Favourite book this month: Grounded
After reading this book, I’ll never look at soil the same way again… without soil, there wouldn’t be life on this planet. That’s every reason to look after it.
Enjoy your time, space and elements you rent on this planet. After about eighty years, if you’re lucky, you’ll give them back for something or someone else to use. Perhaps you’ll become a vase or a piece of art; a tree or a flower. Maybe you’ll be carried around by air currents or drift across oceans, bumping into other particulate beings on your travels.
Everyone leaves a legacy in something or someone else.
It is the soil that allows us to do so.
Alisa Bryce
The author Alisa Bryce, Soil Scientist gave me permission to write some snippets of her fabulous (and some parts humorous) book relating to soil and natural burials:
“The living thing is now well past the realm of the biotic. It has become the soil, ready to enter the world of the living, but in a different form. When viewed from a soil perspective, decomposition is quite beautiful. Not an end, but a transition. It is the idea behind natural burials…the idea of nutrient afterlife rather than a soul afterlife. Since the beginning of humans about 108 billion people have lived, along with so many other living things that, were it not for the soil, the world would be covered in layers and layers of corpse. Sometimes decomposition is fast, sometimes it is slow, but give it enough time and once-living things eventually become soil.”
“There are a set number of elements on earth. About twenty of them, including nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium and sulphur, are part of every single living thing: everything from a carrot to a whale to a virus – and you. In this busy world full of different life forms, life just keeps turning over. The partnership entered between soil and life forms billions of years ago persists today. The soil is a portal between the living and the dead, recycling the elements to turn one living being into the next. And the critters that live on and among the soil particles, in the cracks, pores and channels are the masters behind it all. They constitute the soil ecosystem, and it is glorious. The jungles we see above ground are deserts compared to those underground. …. The saying goes that there are more microbes in a single teaspoon of soil than there are people on the planet. Living things battle for these elements, persisting for a few days or decades, then giving them back to the Earth. This is the way it has been since the beginning of life. Every living being is reincarnated … or at least recycled. Your eyes contain atoms that were once., perhaps, a dinosaur’s toenail, your eyelashes maybe once a blade of grass. The carbon in your body could have been buried deep within the Earth, then shot to the atmosphere by a volcanic eruption, floated around for a decade or so in the atmosphere before being dissolved in the ocean, then taken up by a fish that was caught and eaten by your mother.” Alisa Bryce
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How soil shapes the games we play, the lives we make and the graves we lie in.
By Alisa Bryce
“The elements that make up everything on Earth are in a constant state of flux. They cycle through the soil, plants, animals, water and the atmosphere, changing form and location but never being created or destroyed.” Alisa Bryce
