At one point or another, everyone has been asked to justify his or her career to somebody outside of that field. Parents, mentors, funding agencies… Everyone wants to know why what we do matters and warrants the rest of the world’s support and attention. I’m graduating in May, so it’s probably time for me to perfect this particular spiel.
I study soil. More specifically, I study below ground systems (read: bugs, soil, roots) and their influence on the above ground plants and the entire ecosystem. All of that probably means nothing to you, as it means nearly nothing to my parents, but I think there are some really big ideas encapsulated in that statement, and I’ve got history on my side to prove it.
Ever since humans adopted agriculture and settled down to build civilizations and move rocks around symbolically (pyramids, the face statues of Easter Island), people have been able to determine their own fate by how they treat the soil. When valued as a resource, protected and improved upon — as the Inca did in the Colca Canyon of Peru — fertile soils can feed populations for centuries and lend stability to a civilization in the face of climatic variation like droughts and harsh winters.The Inca would have been set for eternity if the Spanish hadn’t brought smallpox to their valley.
Other civilizations thought of their soil like dirt, a lifeless, plentiful substance that would always produce food. Such was the case of the Easter Island inhabitants. It turns out that the island-wide statue building competition actually cost them every single tree on the island, beckoning massive erosion as well as less precipitation without the forests that held these natural processes in check… Oops.
But why does all of this matter today? Maybe I should ask why shouldn’t it matter today, because most leaders seem to have forgotten the lessons of history. Just in the three years since I’ve graduated high school, we’ve added another billion to the human population. That’s seven billion mouths to feed, shelter and clothe, and all of those responsibilities require fertile soil.
In the United States, our commercialized agriculture is depleting groundwater reservoirs in the Midwest, and the careless ways we till up the soil and leave it exposed to the elements are causing massive erosion. Sediment is the No. 1 pollutant of service waters, and when it starts to build up behind our dams and levees, dredging the sediment that used to be fertile topsoil is quite expensive. Those same levees and dams are creating negative impacts further downstream, too; southeast Louisiana is losing a football field of land to the Gulf of Mexico every 48 minutes without the natural processes that build and replenish the Mississippi River Delta. In the face of climate change and a still growing global population, it’s time we consider our own soil management practices as our greatest enemy.
So back to what I do… My work can offer solutions to the environmental messes that humans inevitably cause. I can identify forests or virgin grasslands as crucial carbon sinks when we think about carbon reservoirs that, if emptied, could accelerate climate change to intolerable levels. I can identify swathes of land that should not be farmed because they physically cannot support large-scale vegetation. I can describe and quantify the processes of nutrient cycling and soil development in a variety of ecosystems, and I can use this data to predict how the ecosystem services we’ve depended on for millennia will change with climate change. Most of all, I can encourage our leaders to think of the ground beneath our feet as soil, not dirt, and to talk about how inextricable this life-giving medium is to the longevity of the American civilization.
A message for big brother: stop treating our soils like dirt.
Kenna Rewcastle is a senior in college scholars. She can be reached at [email protected].
