This chapter gives soil the glory it deserves and has some gems of statements:

“Science can analyze and sequence organisms found in the soil, but it cannot make soil.”

Reminds me of a religious joke a neighbor’s kid told mine: God picks up some soil and makes a human out of it. He then asks a scientist to try. The scientist picks up some soil, and God says, “uh uh, you have to make your own soil first.”

It struck me that science and AI have the same fatal flaw: they can analyze the past, but they cannot imagine and create a future.

Another gem:

“The term Mother Earth was not coined as a sentimental kindness. It expresses the primordial truth of the origin of life.”

There’s also Peter McCoy’s quote about soil being the “skin of the world, tattooed with the legacies of its inhabitants.”

As much as science would like to reduce everything to individual pieces to be dissected and studied, soil is the epitome of integration, requiring true systems thinking.

95% of insects are beneficial to the soil and plants, but apparently the earthworm is the queen; “the planet’s greatest alchemists” excreting “vermicast”, considered the preeminent fertilizer on the planet.

Charles Darwin engaged his children in studying earthworms and championing them despite being ridiculed.

Then there’s the dung beetle which are one of the most effective at cleaning lands of manure, in addition to improving soil structure, burying seeds and recycling plant nutrients. Dung beetles create soil. Industrial agriculture destroys soil. And dung beetles.

Next come the ants, who according to E.O.Wilson, would rule the planet, if it weren’t for Homo sapiens. They did that before we arrived. There are 2.5 million ants for each human being, and the dominant majority are female.

Then it’s the nematodes who regulate the microbial population. There are over 100 million species, and an estimated 60 billion nematodes per human being. They live up to 12,000 ft below the surface. And about 35 species live inside the human body.

Nicole Masters draws an analogy between the human digestive system with the soil’s digestive process. Clean “food” makes both vibrant, while ultra-processed chemical concoctions destroy both of them.

Healthy soil is alive. It has a fragrance called petrichor or geosmin. Our noses and bodies know it, the smell of life, and it is good.

Modern farming techniques, like direct chemical applications and tillage progressively reduce soil to dirt, devoid of life, addicted to chemical inputs to survive. No different from human beings in this colonial capitalist structure who are addicted to high ease and low value.

The “Green Revolution” powered by chemical agriculture which was meant to end hunger and counter the Russian-inspired “red” communist revolution ended up becoming the single largest source of GHG, nearly one third of global emissions, in addition to degrading soil, chemical and water pollution, oceanic dead zones and loss of pollinators. Farmers depending on commodity farming like corn and soy are more financially insecure, indebted, stressed and work in toxic environments. And the kicker: 3 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet – the total world population at the start of the Green Revoluion.

“Soil is the dance and flow of carbon under the surface of the earth”, and this dance has a soundtrack of a variety of sounds caused by the various organisms and the movement of the soil.

Hawken admits to the near-impossibility of asking industrial agriculture to become ecological, because the agriculture industry is comprised of some of the biggest chemical companies in the world, and they still haven’t realized that “the means to regenerate soil cannot be sold in a can.”

He does name several “land doctors” who are healing the land using a variety of regenerative methods: creating more life, above and below, step-by-step.