known as mollisol and covers just 7 per cent of the world’s ice-free land.
Or that the ‘cradle of civilisation’ was seeded and grew to fruition in the quarter-moon-shaped ‘Fertile Crescent’ of the Middle East, fed as it was by the Tigris, Euphrates and Nile Rivers. Although situated in a dry, arid region, the irrigation provided by these vital water sources via natural annual flooding and manmade ingenuity helped to water crops and initially improve the soil with mineral-rich silt.
Fertile Crescent peoples developed farming and herding, domesticating wild wheat and barley and peas, and rearing sheep, goats, pigs and cows, some of the world’s staple crops and livestock to this day. With increased agriculture came an explosion in population and food surpluses to feed non-farming societal strata: metal workers, scribes, accountants and politicians. And so it went on until the present day.
What our ancient ancestors, or indeed modern science until relatively recently, didn’t fully understand, is that without consistent regeneration, the fertility, health and ecological function of soil will eventually be depleted. Too much of one mineral – an overload of salt in the Nile Delta region for instance – and many plants including key crops cannot survive. Too little organic matter due to soil disturbance, deforestation, monoculture, erosion or climate change and soil’s essential structure and ecosystem can be invariably destroyed. And too blatant a disregard for the immense biodiversity of living organisms that create healthy soil – vertebrates, invertebrates, bacteria, fungi, lichens and plants – and the whole thing will quite literally turn to dust.
Soil is not infinite, as many civilisations have found as they literally ploughed themselves out of existence. This includes such soil-related crises as the Dust Bowl of the American and Canadian prairies in the 1930s where a failure to employ dry and farming practices to prevent wind erosion is attributed as a major cause of the drought-related ecological, agricultural and economic devastation that followed. Or soil depletion in Africa where reports show that up to 40 per cent of soils are suffering from some sort of soil degradation including erosion, desertification and loss of nutrients.
If we continue to harvest more nutrients than we replace it will take hundreds of years to restore. With the world population currently standing at 7.8 billion and set to rise to what is thought to be its capacity – 10 billion – by 2050 in regards to the Earth’s natural resources, we need to collectively start nurturing and replenishing our soil before it runs out so it continues to give back.
Sonya Patel Ellis is a writer, editor and artist exploring the interconnectedness between plants and people and author of The Botanical Bible, The Heritage Herbal and The Garden Birdwatchers Bible.