I am getting ready to work my garden soil, starting indoors with carefully placing tiny seeds in compostable containers, later planting the seedlings outside in a cold frame as soon as the frost is out of the ground.
Forty years ago when our family moved from the city to the country, the soil around the dwelling I was building was pure sand. Not much grows on sand, so after completing our new home, I removed the thin cover of grass and started to wheelbarrow scores of loads of black mature manure from the next door farm – some 300 m away – and slowly the soil of my future garden turned color, from a yellowish sandy substance to a darker and more fertile growing medium. Each year I add new compost as well.
What I was doing was improving the substance we ourselves are: we are soil, we are of the earth. A long time ago, the Bible tells us, God fashioned the first human pair from the earth. The Hebrew word for soil is Adamah, from which Adam comes. The word adam reminded the Israelite immediately of the first Adam who was taken from the soil of the earth, hence the well-known saying: soil we are and to soil we shall return. Just as we have red clay and black soil, we too have people of different colors. The word ‘adam’ typifies the human race in its unbreakable unity. We all come from the earth and we all go back to the earth. Earth-bound we are, forever. We, the human beings, are adam, and belong to adamah, the life?bearing earth. With every sinew of our existence we are tied to the earth, which bears us and feeds us.
But by and large we regard soil as disposable, just as we do people. We trample on it, pave it wherever we can, and, stupidly build our cities on its most fertile sections, because that sort of earth is good for digging and drainage, so we abuse it: it’s only dirt after all.
Yes, soil is treated as dirt that’s why we regard it with contempt. Yet all human life depends on it. Ancient Sanskrit texts have warned us: “Upon this handful of soil our survival depends. Husband it and it will grow our food, our fuel, and our shelter and surround us with beauty. Abuse it and the soil will collapse and die, taking humanity with it”. Yes, destroy the earth and we destroy ourselves, and that’s exactly what we are doing.
Monsanto is no help. The ‘santo’ in Monsanto seems to suggest ‘sanity’ and ‘saint’ but the opposite is true. Monsanto deals in seeds specifically doctored to supposedly withstand pests and insects, while its weed killer, called Roundup, is now said to be cancer-producing. The GM – Genetically Modified – seeds cannot be used for seeding the next spring. How much better these seeds are still being debated. It seems to be that putting these altered substances in the soil may poison it forever. In my book when I see the word Monsanto I change it to Mon-morte, a substance associated with ‘morte’ = death.
We now have more than Seven Billion of ever more greedy eaters in the world. To keep up with global food demand, the UN estimates, 6 million hectares of new farmland will be needed every year. Instead, 12 million hectares a year or 30 million acres are lost through degradation. So we move to the next part of the earth: rip out the tropical forests, the Trees of Life, so that McDonald can offer us cheap hamburgers. That cure too has become a curse.
Soil. A miraculous substance. One handful contains more micro-organisms than all the people who have ever lived on the earth. To me soil is gold, my soil in which I plant potatoes and cabbages, onions and beets, carrots and tomatoes. Yet we treat it like, well, dirt.
A paper, by researchers in the UK, shows that soil in small patches that people cultivate by hand contains a third more organic carbon than agricultural soil and 25% more nitrogen. This is one of the reasons why our 2000 square feet – about 200 square meters – vegetable garden produces at least 5 times more food per square foot than mechanically worked soil.
A little aside, still to do with soil. The Middle East is in turmoil. Why? Oil is one reason, but more important is the soil or the lack thereof. The Middle East once was immensely fertile. The ancient empires of the Persians and Medes, the famous cities of Babylon and Nineveh all functioned so well and so long because their settings were like Paradise: luxurious land, high-yielding hummus, the original word for humans. No longer: overgrazing, stupid agricultural actions, greed in other words and endless wars, have turned these regions into deserts, now only still inhabited because of oil, that poisonous substance that will undo us all. Global Warming and looming food and water shortages will accelerate the coming collapse. Polluted earth breeds polluted people.
Civilization started in the Middle East. The Bible mostly plays out there. Loss of soil always creates turmoil and this turmoil even topples tyrants. War and pestilence might kill large numbers of people, but in most cases the population recovers. But lose the soil and everything else goes with it. That’s what’s happening in our suicide-bent world.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer has something to say about soil and the earth.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a theology professor in Berlin and totally opposed to the Hitler regime. He was hanged in April 1945, a few weeks before Germany collapsed. He was then 39 years old and the author of many books. I have his A Testament to Freedom a 530 page volume containing his essential writings. In it he takes the church to task as it has moved away from the earth and has embraced the pagan-idea of heaven, increasingly seeing the earth as evil. Here are his words: “Christ does not lead us in a religious flight from the earth in other worlds beyond: he gives us back to the earth as its loyal children.”
Bonhoeffer calls this ‘heaven message’ pious secularism. His words: “The Christian renunciation of God as the Lord of the earth is pious secularism which also makes it possible to preach and to say nice things.”
In his Creation and Fall he is very outspoken as well. There he writes: “The soil and animals over which I have dominion, are the world in which I live, without which I cease to be. It is my world, my earth, over which I rule…. I belong completely to this world. It bears me, nurtures me and holds me….There is no dominion without serving God. Without God, without our brother and sister, we lose the earth. God, brother and sister, and the earth belong together.” So far Bonhoeffer, my kind of theologian.
Then there is J. H. Bavinck
Bavinck too has written about this. In Between the Beginning and the End: a Radical Kingdom Vision, talking about Jesus, the Son of Man, humanity personified, he wrote: “Death by hanging severs the connection with the earth that feeds us all. Numerous nations still maintain the ceremony of treating a small child with special rituals when it first gets into touch with the fertile earth. This contact with the earth is an essential element of life. We are taken from the earth, we belong to the earth, and we live through the earth. Our bond with the earth is so strong that we cannot for a moment imagine existing apart from the earth, and hanging breaks the contact with the earth. Hanging places a person outside the great cosmic unity and puts him all by himself as an exile, outside the wider context of God’s glorious creation. That is why hanging is an eloquent expression of being expelled from God’s kingdom. When suspended above the earth, humans are placed outside the contact with the earth. Exiles, lonely and lost souls, humans are carried outside the powerful context of God’s life?energizing grace. Such is the significance of that dreadful death, death on the cross. The Scriptures, rather than emphasizing that death on the cross is painful, point out that it foreshadows the cruel reality of carrying God’s curse.
A handful of Mud
In Tending the GARDEN in the chapter called “A Handful of Mud” I found this thought-provoking description. It is written by a missionary who lived in India. In the chapter he related something he experienced as a young child growing up far away from urban areas. He and his playmates had been skipping and hopping on the side of the steep hill. These slopes had been patiently terraced hundreds of years before, and now every terrace was perfectly level and bordered at its lower margin by an earthen dam covered by grass. While running, one of the boys had dislodged one of those dams resulting in water and mud seeping away. Along came an old man. This is what he told these rambunctious boys: “That mud flowing over the dam has given my family food every year from long before I was born, and before my grandfather was born. It would have given my grandchildren food, and then given their grandchildren food forever. Now it will never feed us again. When you see mud in the channels of water, you know that life is flowing away from the mountains.”
Soil is life. A handful of mud can make the difference between life and death.
Thanks to globalization, thanks to tireless tractors and huge harvesters, thanks to tree-removed mountain sides and acrimonious agricultural practices, no longer is a handful of mud treasured for its life-given potential. The earth has become inert dirt, has become a medium to be made and molded in the image of the machine, just like the modern human race. The earth, now penetrated with pesticides, now artificially adulterated with fertility-killing fertilizer, now depleted with life-giving microbes, resembles the dead minds that operate the multi-million dollar behemoths, only interested in the price of corn and wheat and soybeans.
Soil always means toil. It reminds me of Genesis 3: 17: “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life….. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken.”
Until that time Adam and Eve lived off the land, were gatherers, as the apples and berries and other edibles were there just for the taking. Monsanto asserts that the toil is taken out working the soil thanks to oil, but that is pure foil. This spring, as usual, I will brave black flies and pick potato bugs and do whatever I can to produce food by the old-fashioned and cumbersome way. That means digging my raised beds, and hoeing the weeds, and praying that the rains will be just right: not too much water, not too little. Since my soil is still very sandy, very porous, it can take a lot of water. Every year I seed and plant my garden in a different order, and with 7 large beds, I rotate my produce every 7 years.
All year we eat from my veggie garden: healthy organic food, home-grown: no carbon footprint there, no stuff imported from thousands of miles away, displayed to please the eye, treated to look good, on soil that is saturated with none of the ingredients that makes soil healthy.
We are what we eat. Only when food is grown on healthy soil can it produce healthy produce and healthy people. We are what we eat. No wonder illnesses multiply and tumors appear out of nowhere because soil without toil has become oil. Basically we eat poisonous oil. Soon shrinking government budgets, a product of stalled global economies will cause cutbacks also in healthcare. That means that increasingly we are on our own. Prevention is the best medicine. We are what we eat. Good soil means good produce, means healthy people. Good health starts with the Good Earth.