Topsoil
by Rayner Raynor
There is an ongoing argument between scientists over the definition of soil. The new definition is twice as long as the last, words that separate soil from dirt. Dirt is exactly what it sounds like: disheveled and displaced Earth. Soil has character, formed by context, a written history of shifting geology, climate, micro and macro-organisms. It takes centuries to form the terrain we live upon, and only months to ruin it. Healthy soils are a timeline highlighting the erosion from bedrock to soft granular topsoil. Their nutrients feed our agriculture, and their strength gives us the privilege to build above them.
There’s nothing more archaic than standing in a soil pit. Scientists and students clamor together, packed in like sardines. Peering at the earthen column, tapping their clipboards. I had my first experience just recently, young academics fighting for a view of our forgotten land. Soil science is a niche, ridiculously niche. The techniques are almost entirely subjective, lacking the precision found in every other scientific discipline. In the field, we estimate clay and sand percentages by feel. Rub some soil in your hand, feel the grit of the sand. Smear some mud on your palm, let the clay coat your skin. Let the Earth be more than land, bury your fingers like baby roots, and feel Gaia as she feels you.
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The Midwest used to be a world of wonders. The silence of soft breezes and trickling creeks, met with the rumbling thunder of stampeding buffalo. Tallgrasses stood high in these open fields, and what they lacked in above-ground height was made up for in soil. Reaching 10 feet under, these peaceful grass roots tucked away carbon sequestered from the atmosphere for millennia.
This age of free roaming life is a fantasy to the white settlers and immigrants who would soon reap these lands of its wealth. The buffalo, prairie dogs, and indigenous tribes of the time had no idea they were standing on some of the most agriculturally rich soil in the world. Only one other place in the world has the same kind of soil, and the Russian government has been spraying Ukrainian blood all over it for centuries, trying to take it from them.
Nowadays, soil scientists flock to see the beauty of Iowan Mollisols. These soil pits don’t have the same scarring and red oxidation seen on the coastlines; they’re black all the way down, caked in carbon and nutrients ready for any crop to nestle in them. You only get a concentration that sublime from centuries of natural processes, centuries of tallgrass dancing in the wind.
The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 opened the floodgates to foreign imperialists. They engulfed the region wielding hopes of the American Dream and promises from God. So, to the promised lands they went, and with them came their moldboard plows.
They say you can go crazy listening to the winds of the plains. They thought it whispered to them of the prosperity this land would bring, but their ears were tuned to their own prophecies. Farmers drained the land of its nutrients with destructive tilling practices, ripping up land to extract what they could use, leaving dry dirt where there was once pristine soil.
The breeze turned to wind. Wind that beats at the door. Wind that shakes the shutters. Wind that howlS in an open field.
It shredded thousands of miles of land. In the 1930s, Americans watched in horror as 100 million acres of the Midwest blew away. Dust clouds towering over 500 feet caked the land in cannibalistic consumption. Black and white stills are mainly all that remain of the Dust Bowl. Brittle wooden houses, facing clear, empty fields. It was like Mars: a dusty, lifeless wasteland. The high prairies of the west had been settled by colonials for less than a century and a half. The land was a resource, one to be mined and then cast aside. They turned soil into dirt, and no one saw it coming.
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We built before we knew. Mycelium grows anywhere there is air or water in the ground. Mushrooms and fungi have learned to live in all parts of the world, from the streets of urban landscapes to the chaos of Amazonian life. These decomposers shed toxins; they evolved to be Earth’s greatest healers. The closest relative to humans is mushrooms, but this roughly 50% overlap is misguided. We may spread like mushrooms, but we do little to help this planet, in fact, we might just be the villains of this story.
New York City has eaten Manhattan Island and spread its roots out, denser than mycelium webbing. The soil beneath skyscrapers, tight village streets, and hip coffee shops are not defined. Soil sutured with concrete and soaked in corrosive chemicals from sidewalk erosion. These soils have lost their history, and their potential has been disregarded. Look at any soil survey website, and you’ll find the truth of what consideration went into the ground beneath these cities before they were built.
I’ll save you the time,
it’s an empty page.
The land has been so misshapen and malformed that to dig up a city block is to discover a new kind of soil, a Frankenstein caught between what naturally was and what we forcibly did. We stamped it down centuries ago to make it submit to our construction, so we could stand so far above that dirt and Earth were thoughts of the past.
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Our cities have stretched over time. Society has seen its preferences for urban and suburban living push and pull on each other, resulting in mixed levels of care for both. Philadelphia’s premier gentrified neighborhood, Fishtown, sits next to one of the drug capitals of the US, Kensington. As new money pours into condos that look like Home Depot catalogs and local microbreweries with $20 hoagies, the other side of the neighborhood is coming apart at the seams. Foreclosures, broken needles, cops watching through tinted windows. Here, there are abandoned lots left untouched for decades, concrete like broken sheets of ice melting into a sandy grain. Through cracked concrete, the Earth breathes again. Gasping for air through its filthiest gills, these neglected and forgotten city plots should be raised as beacons of hope.
The tight streets of South Philly are some of my favorite places on Earth. Street trees shade the brick alleys, and window baskets are always plump with flowers. The shuffling of leaves in the wind breathes life into the calm liquorice enclave. Unfortunately, this luxury is deprived completely in most neighborhoods, most black neighborhoods, instead bare buildings and molten blacktop sit in the sunlight. Don’t be deceived, city planners are very intentional, and the divisions of race, economic status, and ethnicity are still marked on city streets.
Green space is a rare treat in most downtown areas. You take what you can get. It’s a shame that thousands of lots lie barren when they’re our best opportunity to heal communities. Sure, great soils take multiple lifetimes to form, but in our pursuits to conquer nature, we’ve grown better and better at reversing our tracks. Building up community gardens is a relatively inexpensive way of adding tremendous value to lower-income neighborhoods. It’s a medium for community, whether it’s through employment, education, or simply sharing a naturalized space with your neighbors. Their presence has been found to be linked with higher well-being and stronger ties with nature as well as communally. These small city projects are the grassroots that can help fuel our society’s healing.
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Sometimes I feel like I’m losing my mind staring at a sheet of colors, trying to pick out which one captures the right essence of reddish-brown, and even after deciding on one and telling your TA, they can only shrug and say, “Hm, that seems right…” Their guess is almost as good as ours. But classifying a soil is just a small piece of understanding it.
My hand is gripped firmly, feeling the rocks and dense clay bite the tip of the knife while digging it in deeper. It’s kind of a funny thing to dedicate your life to. We only ever decided to look more into the ground beneath us when our hands were forced, but in the environmentalist movement, we’ve come to reflect just how things really come together on Earth. In the crevices of what we used to call dirt, plant roots borrow their homes, microbes power nutrient cycles, and dead leaves transform into rich carbon to feed their parent tree.
I feel the soil fill the pores on my hand. At first, I flinch, but let it go, to see how I can be a part of this history too. Gaia has forged us mountains to climb, lakes to swim in, and an abundance of food to pick, so who are we to not say thank you in return?