1.1.1 Getting started
Welcome to Soil Matters!
With reports of a limited number of harvests left, regular media coverage of temperature extremes and crop losses, soaring food prices and increasing chronic disease burden worldwide1–4, we are reminded that change needs to happen. But what does Soil have to do with all this? And how can our actions, both individually and collectively have an impact? What’s more, how do ways we relate with Soil matter?
This is an introduction to Soil through an exploratory process that attempts to bring to attention, the microscopic and the planetary, the individual and the collective, the local and the global, the biological and the social, the here and the there, the now and the then, the scientific and the philosophical, and lots of in-betweens. We’ll explore how and why Soil is a key player in food production, human health and climate change. We’ll look at some important disruptors of healthy Soil and how we can encourage soil health. And we’ll touch on ways of putting it to action, in the garden, as consumers and as citizens. As part of this, we also explore ways of practising and re-building or remembering relationships with others, including Soil.
Much of this practice involves opening to different ways of knowing. In some parts of human society, cognitive ways of knowing dominate and are seen as more credible, over for example knowledge that is experienced, sensed or noticed. So-called evidence-based and measurable ways of knowing may in some contexts be deemed superior. Coming from a Western-style scientific background, I have felt at home in these notions. And yet, in this exploration I want to encourage an openness to other ways of knowing, to see cognitive knowing as incomplete and to nurture curiosity for other knowledge traditions and ways of seeing, being and doing.
References
1. FAO warns 90 per cent of Earth’s topsoil at risk by 2050 [Internet]. 2022. Available from: https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/07/1123462
2. Shenoy S, Gorinevsky D, Trenberth KE, Chu S. Trends of extreme US weather events in the changing climate. Proc Natl Acad Sci. 2022 Nov 22;119(47):e2207536119.
3. Baffes, Temaj. Food prices continued their two-year-long upward trajectory [Internet]. World Bank Blogs. 2022. Available from: https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/food-prices-continued-their-two-year-long-upward-trajectory
4. Ansah J, Chiu CT. Projecting the chronic disease burden among the adult population in the United States using a multi-state population model. Front Public Health. 2022;10:1082183.