Don't Call It Dirt: The Science Of Soil

Short Wave

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🗓️ 5 December 2022

⏱️ 12 minutes

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Summary

It's easy to overlook the soil beneath our feet, or to think of it as just dirt to be cleaned up. But soil wraps the world in an envelope of life: It grows our food, regulates our climate, and makes our planet habitable. "What stands between life and lifelessness on our planet Earth is this thin layer of soil that exists on the Earth's surface," says Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, a soil scientist at the University of California-Merced.

Just ... don't call it dirt.

"I don't like the D-word," Berhe says. Berhe says soil is precious, taking millennia to regenerate. And with about a third of the world's soil degraded, according to a UN estimate, it's also at risk. Prof. Berhe, who is also serving as Director of the U. S. Dept. of Energy's Office of Science, marks World Soil Day by telling Aaron Scott about the hidden majesty of soil and why it's crucial to tackling the climate crisis.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:07.0	I have to admit, I tend to take dirt a little bit for granted.
0:11.0	It's something I think about mostly if I track it in on the rug or if I need to wash it
0:15.3	off the dog after we've gone for a hike.
0:18.0	So in honor of World's Soil Day, I am here in the backyard digging in the dirt.
0:27.6	In this handful of soil that I just shoveled up, you know, first glance, it looks exactly
0:33.1	like what you'd think.
0:34.1	It's brown and crumbly.
0:35.1	It's got some clay consistency because it just rained.
0:39.1	But as I start to break it apart and look closer, I see all sorts of things.
0:44.4	There are earthworms, there are little white bug eggs like caviar.
0:49.8	There's, you know, rotting little chunks of wood.
0:52.7	And then just this web of roots and fungi all twisted together.
0:58.4	If you put, you know, a handful of healthy soil, say a forest topsoil if you will undisturbed
1:05.0	on the palm of your hands and look at it, just think about how that amount of soil holds,
1:11.1	you know, up to 10 billion individual living things in it.
1:15.9	Wow.
1:16.9	Most 10 billion individual things can come from anywhere up to five, maybe even more thousand
1:23.9	different species.
1:26.1	So we're talking about not just a lot of life, but a lot of diversity of life.
1:30.8	This is Asmratt Asif al-Bahe, a professor at the University of California, Merced.
1:36.8	She's also currently serving as the director of the Office of Science, the Department of
	...

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