The Hidden Community

 One community that is immensely important to us and all of life is out of our sight. We creatures who are so dependent upon seeing, so focused on the images before us, tend to be blind to the community that lives under our feet. Of course that's true. Out of sight, out of mind. Or maybe never in our minds in the first place. We think of soil as "dirty" and try to get it off ourselves quickly. "Soiled" is a negative term, one that makes us cringe internally. So we don't think about dirt as good. We walk over the earth and seldom think of what's below our feet. That's not a reprimand. I am this way too.

But ever since I did some research for an article I was writing several years ago, I've been fascinated with the community of life beneath the surface. You almost have to get down to the size of a tiny bug, at least in your mind, to be able to think about this. So many of the creatures that populate this ecosystem are microscopic. Microscopic and multitudinous. The numbers of individual life forms in the soil are flabbergasting. I heard a statistic something like this: in one handful of soil there are more microorganisms than all the human lives that ever lived on earth. That is not an exact quote, but you get the idea. Lots and lots and lots of life under our feet. Another startling statistic is about the ecosystem in our bodies. We are made of 1% human cells and 99% microorganisms! We just can't see them.

Just as in the environment above the ground, the one below the ground is made up of a vast and varied community of individuals playing many roles. Some of these tiny inhabitants align themselves closely with plants, and attach themselves to plant roots. They help change dead matter into forms that can nourish the plants growing there. They chemically change some substances. And one of the most important things they do in these days of climate change, in partnership with plants, is to draw down carbon into the soil. Maximizing that process is a huge opportunity to heal the planet. But it needs our cooperation.

Healthy soil has a tremendous ability to sequester carbon. However, much of the soil we have on earth now is not healthy soil. It has been over-farmed. It has been stipped of its green cover and lies baking in the sun. It has had pesticides and herbicides sprayed on it. In many formerly lush areas of the planet, desertification is taking place. One statistic says that 2/3 of the world is now desertifying, the ground turning to dust. That's an alarming statistic! There has been a tendency down through the ages for civilizations to rise to a flowering phase, and then gradually fail and disappear, and much of that process is because when we have many people living in a place, we tend to destroy the soil. Then it can't produce enough food for the population, and the civilization disappears, to grow up again in a new place.

The good news is that for millions of years, the earth has been able to self-heal and self balance. That ability is not gone. Human activity has just become too vast and too speedy for the earth to catch up. But we can do something about it. If we work together, we could harness the regenerative ability of the earth. There are people working on this, doing their best to educate us about how to care for our "mother" below our feet. And the things people can do are not complicated. We just need to slow down and change some of our habits. We can stop plowing fields in order to grow crops, instead planting in rows between a green foliage cover. We can stop using poisons, planting a variety of crops instead of monocultures so that insects are not immediately drawn to the one crop they love. We can learn to plant perennial crops whose roots grow deep and stay there year after year. We can make sure that the soil in our gardens or other cultivated places never stands bare and dry, using cover crops or mulch. 

In other words, we can care for the soil as if it is a treasured family member. Nurturing it, remembering its amazing capabilities, putting it first instead of last. It will take a little adjustment, a little uncomfortable change, but since our future depends upon it, it'll be worth it. And we'll gain a new friend at the same time, the healthy, thriving, populous community in the ground beneath our feet.