April 22nd was international Earth Day. We decided this year to highlight an often overlooked but crucial aspect to life on earth – soil.
Land has become such a contentious issue around the world, who owns it, and how it’s used. Soil has so many life giving functions, purifying our water, protects against flooding, combats drought, it can capture and store vast amounts of carbon, and most crucially provide a nutrient rich environment for plants to grow which we need for food and oxygen.
Due to commercial agriculture and human activity, large pieces of soil have become sterile or barren. As much as 60% of usable agricultural land lay fallow due to pesticides and monocrop farming. Large amounts of topsoil is eroded every year. If we continue on this trend we will soon face serious food security concerns across the world.
There is however multiple organizations trying to bring the importance of the issue to world leaders and the general public. Figures like Sadhguru are actively campaigning through “Save Soil” for the health of our soil and organizations like the Soil Association.Org does work all over the world educating, campaigning and training farmers to use soil regenerative farming methods like permaculture, food forests and other agroecological methods.
Prevention is always best, so to ensure we protect our precious resource, we need to take action on a very personal level. Simple actions can make a big impact. At home, mulch! Mulch helps retain moisture in soil and provides a constant supply of fresh nutrients, compost aerates the soil and enrich it to promote better plant growth.
Plant ‘forests’. Any barren pieces of soil has a chance of burning and drying out, killing to microbiology and mycelium network that keeps the soil alive. Covering barren soil with plants suited to the climate and area can quickly recover soil by bringing nutrients in to the soil, creating constant biomass that can rebuild soil over time and cooling it down to help retain the water. It’s also helpful to remove alien species as they can leech the soil from nutrients essential to indigenous plants this can change the soils pH and cause the soil to degrade or desertify.
Protecting the earth is everyone’s business, we are intimately connected to every aspect of it, the air, the water the soil, we need to keep this healthy if we are to survive as a species.
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