Introduction

There can be no life without soil and no soil without life: they have evolved together.

—Charles E. Kellogg, Soil and Society, 1938

COWS SAVING THE PLANET? Why not? An idea that sounds preposterous begins to make sense if we stop to take a soil’s-eye view of our current environmental predicament. To crouch down to ground level—literally or metaphorically—and see how human and animal activity enhances or does violence to that fine earthy layer that hugs our planet. To appreciate the imperceptible animal–vegetable–mineral dance that keeps us alive. You see, that brown stuff we rush to wash off our hands (or, depending on our age, our knees) is the crux of most biological functions that sustain life. Soil is where food is created and where waste decays. It absorbs and holds water; or, if exhausted of organic matter, streams it away. It filters biological toxins and can store enough carbon to reduce carbon dioxide levels significantly and relatively quickly. It is home to more than 95 percent of all forms of terrestrial life. In any given place the quality of the soil greatly determines the nutritional value of food, how an area weathers drought or storms, and whether an ecosystem is teeming with life or the equivalent of a ghost town.

Where do those cows fit in? Cattle, like all grazing creatures, can, if appropriately managed, help build soil. When moved in large herds according to a planned schedule, livestock will nibble plants just enough to stimulate plant and root growth, trample the ground in a way that breaks apart caked earth to allow dormant seeds to germinate and water to seep in, and leave dung and urine to fertilize the soil with organic matter (aka carbon). The result is a wide variety of grasses and other deep-rooted plants and rich, aerated soil that acts like a great big sponge so as to minimize runoff and erosion. (Cows and their eruptive digestion habits have gotten a bad rap of late—I’ll address the methane question in chapter 1.) The use of ungulates such as cattle in land restoration, a practice called Holistic Management, was developed and refined over the decades by Allan Savory, a farmer and rancher and former opposition leader to then-Rhodesia’s white government. With cows or other grazers operating under Holistic Management across large areas of degrading land, this could mean a great deal of soil created or preserved.

Leaving behind our bovine herd for the moment, another way to build soil is through zai pits, a traditional growing method from Burkino Faso in West Africa. Small holes are dug into a field, and these capture water and hold soil organic matter (compost and such), both precious resources in drylands that depend on seasonal rainfall—about a third of the world’s landmass. Cattle have a similar impact. Rancher and consultant Jim Howell told me that this helped Grasslands, LLC’s, South Dakota ranches withstand the spring 2011 torrential rains while nearby properties suffered losses: The herds left hoof-size pockets in the ground, so water pooled rather than forming gullies and eroding the land.

If you’re wondering why we want to build soil—isn’t there enough dirt out there already?—consider this: Around the globe, we’re losing topsoil somewhere between ten times (in the United States) and forty times (China and India) faster than we’re generating it, some eighty-three billion tons of it a year. Soil is pounded off fields during a rainstorm; it runs down our rivers; its surfaces are over- and undergrazed; when left uncovered it loses its organic matter as carbon oxidizes and enters the atmosphere. Despite our collective societal indifference to soil, we’ve all got a large stake in its fortunes. In an oft-quoted and paraphrased line, “Man has only a thin layer of soil between himself and starvation.” Up to now, we’ve been heedless with our soils. And we’re paying the price.

On an immediate, day-to-day level, the food we eat is only as good as the soil from which it springs. In part because of soil depletion, most food grown today is less nutritious than that of most previous eras. Research from the UK Ministry of Health determined that a steak today has half the iron of its counterpart fifty years ago thanks to changes in what the animals eat. Breeding crops for high yields accelerates the dilution of nutritional content. Over time this can lead to nutrient deficiencies, which a grower may not notice until the effects on the plants are visible, by which point the situation has become extreme.

Remember the adage “An apple a day keeps the doctor away”? Over the last eighty years, the calcium content of one medium apple has dropped by nearly half, and levels of phosphorus, iron, and magnesium have fallen more than 80 percent. So to get the same doctor-avoiding kick, you’d now need four or five apples. And this is fruit straight from the tree; processed foods also lose nutrients en route from the field to box or bottle. Some scientists believe today’s high obesity rates are, paradoxically, a symptom of malnutrition due to diets deficient in micronutrients. Which prompts the question: Could the declining nutritional content of our food also be a factor in our rising rates of chronic diseases and allergies, particularly food allergies among children?

Fortunately, a host of creatures underfoot are ready to make and enhance soil for us—once conditions are right. This is where that microscopic choreography comes in; the cows (or the diggers of holes) are only the catalyst. Worms, insects, and microorganisms like fungi and bacteria aerate the ground, decompose waste, exchange nourishment (mycorrhizal fungi take glucose from plants and in return help plants assimilate nutrients), and break down rocks into minerals like calcium, magnesium, iron, and zinc that are essential to our health. The herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides widely used in industrial agriculture kill many of these organisms; from the soil’s or soil dweller’s perspective, chemical additives are not such a great thing.

With zai, the organic matter in the hollows attracts termites. The termites, in turn, burrow around and create tunnels, allowing water to penetrate the ground rather than evaporate. Though usually regarded as pests, termites in marginal lands play much the same role that earth-worms do in greener climes.

In Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, geomorphologist David Montgomery offers numerous cautionary tales of kingdoms, cultures, and empires that squandered their soil and found themselves with nothing left to live on. From the earliest farmers in the Fertile Crescent to the Mayans, Romans, and Easter Islanders, societies have exhausted their land either to scatter and regroup in much-diminished form, or to become lost to history.

Not that people didn’t know better. Advice about caring for soil has been passed along since the first primitive hoes broke virgin ground.

Luc Gnacadja, executive secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, likes to quote this proverb from the Sanskrit Vedic Scriptures of around 1500 bce: “Upon this handful of soil our survival depends. Husband it and it will grow our food, our fuel and our shelter and surround us with beauty. Abuse it and soil will collapse and die, taking humanity with it.” More recently, in 1937 Franklin D. Roosevelt made the same point with a nationalistic twist: “A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself.”

Despite history’s warnings, the temptation to plant on fragile hill-sides, clear forests, push yields of lucrative crops, or otherwise try to squeeze more from the earth proves too great. But today we can’t just pack up our tent and move to more promising turf while leaving the damage behind us.

It’s time to start treating soil as the precious resource it is. This doesn’t mean forgoing its bounty—soil is a renewable resource that can respond quickly to watchful stewardship. Since soil is integral to so many biological processes, nurturing and improving it provides us with many paths toward ecological renewal—with returns far greater than what you’ll see at your feet.

Let me clarify right up front: If a few years ago someone told me I’d be writing about soil, much less be fascinated and excited by it, I’d have said they were crazy. Wait, I’ll correct that—since I’d begun reporting on the New Economics and the juncture of economics and the environment, I’d grown accustomed to finding my thinking stretched in new and improbable directions. As a suburban-raised writer who can barely tend a houseplant, I’d rank as among the least likely of guides to this rich, brown mantle of our planet and its potential role in restoring our environment. But bear with me as I make the case that soil can be seen as the crucible for our many overlapping environmental, economic, and social crises (excess atmospheric carbon dioxide, drought, floods, wildfires, food scarcity, desertification, and obesity/malnutrition). And that focusing on soil restoration will allow us to begin to chip away at these seemingly insurmountable problems.

Professional pursuits are often driven by personal, emotional needs. For me, over the last few years, that has been a need to allay anxiety, specifically anxiety about the environment. I’d think about the wildlife I’d taken for granted and lament the diminished natural wealth that future generations would inherit. Every day’s news brought upsetting developments—ice caps melting, northeastern bats dying of white-nose syndrome, bee colony collapses—and I realized I had two choices: erect a mental blockade and ignore it all, or find a way to engage with it. I chose to engage as a journalist. I was determined to find solutions, ideas that sparked optimism so that I wasn’t tempted to barricade myself.

For a while I focused on environmental economics. Slow Money, which encourages investment in local food enterprises, introduced me to an appreciation of soil as wealth. I started writing articles on soil restoration—and kept bumping into the kind of encouraging ideas I was looking for but wasn’t seeing in the media. In the course of reporting on Holistic Management, I began to realize that for every seemingly unsolvable problem there was a flip side, an alternative set of strategies that would restore balance to the system. And that the question of which way it went often turned on soil.

For example, our carbon problem. When you hear reports of rising carbon dioxide levels, it’s easy to get the impression that the carbon- and-oxygen molecule is a kind of toxin, some alien vapor coughed up by a century-plus of rampant industrialism that has now come back to haunt us. But the trouble isn’t the carbon itself; it’s that there’s too much of it in the air rather than in the ground, where it lends fertility to the soil. Soil, it turns out, is the natural and the most cost-effective carbon sink. According to Rattan Lal, Distinguished University Professor at the Ohio State University, soil carbon restoration can potentially store about one billion tons of atmospheric carbon per year. This would offset around 8 to 10 percent of total annual carbon dioxide emissions and one-third of annual enrichment of atmospheric carbon that would otherwise be left in the air.

Consider also biodiversity, which starts in the soil; there are as many living organisms in a teaspoon of healthy soil as there are people on the planet. The multiplicity of life underground is reflected in what grows and flourishes on the land. Conversely, deficiencies in the soil limit the plant and animal species that can survive above, from the simplest forms and on up the food chain. Once identified, such imbalances can be remedied, restoring the full range of life to that particular place.

And let’s look at water. Water has increasingly become a problem, with at once not enough in some parts of the world and way too much in others. Sometimes too much comes right after not enough so we get torrents of rain coursing down parched, barren land with nothing to slow it down. Healthy, living soil can contain many times its weight in water. Steven Apfelbaum, a restoration ecologist in Wisconsin, says that every 1 percent increase in soil carbon holds an additional sixty thousand gallons of water per acre. Not only does this limit damage from erosion, but it also keeps water on the land. This feeds plants, builds aquifers, and maintains the moisture that promotes microbial life.

There will always be floods and droughts and so-called hundred-year weather events that are now happening with unnerving regularity, but they needn’t cause such devastation. I spoke to Zachary Jones, of the Twodot Land and Livestock Company near Harlowton, Montana, where in spring 2011 the Musselshell River, a tributary to the Missouri River, saw thirteen times its usual spring runoff: “The most water we’ve ever seen in that creek in the five generations my family has ranched here.” While the flood closed highways, washed away barns and corrals, and drowned livestock, Twodot’s land remained unscathed, with very little runoff. Jones attributes this to its having been under Holistic Management for twenty-five years. Compared with its neighbors, Twodot’s twenty-four thousand acres had a greater variety of grasses and other plants with deep roots (for efficient nutrient and water cycling) and rich, aerated, highly absorbent soil. Rather than streaming off and causing erosion, the water stayed on the land.

Here was cause for hope: Focusing on soil could minimize the devastation of floods. I couldn’t get enough of that optimism, so I kept exploring. It turns out that accelerated topsoil formation is doable, with the tools required as modest as livestock, hole digging, organic amendments, and simple cultivation techniques; no costly, high-tech, geo-engineered you-need-a-PhD-to-understand-it schemes. I began to see that, despite the way our ecological predicaments are often portrayed, we aren’t dealing with discrete problems to be tackled one at a time. Rather, our environmental messes are symptoms of disrupted biological cycles: the carbon cycle, water cycle, nutrient cycle, and energy cycle. Since all these cycles are interconnected, efforts to redress one system will likely help restore the others.

I don’t mean to come across as naive, or to suggest that we can throw some cattle and compost on the ground and go on wasting and polluting as before. But neither am I willing to be paralyzed by despair, nor take refuge behind that barricade of indifference, no matter how tempting at times. I know how bad things are. But we’ve got to start somewhere. Soil restoration can be done anywhere: one watershed, one community, one abandoned field. At whatever scale, attend to the needs of the soil, and the ecological cycles will begin to get back in sync.

One sweeping and dramatic example is the restoration of the Loess Plateau in China, documented in John D. Liu’s film Hope in a Changing Climate. Over ten years, an area the size of Belgium along the Yellow River in northwest China was transformed from a near-barren desert plagued by dust storms, considered the most eroded place on earth, to a thriving agricultural region with the poverty rate lowered by half. Through a government–community partnership, local farmers built terraces, reforested sloping land, and shifted to perennial crops that have deeper roots. Basically, the Chinese government saw that it would cost less to stabilize the soil than to continually deal with the sediment running into the river. In stabilizing the soil, numerous other benefits followed.

In considering our environmental challenges, one wild card is the extent of nature’s ability to heal itself. The awareness that restorative feedback mechanisms may be greater and more powerful than we appreciate gives me tremendous hope. A few years back I attended the annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures at what is now the Schumacher Center for a New Economics in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, not far from where I live. (Schumacher was the fellow who wrote the early-1970s book Small Is Beautiful, with the evocative but oft-ignored subtitle Economics as if People Mattered.) At the end of the day I was standing around among a group chatting with Alisa Gravitz, executive director of Green America, who’d given a talk called “Everyone Is an Activist.” The speakers, including environmental stalwart Bill McKibben, had done a fabulous job of articulating just how dark the state of our environment was, and I think many of us were looking for some flicker of hope to carry home. Gravitz has an easygoing, upbeat style, so several of us were drawn to her.

One woman asked straight-out how to keep going in the face of constant bad news. Gravitz thought for a minute, then said that she grew up near Lake Erie, which in the 1960s was declared “dead.” (Famously, in 1969 Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, a tributary to Lake Erie, burst into flames.) They were told that restoring the lake would take decades, Gravitz recalled, but very quickly signs of life appeared. With tightened pollution restrictions, including the Clean Water Act in 1972, the lake bounced back and by 1980 was a popular recreation destination. There are now large algal blooms and occasional fish die-offs. But Gravitz’s point was that the lake most experts had given up on improved faster than anyone anticipated. “That’s what I remember whenever I start to lose courage,” she said. “We should never underestimate ecology’s capacity to heal.”

This made sense to me: We need to work with the natural inclination of all living things to strive toward health. We can start with one lake, one watershed, one devastated plateau, and create isles of reparation. Then, over time, fill in the gaps, jigsaw-puzzle-like. Every stretch of depleted or chemically saturated soil, every gulch and gully carved by erosion, is a wound on the landscape. We can heal those wounds by tending to the soil.

When I was a kid, we called it “dirt.” It was brown (that unfortunate color with scatological overtones) and got stuck under our fingernails when we played outside, making the immediate, requisite hand washing an ordeal. It was an affront to the smooth-surfaced chrome aesthetic that dominated the era. There was the impression that if we failed to scrub it off, something bad would happen (if nothing else, our clothes might be “soiled”). Still, we played in it, with toy versions of the construction vehicles that were ripping up the earth just yards from our house. For this was the mid-1960s, and people were planting houses the way a thousand miles west in the Grain Belt they planted corn, acres and acres of homes sprouting up with their tidy brick chimneys and matte aluminum siding, consuming the land in architectural and social monocultures. We neighborhood kids were creatures of our time: In our pretend games we were builders, not farmers.

Even living in Vermont, where you’re never far from a contented cow or, in the summer and fall, a farm stand (often a shed with a cash box, run on that old-fashioned principle, trust), it took me a long time to understand that soil is more than a one-size-fits-all passive medium for stuff that grows. A while back, I was chatting with our neighbor Charles Moses, who brush-hogs our meadow so that it stays meadow, and who teaches chemistry in our local high school and is a great-grandnephew of Grandma Moses. “You know,” he said, nodding down toward our property, “you’ve got great soil down there.”

The way he said it, I could tell that it was bugging him that we weren’t growing anything on our land. I said, “Really?”

“Yup,” he said, with the native Vermonter’s habitual restraint. “If you’ll put in some vegetables I’ll till it for you. There’s nothing like eating potatoes straight out of the ground.”

There was no turning back. We bought vegetable starts at Clearbrook Farm, an organic gardening mecca in nearby Shaftsbury, and with scarcely any effort on our part things grew. A bit of beginner’s luck; that hyper-fertile soil, lovingly nurtured by the farmer who lived there in the 1970s when Charles was growing up, had been waiting for some crops worthy of nourishing. I’m now an avid reader of seed catalogs. I so revel in the summer ritual of surveying the garden and harvesting that during those precious months, I’m reluctant to go away. On the agenda right now: a second planting of kale, beets, and beans, and what to do with all those cucumbers.

This book isn’t a scientific or how-to guide to the soil. Rather, this is a call to action on behalf of the soil—and, by extension, those of us who benefit from it. Which is, of course, all of us. I’m not going to mince words or hide behind euphemism; we know ecological systems are crumbling all around us. Chapter by chapter, I’m going to hit our most severe environmental problems and explore how zeroing in on soil can move us toward solutions—and I’m going to share examples of people who are doing this through innovative, and often counterintuitive means. (Remember those cows?)

So roll up your sleeves and pant legs and wade with me into the dirt.