Week 42: 'It is enriched by all things that ... enter into it.'

Wonder spawned in: Really a very long time ago
Wondered into being by: Weirdness
Wonderspan: Probably more than 10 minutes this week

Would you like to guess what this is?  www.waysofloving.com/4.jpg

Is it:

1. a rainforest
2. the sea bed
3. art
4. soil

The answer is that it’s soil - good compost, in fact.  Let’s begin today’s adventure with a few stunning characteristics of this amazing stuff:

• An inch of fertile soil takes 500 to 1000 years to form in Nature’s own time.
• Just one gram of certain soils contains up to one million species of microbes (that’s not one million microbes, but one million species of microbes, most of which are still unknown)
• A cubic inch of fertile soil can contain eight miles of microscopic fungal threads called mycelia.  That's eight miles, one cubic inch.
• Soil is an ecosystem in its own right – indeed it is the most abundant ecosystem on Earth.
• Soil is alive in the same sense as a forest is; it balances itself, evolves, physically churns and enriches itself; it even breathes.
• The soil's ecosystem is part of the larger ecosystem above it; the whole evolves together, so the qualities of a soil will change with the plant life that belongs to it from lichens to mosses, grasses, shrubs, and finally forest.  Plant roots, soil-dwelling organisms and the microclimate all combine to condition the qualities of the earth, enriching and preparing it for the next stage of the ecosystem’s evolution.
• Soil is fragile.  Tilling beats it to death; remove plants from it and blows away as dust or washes into the sea; it suffocates when you pave it over.  In the 30 years to 1991 the world lost 30% of its topsoil to overgrazing, intensive agriculture, deforestation and urban sprawl.

Perhaps most of us associate soil with dirt: bland, brownish, inert, and noticed only when it stains clothes or gets under our fingernails, but it is extremely complex and subtly responsive as only a richly diverse, living unity could be.  Lying always right beneath our feet, soil is the very ground of our lives, from which we came and to which we will return.  It's something to reflect on next time you get muddy knees.

The sense of earth or soil as a source of life, rather than just as muck,  is appreciable in how these words have come to us.  ‘Earth’ is a very old word, whose root er – from the ancient Indo-European family of languages –  means both ‘soil’, as in the stuff we’re talking about, and ‘ground’, as in the foundation of things.  ‘Ground’ is also an old word, originally meaning ‘the bottom’, from the Proto-Germanic root grundus, ‘deep place’.  ‘Soil’ is a later word; it carries the same meanings as ‘earth’ but did not become associated negatively with ‘dirt’ until the 15th century, which (I wonder) might be when society became preoccupied with physical cleanliness.

So soil, our grundus, combines bits of ground-up rock, dead animals and plants, animal life (from bacteria through microbes to invertebrates), plant life (including fungi and rooting plants), air, and water, all forming part of a delicate, dynamically balanced system that knows what it's doing.  It is a world all of itself and yet, once you start thinking of soil in this way it becomes obvious that we have very few words, outside the soil sciences, with which to explore it.  Perhaps that’s good, if it means we rely on more symbolic, poetic language to experience it with.  Virgil, for example, talked of ‘the genius of soils’, each with its own strength, ‘… its hue, its native power for bearing’.  I can’t think of any other source of nourishment which must be alive and well in order to nourish; apart, that is, from mothers.

I know little about soil but from the depth of my growing love of it, I find myself suggesting that it has personalities and moods.  Some whole cultures have done the same.  Surveying differences in cultural attitudes to soil, Rebecca Lines-Kelly found societies which described soils as ‘lazy’, ‘needy’, ‘melting’, ‘fruity’, ‘fat’, ‘hot’ and ‘weak’.  Also turning to creative language, the poet and farmer Wendell Berry has written without exaggeration that soil

‘is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all.  It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life.  Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.’

‘[Topsoil] increases by experience,’ he says, ‘by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it, not by ambition or aggressiveness. It is enriched by all things that die and enter into it. It keeps the past, not as history or as memory, but as richness, new possibility. Its fertility is always building up out of death into promise.’ 

These are holy qualities, suggests Wendell Berry, even ‘Christ-like’.

What can this mean for agriculture?  If soil is a living thing and must be well in order to nourish plants, then good agriculture surely has to serve the soil as an end in itself.  This is entirely different from treating the soil only as a means to an end, in which we imagine it to be an inert source of food for crops.  Rather, healthy soil must be respected and nourished; it has needs, being full of fungi, bacteria and microbes.  In these things lies its wealth, but all can easily die if we unbalance or abuse the soil.  The only possible good relationship with soil is a mutual one, in which we honour it by allowing it to sustain itself and it honours us, in turn, to exactly the same end.  ‘To be responsible to the soil is to respond to its gift with our own’, writes William Bryant Logan.  The soil is our honest lover; when we cheat the soil, we cheat ourselves.  But it must be difficult to honour the processes and needs of soil if you are a farmer under pressure from supermarkets to sell produce more and more cheaply.  We think food is cheap at Tesco but the full cost is being paid by the earth.

Being a lover of soil, it seems, takes work and time.  It leaves no place for gimmicks that help us to cheat – that is, enable us to make the soil do something it doesn’t want to do.  Soil doesn’t want monocrops, which kill it, and does want rest after each harvest so that it has time to re-enrich itself.  Soil probably doesn’t want to make garden lawns either, if only because soil has an adventurous spirit.  There’s some stuff for lawns called Miracle Gro Patch Magic, made by multinational manufacturer Scott’s (also the distributor of Monsanto’s notorious Roundup).  It promises to make grass grow where it wouldn’t before. ‘Grass is guaranteed to grow anywhere, even on concrete’, is the rather daft claim.  Clearly, this stuff tries to rule the soil rather than work with it, but the soil is bound to have its way in the end because there’s a reason grass isn’t growing in the shade of a tree, under a swing, or on concrete!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT9IogbCl84 (not a wonder but mercifully short)

This stuff is ‘magic’, in that it produces an effect without us knowing how, but it’s a terrible misappropriation of the word ‘miracle’; the thing with miracles is that you can’t make them happen, they are given.

The Miracle Gro gunkathon is symptomatic of a disconnection between humankind and the way the Earth works, which is leading to a massive loss of soil.  We’re running out.  It has taken Nature millions of years to enrobe the Earth with a thin covering of fertility, and humankind a few decades to kill off a third of it.  Deforestation, intensive agriculture including over-grazing, and the spread of urban environments are the drivers of this problem, but leading all of these is humankind’s general disconnection with (that is, a lack of feeling a mutual relationship with) the processes that give life and sustain it.  This violence to the Earth does violence also to ourselves, for the soil is our grundus, the deep place upon which our being depends.  Bob Kerrey has put it like this: ‘If you run out of water, you pray for rain.  If you run out of soil, you pray for forgiveness.’

We might imagine that topsoil loss is a recent problem, beginning perhaps with the industrial revolution and continuing with today's aggressively consumer-capitalist economic system, in which the health of soil is hardly likely to be a consideration.  In fact, although these forces have accelerated the degradation of our soils, the losses began much earlier.  Rebecca Lines-Kelly has found that writers in many older cultures have warned of the loss of soil due to self-centred human practices.  She picks up Critias in Plato’s Dialogues, who says of once-lushly-forested Greece:

‘What now remains of the formerly rich land is like the skeleton of a sick man, with all the fat and soft earth having wasted away and only the bare framework remaining. Formerly, many of the mountains were arable. The plains that were full of rich soil are now marshes. Hills that were once covered with forests and produced abundant pasture now produce only food for bees.  Once the land was enriched by yearly rains, which were not lost, as they are now by flowing from bare land into the sea. The soil was deep, it absorbed, and kept the water in the loamy soil, and the water that soaked into the hills fed springs and running streams everywhere. Now the abandoned shrines at spots where formerly there were springs attest that our description of the land is true.’

Critias appears to be using soil as an allegory of a society’s decline, but really the situation he describes is more concrete and immediate than that: yes, you can use the degradation of soil to allude to a society’s decline, but also to measure it.

Having wondered at soil as mother and then as lover, can we also appreciate it as teacher?  I would say that I can draw three lessons from it, but perhaps it is in better keeping with the nature of soil to say that it offers these lessons up.  They might be lessons for everyone, or perhaps mainly for us Westerners, a people as we are of two halves: ravenously curious, adaptable, iconoclastic and irrepressibly hopeful on the one hand, while patriarchal, capitalist-consumerist, self-aggrandising, and spiritually rather lost on the other.  (Yes, it's a sweeping generalisation but not an entirely wayward one.)  If soil really does tell us something about being, then perhaps it is something like this:

1. Being belongs to being; when we chop it into chunks, either physically or in our (lack of) imagination, we damage it and ourselves as part of it.  In our being, we belong to soil, soil belongs to us; not as a possession belongs, which is where violation begins, but as lovers belong.
2. Being rises and falls in the patience of its own time.  If Nature takes a million years for some part of its being to develop, Nature is content to wait, and yet during its waiting is not undeveloped, for it is sufficient to be how it is.  Nature does not need superchargers, which would hurt Nature and the part of it we call ‘us’.
3. Being and beings are always an end in themselves, of worth in themselves.  Being has utility too, but if we encounter a soil, a person, a culture, and see only utility, then we have not seen the thing for what it is.  Being calls us out into mutual relationship; this is nonviolence.

I am extremely excited by the epiphany that soil is alive.  Even in some imaginary hard-headed world where the only illumination came from the freezing-cold light of reason, soil ticks every ‘I am alive’ box that science has come up with (or had done when I was doing by Biology GCSE, anyway).  That is, soil moves, excretes, reproduces, respires, responds to stimuli, feeds and grows.  In my day that was all you needed to be counted alive.

A secret life of soil: fungi

Now, let us dive into soil to wonder at one of its many secret lives: that of the fungi.  This might blow your mind so I recommend holding onto your head tightly with both hands.  Before that, let’s just enjoy just a few of the most lyrically beautiful words that mycologists (mushroom experts) get to shout out and enjoy every day:

• Sporangium – a structure on a fungal body which releases spores
• Hypha – a filament forming the basic structures of a fungus)
• Mycelium – mass of hyphae forming the main body of a fungus in its medium, such as soil
• Flagella – a structure that allows some micro-organisms to swim
• Antheridium – part of the reproductive mechanism of fungi
• Oogonium (pronounced oh-oh-gonium) – another part of the reproductive apparatus.
• Nematode – a tiny worm eaten by some fungi
• Caenosytic – a cell having more than one nucleus
• Aflatoxin – a toxic compound produced by certain fungi

And there are many more but we only have a few minutes, sadly.

A bit of background, then: the first fungi evolved before plants over a billion years ago; we know about 200,000 species of fungi but there are about 1½ million out there somewhere and 1,000 new ones are discovered each year.  One of the very mad things about fungi is that the thing we call a mushroom is just a tiny part of the organism.  It's the bit that appears as the fungus sticks itself above ground for a few days to reproduce.  For most of the time the fungus is completely hidden; it consists of long filamentous strings called hyphae, which net together to form a mycelium, stretching through the soil for many yards or even miles.  The biggest mycelium in the world is two millennia old and 34 square miles in size, making it (in terms of area occupied) the largest living thing ever known.  34 square miles – how big is that?  Coventry.  It's older than that city, though.

Fungi are slightly spooky in that they are more closely related to animals than are plants, or indeed any other kingdom of living things.  There are so many biochemical similarities between animals and fungi that it is difficult to create medicines for people that can treat fungal diseases without harming the human body.  At the same time, we can borrow antibiotics from fungi and benefit from them -- far more effectively in some cases than we would from regular medication.  This is just an aside, though – it might save the world later but please ignore for now as we’re moving on.

Fungi belong to the soil and participate as part of it.  Paul Stamets describes them as the ‘soil magicians’, responsible for creating highly fertile, loamy humus by recycling dead plant matter and making it available again to the soil.  A single mycelium can even transfer nutrients from one part of a forest to another, thus benefiting different species of tree in distant locations.  It can secrete chemicals that crumble rock and help add this ingredient to the soil.  It doesn’t need light to grow but can use radiation as a source of energy in a manner similar to plants’ use of sunlight.  It can store carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas; it can also break down undiluted diesel and other hydrocarbons very happily, turning this poisonous stuff into food for a new ecosystem.  And when it wants to say hello, it’s pretty determined; some fungi exert vertical forces of up to 1,200 psi – easily enough to blast through your tarmac drive and leave you groping for your Miracle Gro Patch Magic.  A mycelium even ‘knows’ what’s going on around it:

‘The mycelium is sentient, it knows that you are there,’ says Paul Stamets.  ‘When you rock across landscapes, it leaps up in the aftermath of your footsteps trying to grab debris.’

Another aside...  Have I mentioned lichens, which are actually two species – a fungus and an alga – living symbiotically as one?  Beatrix Potter of Jemima Puddleduck fame was the first to discover this, by the way.  The fungus provides structure and soaks up nutrients, the alga makes more complex compounds like fats etc.  They live together in peace until pollution comes along – the degradation of lichens is a strong indicator of bad air.

And another.  If every minuscule spore of a puffball mushroom created a new puffball over two generations, the volume would be 800 times that of the Earth (although the spores would create new mycelia rather than a new puffballs but never mind).

So, let’s have a look at some of these fungi.  Pilobolus lives in dung.  Its fruiting body (the mushroom part) is less than a centimetre high with its sporangium (spore sac) sitting on top.  This mushroom is phototropic – it turns towards the light – and when it’s ready, bang!  In its tiny way it blasts its sporangium towards the sun with such force that the stalk is crushed instantly.  This performance takes 0.25 milliseconds or one 400th of the time it takes to blink.  So 400 of the things could go off one by one and you still wouldn't know about it when you opened your eyes again.  The spores land on grass eaten by cows which pass the spores through their body and into their dung, all ready to go again.  So, any ideas why it helps Pilobolous to be phototropic? Answers in a comment at the bottom of the page!  If you know the answer, you're clever enough to do first year Biology at Berkeley (see below).

Anyway, in case you're a blinker, here it is in slow motion to music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrKJAojmB1Y

The Earth Stars are particularly elegant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iQwKYi6ytg (more so than the advert at the beginning, I’m sorry)

Here’s John Bonner with his fascination for another soil-participant: slime mould (very similar to fungi but not a single organism, rather a social cooperative of single cells).  He says the stuff is

‘no more than a bag of amoebae encased in a thin slime sheath.  Yet they manage to have various behaviours that are equal to those of animals who possess muscles and nerves with ganglia – that is, simple brains.’

Cells in slime mould can behave in ‘altruistic’ ways, sacrificing themselves for the sake of the whole.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkVhLJLG7ug

There are also videos on YouTube of slime mould solving mazes.

Extra…

Could hallucinogens in mushrooms have been the 'soma' mentioned in ancient religious texts like the Rgveda, which was used for creating altered states in which humans drew closer to their nature gods?   www.youtube.com/watch?v=32uUblJyBUE  The trippy lady is so trippy that she might make you flash back, by the way.

And finally, here are some more writings on soil:

‘The soil scientist digs a hole: He digs through thousands of years in a few feet of soil, then pauses to catch his breath. While he stands in his hole gazing out over the land, you almost remember silts and clays filtering down through impounded water, water rushing under ice, washing sands and gravels into stratified beds, glacial advance and retreat, outwash and deposition, great calves of ice spawned in the drainages. His gaze passes through time and matter. After a while, you begin to wonder about the importance of these human beings clustered around the hole, all of us looking intently in, or following his gaze out to the landscape, nodding our heads gravely in agreement.’ (Lewandowski in Lines-Kelly).

‘We should learn the art of making compost. Using that compost we will grow a lot of flowers. Don’t think that without compost you can have flowers. That is an illusion. You can have flowers only with compost. That is the insight of inter-being — look into the flower and you will see the compost. If you remove the compost that became the flower, the flower will disappear also.’ (Thich Nhat Hanh)

‘Soil is the connection to ourselves. From soil we come and to soil we return. If we are disconnected from it we are aliens adrift in a synthetic environment.  It is the soil the helps us to understand the self-limitations of life, its cycles of death and rebirth, the interdependence of all species. To be at home with the soil is truly the only way to be at home with ourselves, and therefore the only way we can be at peace with the environment and all of the earth species that are part of it. It is, literally, the common ground on which we all stand.’ (Fred Kirschenmann in Lines-Kelly)

‘Soil appeals to my senses. I like to dig in it and work it with my hands. I enjoy doing the soil texture field test with my fingers or kneading a clay soil, which is a short step from ceramics or sculpture. Soil has a pleasant smell. I like to sit on bare, sun-drenched ground and take in the fragrance of soil’ (Hans Jenny in Lines-Kelly)

Selected sources:

• Berkeley Biology 1B – lectures 1 and 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6Z1Trj369E
• Rebecca Lines-Kelly’s beautifully written essay on soil: http://www.regional.org.au/au/asssi/supersoil2004/keynote/lineskelly.htm
• Compost Image from ‘For Greenies’ website.
• Paul Stamets on how mushrooms might save us all: http://hyperlocavore.ning.com/page/about-mycelium-running-by

Thanks…

…to Sunniva T for pointing me in the direction of soil (i.e. straight downwards)
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