Out of Earth! That was the title
of the book by the distinguished professor of soil science which captured how
civilizations sprouted from soil. The soil is central to our survival on earth.
The soil is important in purifying the air we breathe. Without clean air humans
are affected. The biodiversity in the soil plays a significant role in
supporting diseases e.g. the population of organisms such as anthrax and
salmonella are kept low by soil organisms. Almost every plant and animal
depends on nitrogen whose production is dependent on important soil microbes. Without
our soils there will be no life on earth. However, “advancement” has bred high
level ignorance about the very matter which sustains our life. Out of this
ignorance has arisen the arrogance which allows some people to describe the
soil as “dirt”. Our society is now breeding a new generation of children that
believe that crops are grown in the supermarket since that is the only place
they now encounter fresh food.
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| Source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biogeochemical_cycle |
As though the aforementioned is not
enough trouble, development /industrialization is leaving us with less and less
land to produce more food than was required decades ago. This means the soils
left must be maintained adequately to avert an imminent disaster. Climate
change is real and Nature doesn’t care about the notions we hold of its
element, but humans care! A future generation of people ignorant about the very
processes that support life could be our undoing. Because of this looming
possibility, this state of ignorance has become unacceptable, the responsibility
of a sustainable environment is on everyone. By making people see
in lucid and interactive ways the background reactions and processes sustaining
our highly digitized world we could slow down the process of environmental
degradation and climate change.
