I’ve been reading a lot about soil lately. That’s not dirt. Dirt is soil with all the supporting organisms–bacteria, fungi, and larger creatures like worms–removed from it. Soil engages in complex interactions with plants, providing them with nutrients and enabling inter-plant communication and feeding underground, sometimes even working from inside the plant.

Today’s scientists are just starting to understand soil. Just last December, scientists published* findings of microbes in ancient Irish soil, microbes that seem able to combat four of our six worst antibiotic-resistant disease organisms.

There’s not too much ancient soil left for us to check out.

Sadly, we’re on a course to destroy all the world’s soil, along with all the other stuff we are destroying. “We” refers to that global blight, homo sapiens’ Civilization. So many problems it causes! Yet could we live without opera? Much less indoor plumbing…

The May Harper’s cover story, We Can Do It Again, describes the origins of the New Deal, which were well before WWII. Caucasian settlers had taken one look at the prairie and proceeded to did it up, despite millions of people having been bountifully sustained there for thousands of years prior. Big money/power forces were responsible for policies that resulted in desperate farmers forced to compete against each other to produce crops for which prices were dropping to turn to the bad farming practices that changed feet of rich soil to dirt. Corporate America contributed in its usual helpful fashion, for example, convincing farmers to sell train rights to their acres of dust because the steam from the train would create rain.

Maybe I should characterize the blight as white homo sapiens’ Civilization.

Can it be that those of European origin, which includes me, have an innate urge to destroy nature rather than understanding it? By methods such as deforestation and dam-building, we have destroyed habitat from Australia to New England and beyond. Of course we were racist then, determined not to learn from the successful inhabitants, or even to acknowledge them as successful. Now we are not racist at all, and always take the time to understand any system before altering it.

Or not.

The more primitive humans weren’t living in passive harmony with nature. Huge numbers of bison and passenger pigeons were managed by natives in North America, and swaths of the Amazon were terraformed by those in South A. All these people were able to maintain the bounty of the land while being both healthier and more satiated than the Caucasian immigrants. Were they just smarter than us?

Seems possible, since we have evidence of the problems we are causing now, and we still can’t seem to stop ourselves.

If only the current inhabitants could have controlled their borders!

On the other hand, we did a great job of turning around a lot of the Dust Bowl effects, both by restoring ecosystems and by putting people to work improving living conditions for themselves and others. This work was diverted to the war effort during WWII, then, sadly, dropped for the most part thereafter, despite exhortations from some leaders. Those people who accomplished this monumental turnaround were the same ones I was complaining about above.

Hope? Go Green New Deal!

================

* https://phys.org/news/2018-12-bacteria-ancient-irish-soil-halts.html