Watch “Dirt” the Movie Today
March 28th, 2010 · 1 Comment · Posted in garden
Be kind to your soil
In case you haven’t noticed, soil is one of my favorite subjects. The greatest event that takes place in our garden is not the vegetable harvest at the end of the season, but the day our food scraps and dried leaves and coffee grounds transform from “waste” into new soil, or what we call “compost.”
Civilizations rise and fall on the health of their soil. In the last 100 years, we’ve lost one third of our topsoil in this country through poor farming practices. Soil is a living thing, full of far more organisms than those that walk the surface. In just the top six inches of topsoil, all of life on earth depends. And yet we treat it, well, like dirt. Instead, we should be nurturing it and caring for it as if our lives depended on it. Because, in fact, our lives do depend on dirt.
This is the driving thought behind “Dirt!” the movie. It’s based on the book “Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth” and traces our on again-off again relationship with the soil, how we’ve imperiled the planet by either mining our landscape indiscrimently for minerals or paved it over with concrete to make cities and highways, how we’ve mechanized food with the aid of artificial fertilizers and pesticides that destroy soil, and driven thousands of farmers into debt and suicide with industrial farming methods.
Yet, people seem to find a way back to the soil through gardening and tree planting and individual acts of kindness toward the environment. We seem to be entering a new age in which we face stark choices between nurturing the planet, or creating the means of our own destruction. Ask Alice Waters and she would say, Teach the kids to grow vegetables and make soup. In Maine, they are finding ways to use fish waste to make compost.
And Eliot Coleman is a happy man, spreading clam shells on his garden to guarantee calcium for future generations of plants.
You can see “Dirt!” the movie at a free screening tonight at Busboys and Poets, 14th and V streets NW, at 5 pm.
Ed; Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth was one of my pool-side reading books last summer!