Dirt is Life

Dirt is Life 

Mud, Soil, Dirt, its alive and its feeds your existence. Were you as dismissive of dirt as I once was? Lets take a look at what dirt is made of and how dirt powers the human experience. 

Dirty Aaron after a muddy soccer game!

For most of my life I dismissed dirt as funky and went to great lengths to oppose getting “dirty”, with rare exception of a muddy soccer game. I played defense and loved to slid-tackle forwards trying to get close to my home team goal box. What I did not understand until recently is that dirt is the earths living skin from which all life emerges. Sure I knew that plants grew in dirt, but stopped short of thinking any deeper into the subject until recently....

Cow is made of grass/ grain : grain and grass is made of dirt! 

All food that humans eat comes from the natural world. This might come as a shocking surprise to people who think that food comes from a grocery store. The steak you eat is made of a cow, a cow that ate plants and grasses, plants and grasses that people learned to cultivate in dirt.


Plants and grasses are made of dirt, they take carbon from the air, minerals from the dirt, water from the ground and sunlight from the sun and produce life. Cereal grains that turn into flour make up a lot of the carbohydrates we eat. Sugarcane and rice are other sources of carbs we eat. The plants that we eat as food grown in dirt. The wine and beer we drink are made of grapes and grain that grew on plants made of dirt.


Dirt is made of old plants and grasses and tress that have been broken down by an elaborate community of life that are made of dirt as well. Dirt is made of thousands of kinds of rock debris, wood debris, microorganisms, bacteria, and fungi. Dirt is plant food that recycles naturally with living beings over and over again. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, we are made of and fashioned from things of this world, from soil and plants and animals, and when we die we return to the ground (hopefully without preservatives) and become part of the dirt again. Don't think for a second that the box they put you in will stand up over millions of years in the ground, eventually you will become part of the earth again one way or the other. 

Grain/ Grass growing in Dirt on top of clay/rock!

Plant roots break down the rocks with their waste products, the minerals released in this process nourish the plants and the orgasms that break down the dead plants. As plants die and bread down naturally with fungi, they form more dirt and the cycle repeats. When we strip a forest from a landscape or clear the vegetation from a lot, we are taking away the soil building lifeforms from the land. Where is your garden?

Human Food Chain/ Cycle: Eat Plants or Things that Eat Plants

Humans are made of dirt. The water we drink, the mineral we eat, the proteins and fats from our foods, they are all made from dirt by plants, or made from plants by animals who eat the plants, animals that we then eat (hopefully not). When a pesticide is sprayed it enters the plant, then the animals and then humans either through the plants or animals that we eat. Sickness and diseases like cancer result from pesticide pollution. Synthetic pesticide, herbicide, fungicides and other "control" chemicals are toxic to soils, plants, humans and other animals. The chemicals get into soil and water and stay around as persistent organic pollutants (POP's). Many toxins are magnified in the food chain, such that by the time they get into our foods they are more concentrated then they were in the environment. Pollution of all kinds is therefor bad for life because it poisons the systems that fuel the human experience with food. Pollution makes live harder and more painful for all living beings on Earth!

Nature filter our water for free: We need healthy nature for clean water! 

Dirt is a filter that breaks down waste. The natural would has been filtering and recycling water and organic waste for all of human history. When God created Adam and Eve, Adam's name means dirt in Hebrew and Eve's name means life. God literally breathed human life into the soils and dirt according to the bible. The natural world cycles water through rain, that become snow, that then moves through the land. The soils take this moisture and it becomes part of life. Humans learned to redirect water to hydrate soils thousands of years ago in Egypt. Flooding of the once mighty rivers in that region fertilized the landscape, which was then cultivated with agriculture by humans: civilization as we know it began with the organized management of water and dirt.

Industrial water pollution burning on top of a river 1952 Cleveland 

Interestingly, much of the outsourcing that has occurred over the last 40 years has moved many industrial pollution sources to China and other developing countries. The consumer of these Good in Europe and America therefor no longer sees or smells the pollution directly from the manufacturing of the goods they buy. That is called externalization, where the impacts of ones choices become the burden of someone else in another country. The American buying socks made in Honduras does not see a picture of the sweatshop when they are making their purchase. When we buy and iPhone we do not see the slave labor and toxic wastes emitted by Foxconn in China.

Chinese industrial waste coloring the river and poisoning the dirt!

Rusting circuit board piles leaching off heavy metal pollution

Dioxin emissions from paper pulp processing in Tacoma Wa to e-waste piles leaching off mercury, lead and arsenic in mainland China: our lands, airs and waters are being polluted by industrial waste at a scale never previously seen. China, the hub of world industrial production, has very lax environmental laws (part of the reason production is so cheap in China), and factories in China use rivers to carry away industrial wastes. These wastes go downstream where other people use the river water for farming....the toxins thereby enter the food chain.


Trash Dump Problem


When we throw something in a dump, it sits there getting rained on for a long time. Weak acids in the raid from air pollution (smog) leach toxins from the trash and generate a stinky foul liquid that pollutes the environment. 


Plastic Trash is Toxic


As plastics break down under sunlight, heat and pressure, they emit petrochemical toxins directly into the piles. These toxins are not broken down efficiently in the environment, and we are producing them on such a scale that natural system can no longer handle waste break down effectively. 


Nature Does Not Understand


The environment has never had to deal with a lot of synthetic human waste products. Chemical products that we use in cosmetics, cleaning products: non-biodegradable chemical products, lawn chemicals and bug killers and other toxic things that people buy at hardware stores and use at home are incompatible and toxic with living systems. When we take a drug of any kind, the metabolites of these synthetic substances end up in our waste output, that eventually enters the environment. A lot of synthetic materials and chemicals end up in trash dumps, where they are leached off into the ground and water by acid rain. 


Industrial Waste and Pesticides


Industrial synthetic chemical toxins are sprayed on all conventional non organic food crops. Other industrial wastes are released by point source industrial polluters like coal power plants, and these toxic wastes end up entering the human food chain, where these persistent pollution toxins are causing cancer, brain damage, organ and tissue damage and other toxic impacts, diseases, suffering and sickness.


The Population Problem


The cost of our over population as more consumers are making choices they dont understand that have toxic impacts on the living systems in the world. The earths dirt, water and air is polluted by the upstream mining, processing, manufacturing and transport of the "goods" we buy as consumers. Because there are now more people demanding more things, the scale of this problem has increased dramatically. 


Toxic Fossil Fuels


The fossil fuels we burn are produced in a toxic chain of industrial waste and then when we burning them even more pollution is released. Try breathing off the tailpipe of your car when it is idling... see what I mean. Go find a coal power plant and get a nice thick waft of the sooty plume its emitting. Go drink a glass of water with some lawn chemicals mixed in... yuck right...


Lossing Track of Where Food Comes From


People are increasingly isolated from farms and soil as millions of people flock into cities every month. Generations of people now exist that have never planted anything edible in soil, who have never been to or seen a farm in first person; who only buy their foods from industrial suppliers through grocery stores and as such have distorted understanding of what constitutes "food", where food comes from, what is in the food, ect. 


Growing Awareness


Fortunately there is also a growing movement and popularity of returning to organic agriculture. More people are starting to understand that industrial toxins should not be sprayed on our food to boost monsanto's profits, and that we can all win and save money by avoiding the health problems associated with ingesting monsanto's frankenfood chemicals and GMO experiments. 


Safer Production


Organic and all natural foods are produced in ways that respects the environment by people who understand that we have an ethical obligation to each other not to ruin, wash away, poison, pollute or degrade soils essential to the future of food. 


Nature our Business Partner


We know that we must make nature a business partner and respect what nature gives us: food to fuel the human experience. We cannot make synthetic foods, food at the scale that humans require can only be produce by a partnership between soils, plants, water and the sun with human cultivation. We have do our best to preserve and protect the integrity of these systems by voting as informed consumers for environmentally responsible products and organic foods. 


Protecting the Future of Food


Going green is about protecting the future of food. Going green and voting for organic at the co-op, farmers market or grocery is about protecting your health and the health of your family and friends. When we take care of nature, nature takes care of us. When we pollute nature, we then eat the pollution which poisons the human experience. 


Sickness is the Cost of Pollution


A lot of preventable suffering and disease exists as the byproduct of industrial air, soil and water pollution; industrial pollution that occurs because of how things are made, and what they are made of. 


Voting for a Healthy Future


By voting for organic, we are voting to protect the land, air and water from pollution. By becoming smarter consumers, we can get more with less money and have a much lower negative impact. We can make positive changes to protect our future if we know a simple fact.. that life is made of dirt!

Composting

Composting is a fantastic idea. You can compost at home really easily. Alternatively you can throw your food scraps into your yardwaste bin, and the company that collects your yardwaste will compost it into soil that they will then gladly sell back to you for $20-$30 per square yard. With composting at home you can make your own soils :)

Check out this video on home composting from a blog that I just started reading: 

http://www.thekindlife.com/post/great-deal-on-a-home-composter

The Kind Life, Mrs. Silverstone and her husband Mr. Jarecki's Blog promotes environmental stewardship, heathy vegan eating, and other eco-friendly healthy lifestyle ideas

More on Composting! 

Plants that we eat are made of soil and in the composting process plants that we eat and other organic plant debris that we can not eat turns into soil that can fuel the growing of foods that we can eat: a positive feedback loop that produces edible food plants from inedible plant parts. 

Magical Plants

Plants are magical in their own way and so are soils. Soils are teaming with lifeforms, many of which have relatives in our own gastro-intestinal systems. Bacterial and fungi in the soil are doing all of the heavy lifting in breaking down organic matter. The heat and pressure of a compost pile help to speed up the decay/ recycling of these plant parts. 

The Plant Soil Food Relationship

Plants take carbon from the air, water from the ground, nutrients from the soil, and sunlight from the sky and magically self assemble them into a huge range of lifeforms, many that are edible and delicious when combined with other plant parts, herbs and spices. Plants energy efficiency for food calories is approximately %300 to %1000 more efficent than meat production. If humans ever wish to live outside of earth in a sustainable way on the moon or mars or father out, we need to collectively master the art of gardening and recycling plant materials and food wastes efficiently with composting.

Natures Beauty

No human artificial creations come close to mirroring or comparing to the subtle complexity, beauty and wonder of plant growth. Plant life be it edible vegies, grains, herbs or huge wood producing trees, is absolutely wonderful. These plants that we eat power the human experience, and the experience of all other living things we regularly interact with. Plants come from soil and become soil.

Pollution is Toxic

Pollution is really harmful to life because it gets into our soil, air and water. Pesticides and other industrial toxics from coal power and oil refining do not break down easily in the environment, many of them are called POP's or persistent organic pollutants. These toxics kill the living beings in the soil and make plants sick. When the plants soak up these toxics, they become toxic to consume. Right now, companies that emit pollutants, are not required to pay for all of the negative impacts that their emissions cause. Human health impacts from pollution translate into costly to treat deseases like cancer and neurological conditions, add tens of billions to our health care system. Soil runoff, fresh water aquifer and river pollution, climate change, smog, ground contamination: the problems with conventional toxic pesticide Monsanto style agriculture are negatively affecting everything from the economy to public health and the environment. 

Monsanto is Evil

Please look online on facebook and other sites and join Anti-Monsanto groups. Monsanto profits off of poisoning other people. Companies like monsanto that derive all of their profits from selling toxic carcinogens pesticides sprayed on food crops/ and polluting life with Genetic Modified Food  experiments (GMO's) with unknown and high questionable safety. These GMO foods are sold without a label indicating that they are GMO because Monsanto has installed its employees in the USDA, FDA, Congress and the Senate to prevent GMO labels from going on foods because they know the general public would avoid buying products that contain GMO! The safe way to avoid supporting evil companies like monsanto is to buy organic foods that say they are GMO free.