Transcript for Dirt! The Movie

Since the beginning of time, of all the planets and

all the galaxies of the known universe,

only one has a living, breathing skin called dirt.

(BILL LOGAN, Author of the "Dirt, The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth")

All the silicon and aluminum that are the basis of the framework of this soil,

all the carbon in the hummus, the magnesium, the sodium, the calcium,

all of that is made in stars very different from our star very far away

and has probably been recycled through dozens of stars before it got to us.

We are made of the same five basic elements that the earth is made of.

The living organisms on earth have used

the very same molecules over and over again,

not just the same types of molecules, but the very same molecules.

Dirt is very much alive. Probably has in it all of the kingdoms of life,

from the tiniest bacteria, the fungi and the algae, the slime molds.

With the amount of species that live in a teaspoon of dirt,

I think it’s very obvious dirt might be more alive than we are.

DIRT! THE MOVIE

About four and a half billion years ago,

the earth was a fiery ball of molten rock.

Volcanoes punched through the surface,

showering minerals from the earth’s core,

and spewing water vapor that turned into rain.

For millions of years, rain pounded rock into clay,

and formed the oceans where life began.

Microscopic life oozed from the sea onto the land,

where it mixed with the clay,

creating the first living dirt.

Countless cycles of birth and death, fertility and decay

transformed this dirt into the matrix of life on earth.

When we humans arrived two million years ago everything changed for dirt,

and from that moment on, the fate of dirt and humans has been intimately linked.

We think that diamonds are very important, gold is very important,

all these minerals are very important, we call them precious minerals,

but they are all forms of the soil, but that part of this mineral, that is on top,

like it is the skin of the earth, that is the most precious of the commons.

Our wealth is imaginary, it comes from soil.

If we don’t take care of the soil,

which is just the first five centimeters layer of life

that is on the, on the earth, our future is totally condemned.

We take the soil for granted because it’s there, it’s everywhere

except when it, all of it has been taken by the wind or by the running water

and then you are left with bare rock and you realize,

you can’t do very much with the bare rock.

A lovely mild, sweet aroma and it has so much diverse life in it.

A handful of terrestrial dirt contains more organized information

than the surface of all the other known planets’

WHAT ?

contains more organized information than the surface of all the other known planets.

This much soil probably has in it tens of billions of microorganisms

and they’re all living together,

some in cooperation, some in competition,

so they have tremendous strategies for living with each other and getting rid of each other

and making their own space in the ground.

The idea that, uh, they’re just micro organisms, just stupid dirt’ is stupid.

What we often call dirt, you know, this,

the stuff we re trying to wash off our car, or wash off your driveways,

are really these soils and sediments that are vital to keeping our biosphere healthy,

which is all about keeping the plants and animals and ourselves alive.

Dirt is a really strong living word,

it’s a word like ‘house,’ ‘wrath,’ ‘eat, ‘frck,’

it’s a word that has flavor to it in your mouth.

And it’s a word about relationships.

Kids don’t go to play in the soil, they go to play in the dirt.

As we walk through the landscape,

not only are the birds aware and the bears and all the other animals of this forest,

not only are the birds aware and the bears and all the other animals of this forest,

but all the microbes in the soil are aware of our presence.

We’re deep in the old growth forest,

at the end of the trail that’s called Trail That Time Forgot

and here I sit amongst these giant spruce trees that have grown over the years.

They’re probably three to four hundred years of age, 120, to 160 feet high.

This old growth forest comes from the soil that’s so thin beneath my feet.

The soil was originated after the last ice age 10,000 years ago, when the glaciers receded,

they scraped away most of the soil down to barren rock.

Small lenses of soil survived, and in these lenses, trees and small shrubs began to grow,

but the soil is so thin, they climaxed, they fell over and the fungi rotted them,

the soil became a little deeper and the lens got a little larger.

Next succession would occur, and again, and again, and again, these cycles of renewal,

decomposition, soil building, soil becomes thick, and, as the soil becomes thicker,

it increases in its ability to support biodiversity.

Let me pull this back and you can see the mycelium is all underneath.

These are the interface organisms between life and death,

and as they decompose the wood, they generate soil.

This cobwebby growth then erupts into a mushroom.

Its spores spread and satellite communities appear

distant from the mushroom from which it sprang.

This is the way of fungi.

All soils in the world are infused with these mycelial mats.

This is what the entire soil is made of, it’s made of mycelium,

and as it decomposes the wood material and plant material, it becomes dirt.

Mycelium makes dirt.

Even in the concrete jungle, dirt finds a way to come into being.

I decided to write a book about dirt largely because everywhere I went in New York

people didn’t seem to believe in it, people didn’t seem to believe that nature existed at all.

Clive was a guy I knew really well. He was just a general handyman.

And one day he was asked to clean the front of the Cathedral

because there was a block that was loose in the top.

Clive fell off the scaffold. He fell more than forty feet.

While he recovered in the hospital, his Chevy pickup sat for months under a maple tree,

the motor not running.

But in the back of the truck - open to the air and the sunlight and the rain,

nature’s motor was emphatically running,

as fallen leaves, styrofoam cups, chinese menus and pigeon drops turned into a garden.

The process that turns garbage into a garden is central to our survival.

We depend on dirt to purify and heal the systems that sustain us.

As a water doctor the repository of life that I need to heal

are the organisms that are beneath our feet.

That’s the basic machine that has always recycled our water.

You know, there is no new water on the planet,

since the planet was created, it’s always been recycled.

So this notion that water is pristine,

it’s that community of soil, of dirt, of critters, of trees and plants.

It’s all of these things, including the tiniest worms in the soil that do this transformation.

Thinking about water, this pristine stuff that we’re drinking,

I just had a sip of dinosaur pee.

In our earliest stories, we’ve celebrated dirt as the source of who we are

and where we come from.

In the Amazon jungle, it’s said that one day Sun hurled a stick rattle into Mother Earth,

and out we came.

Ancient Egyptians believed that the gods shaped clay into humans

and put them in an earthly paradise.

Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions share the story that God scooped up dirt

and blew in the breath of life.

In Hebrew, the very name Adam means dirt or clay.

And Eve means life.

Dirt in the garden of Eden gave them, and us, everything we need to survive.

In traditional agriculture, the soil is the mother.

She’s the mother who gives, to whom you must give back.

And to treat soil as the sacred mother

is the best thing you could put in your relationship with the earth.

In traditional agriculture, soil is recognized as the source of all fertility.

The sacred cow is such a important part of sacred soil

because as we feed the cows, the part of the plant that we cannot eat,

they turn that into the real life of the soil, the cow dung.

Indian civilization wouldn’t have lasted 10,000 years

if it hadn’t recognized the worth of what is literally the beginning of dirt, living dirt.

Whenever interacting with nature, you’ve got to grow food for humanity and,

at the same time, you’ve got to grow food for nature.

Hi, welcome to Cannard Farm.

Plants get compounds from the air, and they get energy from the sun,

and they use their biological systems to, to fix this stuff into the sugars.

They use some of those sugars to put into their fruit for attraction,

to spread their seeds with all us animals.

About half of those sugars they secrete from their root systems

and pump those sugars into the soil to feed the soil biology.

Plants are absorbing moisture so there’s a tide in the soil coming to the plant.

While they’re alive they’re utilizing their bodily wastes

to soluablize the mineral nutrients from the raw parent material.

This is the raw parent material. A rock, this is planet earth.

We’re going to have tomato plants and little baby vetch plants growing up underneath them,

and we’re going to come in and harvest the tomato plants

and then the vetch plants will have the whole land and it will turn into a tangle of vetch

and other weeds, and they’ll be allowed to come to full maturity

and die of their own volition.

They’re going to die of maturity, they’re going to be grandmas at 93, dying of contentment.

Then that is going to offer the soil mature, durable organic matter.

Visionary environmentalist, Pierre Rabhi, is a farmer without borders.

He’s devoted his life to healing dirt.

Over many years, this dirt has taught me a lot.

God did not give us this amazing dirt to mistreat it.

I have a relationship with this living organism.

At times I’m Dirt’s father because I take care of it.

At times Dirt’s my mother because she feeds me.

And at times Dirt’s my lover because’

we share a loving relationship.

I take care of it and the dirt takes care of me. I feel the life within it.

Dirt that’s alive is a community

and that community is trees and plants, microorganisms living in the soil,

the plants that hold it together, the mulch that’s fed by all the leaves that come,

that’s an amazing community.

Add the layer of human community interaction with us, helping feed, helping water, prune,

but also exchanging the oxygen and the carbon dioxide, that necessary community exchange.

The trees feeding us fruit.

We live in potentially a Garden of Eden.

I’ve got zucchini, I’ve got strawberries, carrots, yellow beans, purple beans, cucumbers,

I mean, what more could you want?

The coconut.

I eat the ground.

I will tell you that every wine growing region I’ve ever been to, which is a lot,

Italy and Spain and France and Australia, and all these places,

the first thing I do is put my hand in the ground and eat it.

I don’t know what that means, so, if I’m crazy, but I’m telling you,I always feel a connection.

The ground is what you taste. When you really break it down,

when you’re not just drinking for casual fun, when you’re ‘nerding it up,’

it’s the ground that really exposes the wine.

Getting a lot of cranberries, I get a little bit of like a roasted peppers kind of thing going on,

maybe even a little bit of cassis on the back of the Sango.

Now, when you taste the grape, you know, maybe you’re tasting some of that berries.

Now, going down this beautiful vine, you get into the soil and, as you dig into the soil,

you know, you start, this is sandy soil, you start smelling it and you’re getting,

that classic dirtiness that you, sand and dirt that you got, and maybe even a little taste.

Every piece of land has its own flavor profile and people understand it’s all about their dirt.

Listening to the stories of the people who’ve gone organic, who’ve gone from being,

places that put awkward things into the land to being very clean, the wine is so much better.

And healthy vineyards make healthy wine.

The people who make the greatest wines in the world, they love their dirt,

they pick it up, they coddle it, they kiss it, they put it in a jar and it sits on their mantle

in the living room because they know, they know.

Growing up in a country like India, in the period when I did, soil literally was your cradle.

Everything was soil.

My parents were highly educated, but my mother had chosen to become a farmer,

and I remember holidays coming down to her farm

and our most fun thing used to be the cow dung and soil plaster

with which, on a daily basis, the floors would be plastered,

it was like artwork, it was like being a painter.

And for us that freedom to play with dirt,

I think has been both my intellectual, emotional and physiological immunity builder.

People have been building with dirt for over 9,000 years.

Most of the world considers this a really viable building material,

a third of the world still lives in earthen structures.

You can dig it up right on your site, you don’t have to transport it.

To operate heavy machinery, pull out hundreds of yards of soil,

then haul it hundreds of miles away to dispose of it like it’s garbage just seemed ludicrous.

We use the wonderful machine, the horse, in this case, to process our straw.

It’s an incredibly fine fiber.

And in that process, they’re adding enzymes and other proteins to the manure,

which act as a natural glue.

So, as this dries, it dries with an incredible hardness.

And we’re just kicking it old school,

it’s like, oh, this is how everybody’s done everything for so long.

The mixture of mud and cow dung in our climate, has many, many uses,

the cow dung acts as an antiseptic, so you don’t get infestations,

and mud, compared to cement, is warm in winter and cool in summer.

So, if you go into a house with a mud plaster, in the summer, it will be cool.

You go into a house with cement plaster, it’ll radiate the heat.

You get the dirt high, it’s a really different experience than VOCs and petrochemicals,

and I’d like to think that it lasts longer,

everybody could get it, if they got their hands dirty.

For us, mud is not just the matrix of life in where you grow your plants.

It’s our building structure, it is, it’s our very sense of who we are.

Dust to dust and ashes to ashes, we are dirt,

and we’re made of it, we’re made of clay, and to that we return.

Everything that we see as our flesh,

our blood, our bones, could not be here without the land.

The DNA text of a bacterium has entire paragraphs that are identical

to our own genetic instructions.

So, on a physical/chemical level, we’re just not all that different from microorganisms,

as we might think we are.

To understand, when you look at the mountains or the lakes, or the rivers,

and to feel that being a part of it, to feel that this flesh that’s standing here is that place.

That I am that river, I am that mountain, I am that dirt.

I could pick a hand of dirt and that’s, that’s what my grandmother used to say.

She, she’d pick up a hand of dirt and she’d say, ‘this is my flesh.’

We’re on our way to get some sacred dirt, get our souls right, cleanse.

Maybe throw some dirt in our hair or something.

Have a dirt bath.

A dirt bath, but this has got the holy dirt here Chimayo, glad to be New Mexicans.

Today we walked 22 miles, me and her did.

We do the walk every year to come over here and stand in the pit of dirt.

It has healing powers.

Gives us like a good sense of the Holy Spirit.

People from all over the world come here.

There’s a sense that God’s continuing creative action is real close here.

One of the meanings of Chimayo is that our connection to the earth is still sacred.

We did the pilgrimage today for my family.

My auntie, Mary Jane, just passed away, so that’s what sparked it up.

The dirt from the Santuario de Chimayo, has a specific sparkle to it,

so whenever we need it, we’ll sprinkle a little bit here there

and it does help, it’s proved true.

In the past I was not paying attention to the dirt,

but when it came to this place and I met people for whom the dirt is so important

because their lives used to depend on fields and crops and harvest.

I truly believe that then my eyes were opened

and I understood better the importance of Mother Earth.

Remember, you are dirt, into dirt you shall return.

The demand for natural resources has completely changed our relationship with dirt.

This is a fabric of life being torn apart that can never be put back together again.

All around the world, we are destroying dirt

in pursuit of the raw materials we consider to be more valuable.

There’s a practice of coal mining that’s called ‘mountain top removal,’

it’s strip mining with a vengeance, with equipment,

the scale of which is difficult to conceive.

Mountains are literally cut off and leveled

and they’re being destroyed in the name of cheap electricity.

It isn’t cheap at all, it’s unbelievably expensive.

The attitude toward nature that says nature is only resources to be used,

and not for the benefit of everyone, but for the benefit of a very, very small number of people

at a very, very thin slice of time in this human journey.

The coal companies can come in and blast and remove

a one-layer of what they call ‘over burden.’

The over burden is the boulder field, which will have no water table.

That will support no vegetation, and the mountain tops, with the things in mountains,

the heavy metals, the lead, cadmium, selenium,

and all that now is free to get out into the watershed.

I was born and raised here in Los Angeles in the 1950’s.

In fact, I was raised in the house right there with the white van in the driveway.

Urban intensity, but I got to escape it by hiking up here every day after school.

I’d come up with my friends, we would see the animals, the snakes.

We’d imagine getting to fish here, hunt, but the smog was devastating.

If you look out, you see the vastness of concrete, asphalt, homes, buildings,

parking lots, freeways.

The city was built and designed and has been managed for over 100 years

as a dead piece of inert concrete.

We put all this asphalt on top of living dirt.

We live in this living organism, it’s dysfunctional, pathological,

but it’s a living organism, and it’s called the Flat City.

When you have an area paved with something black, it’s going to collect a lot of heat,

so you get a very strong heat island effect from building a city like Los Angeles

and, superimposed on this, of course, come the freeways,

so the biggest way that the city, as we’re building them now, relate to climate change

is that they put up massive amounts of CO2.

We took the rivers and encased them in concrete.

We paved literally two thirds of Los Angeles so that now when it does rain,

instead of being absorbed by the soil,

the water runs off and it’s billions and billions of gallons.

The city of Los Angeles itself spends close to a billion dollars a year

to bring in water from as far away as Wyoming and Utah, all over to bring it here.

They don’t need to. They have half the water falling here now,

but because we’ve sealed the dirt, and sent the water away,

20 percent of our electricity is to bring water here.

So, when you turn on the tap, it’s a climate change event.

Without healthy dirt, it’s difficult to survive extreme climate events

like hurricanes, floods, windstorms and drought.

A large part of Bundelkhand is today suffering from a very extended drought

linked to climate change,

and this long term drought has led to crop failure, which has led to starvation.

You create deserts where you are, and eventually these micro deserts

coalesce and form much bigger areas,

and we can’t live very happily in a desert.

And so we start fighting between farming communities and nomadic communities,

over land that is not a desert, that still has dirt.

Desertification, or land degradation is one good way of undermining security in any country.

Throughout history, we’ve seen civilizations rise and fall

based on how they treated dirt.

The American Mid West was known as the Bread Basket of the World.

Across the prairies, using modern industrial machinery, farmers removed native grasses

grasses to plant a single crop over millions of acres.

This seemingly efficient system of farming, called monoculture, worked in the short term,

bringing record yields and profits.

Monocultures don’t produce more, they produce less.

Monocultures produce nothing for the soil.

The idea that we are increasing soil fertility and agricultural productivity

through industrial monocultures is one of the biggest lies.

What the farmers didn’t realize was that they were killing their dirt

by destroying its root structure.

After years of severe drought, fierce winds picked up whatever remained of the topsoil

and just blew it away, leaving the dustbowl in its wake.

The Dustbowl was an event not quite on the same scale,

but getting up to comparable to what happened after the last ice age.

We made a really big change in the landscape just by bad farming practices.

A third of our topsoil we’ve lost in the last one hundred years.

It’s the problem of agriculture, it’s the way we do agriculture now.

If you look at the landscapes today,

we have millions and millions of hectares of monoculture of one variety

one species, one variety.

All these monocultures are actually going to collapse under climate change scenarios,

especially in drought situations.

Now genetically modified soy dominates this land.

When you see the vast scale’ of what’s happened to the soil here in Cordoba’

you know it’s a serious problem.

The more we grow monocultures, the more vulnerable our systems are.

So, we need to diversify the systems, for example,

in the winter here sometimes, we grow broccoli with fava beans.

If a frost comes, the broccoli dies, the fava bean remains, very resistant to frost.

If you have corn and beans and sorghum and a drought comes, the sorghum will remain,

everything else will collapse, so you don’t put all the eggs in one basket.

We have this one species planted for miles and it’s an all you can eat restaurant for pests.

So, once a pest learns to unlock the key and get into one kind of plant,

and you’ve got that plant planted for miles around, it can open every single plant, okay?

And so that’s how pest epidemics get going, so then we add pesticides.

Those chemicals deplete the life of the soil.

They take away the structure of the soil, they take away the water of the soil.

They take away the very organisms that make for soil fertility.

Essentially, insects and plants are so like us, physiologically, you know,

cell to cell, gene to gene, protein to protein

that if it’s going to kill plants and if it’s going to kill insects, it’s going to kill us, too.

What this system produces is food empty of nutrients but loaded with toxics.

We weren’t designed to eat that kind of diet.

Industrial farming practices have robbed the soil of its nutrients

and created a huge demand for nitrogen fertilizer.

When we pump those nitrogen fertilizers into the soil,

we’re not just killing the life of the soil--this is mobile nitrogen.

Only about 20 percent is taken up by the plant.

Some of it goes to water tables, and the rest goes into rivers.

In the American Mid West, the excess nitrogen flows into streams,

down the Mississippi River and into the Gulf of Mexico.

The nitrogen then feeds giant blooms of algae that suffocate nearly all marine life,

creating a massive dead zone, where only jellyfish can thrive.

This mobile nitrogen also combines with oxygen to form nitrous oxide,

which floats up to the atmosphere, accelerating climate change.

25% of greenhouse gas emissions are coming from an agriculture

that has become a war against the soil.

For two seasons, three seasons, they’ll get a soya harvest,

then they’ll abandon it like a desert and cut down another 100,000 square miles.

Trees absorb pollutants, protect topsoil,

prevent erosion, sequester carbon and release oxygen.

The entire Brazilian Rain Forest is being cut down for expansion of soya.

We have always cut down forests to clear land for growing food.

Now, to meet the global demand for lumber, paper, bio fuels and land to graze cattle,

forests around the world are being mowed down and the dirt beneath them ravaged.

The government and many other people see timber, they see money,

but they do not see the diversity of life that is in those forests.

Each year 100 million trees are turned into 20 billion mail order catalogues.

When I see how much the Congo forest is being encroached upon,

how it is being harvested, how it is being destroyed,

I know that if the Congo forest goes, so does Africa.

Behind me we have an example of ecological Armageddon.

This is a practice currently employed by the foresters and by logging companies who,

after they’ve cut the old growth forest, adding insult upon injury, the brush is then set on fire,

sending carbon dioxide, as well as gases, into the atmosphere.

If this wood had been chipped and left on the ground,

the fungi would have recycled it, eventually building soil.

When it rains, the water runs off and carries with it the wonderful topsoil that we need

to sustain vegetation in these forests.

We do not replenish the underground water, and therefore, eventually leave us dry up.

In once productive farmland, it’s the farmers who are being ravaged

as they struggle to pay for expensive new technologies and equipment

they’ve been pressured into buying.

Farmers have been pushed to buy more seed, have more tractors,

been pushed into the loan economy.

Now, an activity that was a zero cost activity

suddenly becomes a 5,000 rupee activity every year, and the farmer is burdened with debt.

I couldn’t make the payments on my tractor, so the bank took it away.

Now I have to look for work and my family is facing starvation.

I think we’ll have to leave.

As farmers around the world go broke and lose their farms,

their land is taken over by international agribusinesses

that grow genetically modified single crops for a globalized economy.

I just love farming.

In India alone, the target is 600 million farmers

should disappear in an industrial model of farming.

No one thinks about where will the soil be, where will the soil keepers be?

Saddled with debt they are unable to pay, farmers around the world are committing suicide.

So far here in Bundelkhand there have been about 5000 suicides.

I went to the fields to look for my husband’ and found him hanging from a tree.

In India, over the last decade, an estimated 200,000 farmers have killed themselves.

Many by drinking the pesticide they can no longer afford.

I think the problem is this:

When you step on a person he shouts.

He lets you know he’s upset. The soil doesn’t.

But in reality, the soil does scream.

Erosion means the soil is hurt.

It’s bleeding, It’s in pain.

We don’t understand this.

Because we don’t know its language.

Soil is a living system, it’s not dead.

That’s the problem, we treat it like it’s dead.

Because of our activities, we should be very concerned about our future.

If there was a united organization of organisms,

and each organism had the right to vote, would we be voted off the planet?

Given that our bodies reject viruses, the analogy that the earth could reject the human species

as a virus is very apropos and has good biological precedent.

Over the course of 30 years, taking and editing photographs,

Sebastio and Laylia Salgado have documented

environmental and human devastation around the world.

When you do human photography,

when we do this kind of photography, then you must live with people.

Living with people, you have time to see what happens around you,

and you start to see that there is a very strong correlation

between human degradation and environmental degradation.

This picture, it’s, you know,

when we see all dry and the people, they are asking for rain.

It’s because we have no more trees, no more forest, and the people suffer.

This is Mali, no more water inside of this lake.

And here I have a picture of the people walking inside what was the lake

and that has become a desert.

People who live on degraded lands, become very poor,

often they will abandon their land and they will go to cities

looking for jobs that are not available and they will end up in slums.

For the first time in human history, more people live in cities than in the countryside.

In the developing world, nearly 80 percent of city dwellers now live in slums.

They are displaced people who’ve been separated from the dirt that sustained them.

It’s lunchtime in one of Haiti’s most desperate slums, but because of rising food prices,

this mother and her toddler now rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs,

cookies made of dried yellow dirt.

Across the planet, hungry people are rioting over food.

The food riots are a direct consequence of the industrial model of agriculture,

the failure of the industrial agricultural model.

Deadly conflicts and outright wars are breaking out over our dwindling supply of fertile soil.

The conflict in Sudan is really a conflict over dirt.

For the first time you have corporations

that are going to be dictating the future of the soil

and the future of the landscapes.

Floods, drought, climate change, even war,

are all directly related to the way we’re treating dirt.

We, as a human species are facing, first, the problem of ecological non-sustainability

that we have created, toxic load, we’ve created climate change.

Each of these problems, individually, could push the human species to extinction.

Collectively, we can be absolutely sure, we don’t have too much time.

Here’s this 120 year window in which we find ourselves.

And it’s probably the most important window in the history of Homo Sapien.

I think it’s this period that’s the most important since our walk out of Africa,

because we’ve now got to come to the end of the extractive economy

and figure out how to live within our means.

We are constantly being bombarded by problems that we face

and sometimes we can get completely awkward.

The story of the hummingbird is about this huge forest being consumed by a fire.

All the animals in the forest come out

and they are transfixed as they watch their forest burning

and they feel very awkward, very powerless, except this little hummingbird.

It says ‘I’m going to do something about the fire.’

So it flies to the nearest stream, takes a drop of water and puts it on the fire.

It goes up and down, up and down, up and down as fast as it can.

In the meantime all the other animals, much bigger animals,

like the elephant, with the big trunk, could bring much more water.

They are standing there helpless, and they are saying to the hummingbird,

‘what do you think you can do? You too little. This fire is too big.

Your wings are too little, and you’re beak so small,

you can only bring a small drop of water at a time.’

But as they continue to discourage it,

it turns to them without wasting any time and tells them,

‘I’m doing the best I can.’

And that to me is what all of us should do. We should always feel like a hummingbird.

After years of bearing witness to environmental degradation,

the Salgados knew they could no longer simply remain observers.

They had to do something

Why not plant a forest? The forest we had before here?

The first plantation we did, we did it here and there.

When you come to Instituto Terra, you see one millions trees together

and how big a trees that you can embrace.

You see the birds, we have so many birds now.

In all this land around the planet, if we started to replant,

in ten years would be no more dead land.

When Pierre Rabhi looks at a desert, he sees an Oasis.

I went to Burkina Faso for the first time in 1981.

My specialty was to keep desertification from killing dirt.

So I proposed they practice agroecology.

His lifelong work in Africa has been to promote agroecology,

an organic, bio-diverse agriculture that combines scientific knowledge with traditional wisdom.

Today there are over 100,000 farmers in Burkina Faso

who are using the methods we suggested in 1981.

We have estimated that Ethiopia alone, if properly cultivated,

could feed the entire African continent.

It wasn’t long ago that native Americans were living off this arrangement.

They ate the prairie turn up. Course ate things out of the streams,

and they also ate the bison and prairie elk.

Here was what we might call an original relationship with the universe.

To build an agriculture

as sustainable as the ecosystems we have destroyed is necessary and possible.

What we’re trying to do is build agriculture based on the way

the ecosystems were ten thousand years ago.

This prairie would be our library.

What the soil scientists here are trying to do is to understand those dynamics

below the surface that sustain what we harvest above.

Just to show you in one plant,

some of the diversity of root systems that we have.

With a perennial it allows this plant to come back each year from its root system.

It doesn’t have to be started each year from seed

and it doesn’t have to grow its entire root system each year

like an annual plant would have to do.

Our annual crop such as this native annual wheat,

it’s root systems are much more shallow,

so if it rains, carrying with it nitrogen and that nitrogen ends up ten feet down,

this wheat plant can’t get it, so we have to put on more nitrogen.

That native perennial at ten feet is able to grab it.

This ain’t doin it, this is.

This root diversity below ground, green diversity above the surface,

is going to be far more resilient to a change in the climate than the annual monocultures.

A lot of what we’re talking about is going on below ground.

So let’s just go below ground.

So here we have a nice soil pit roughly six feet from the bottom of the pit up to the soil surface.

Now not all soils are this deep obviously, but the thinner the soil

let’s say we have bedrock right here

the thinner the soil the more important it is to have the perennial roots to protect that soil.

If you only have this much soil in which to grow your food

and you lose several inches of it a year, it’s not too many years and you’re growing nothing.

Our goal is to have soil erosion go to zero.

That’s the first important step, as I see it,

to begin the reconciliation for us as a species out of context.

When I started Narvania with concern for the seed and its renewability and its fertility,

I started it as my personal commitment.

Not knowing how many would join,

no matter how long I would be able to continue this commitment,

in practicing farming that is first a service to the soil.

What Vandana Shiva and her colleagues do here is to collect & preserve the seed varieties,

to share them with the surrounding farmers,

so that the entire agricultural region regains bio-diversity and is revitalized.

The only quality food that we can ever produce

is food that is a byproduct of our relationship with the soil.

We will use vetch, we will use clover, and I’m going to broadcast them by hand

and while I’m broadcasting them by hand,

I’m going to give each seed all of the energy of my soul,

and connect with all of my plants and my soil.

It’s so very important that we recognize that we’re not separate from all of it.

What’s happening here dictates what happens up here.

And what happens up here also dictates what happens down here.

They’re totally connected,

the below ground and above ground are totally connected ecologically.

A new generation is finding ways to change their relationship to dirt.

One group of young city dwellers moved from Brooklyn to upstate New York

to put down new roots.

We grow $20,000 per acre per year of vegetables,

feeding thousands of people on what was a hayfield.

And there’s tons more of these fields all over this region.

We have been working together for two years now.

This is such small time, small scale,

compared to most other farms,

but we’re preserving the soil by doing it organically.

It’s pretty amazing to have your hands in this matter right here and it’s all alive.

Add a little water, add a little sunlight and tend it a little bit, and hey.

At this point we have about 500 families who we supply vegetables to on weekly basis.

Miriam and Benjamin have figured a way to make it work for themselves and for us.

We have healthcare, which is pretty amazing, I mean I have healthcare.

I haven’t had healthcare in awhile. First drop off is in Bay Ridge.

Then we make it over to Greenwood Heights.

Then we make it over to the Red Shed Community garden.

Giving food, the food you grew, to people, that’s pretty awesome.

Community supported agriculture, or CSAs,

provide fresh produce to subscribers.

In exchange for us providing them produce every week, they pay us a yearly subscription

and that money allows us to grow the food:

buy seeds, buy equipment, take care of ourselves.

I think there are a lot people trying to make efforts, doing things like this.

Give us a natural niche in a place that’s pretty much concrete, you know.

So you know you do what you can.

These are gonna be goin’ to Brownsville, Brooklyn,

to a lot of the less fortunate families.

Be really a good thing in the future if some of the families could actually come in,

come here and see the whole dirt process.

Cause a lot of times in a, you know in a city there’s actually no dirt,

you see everything is pretty much concrete.

You don’t have to move out of your neighborhood to live in a better one,

but you sure do have to fight,

if you want to reconnect your life into a more natural state

that actually includes poor people, and poor people of color.

So we work to create opportunities’do tree planting, to work on creating parks.

The presence of trees and open space actually has a positive impact

on people’s mental well-being.

We’re in the South Bronx, on top of the house that I live in

and what we’re standing on right now is the green roof that we planted about 7 months ago.

A green roof is a sustainable building technique

and it’s really simply soil and living plants,

but it has some really amazing properties, such as storm water management.

It actually retains about between 70-95% of the water that falls on it.

Energy conservation, it provides an insulating layer to the floor underneath it,

they protect the roof from sun damage

so they actually last up to five times longer than a traditional roof.

And it actually cleans the air as well. Isn’t that beautiful.

Up here, that’s the down spout that goes from our green roof,

so all the excess water goes down and then it’s carried over into this rain barrel

and that’s connected to a drip irrigation hose, which nicely waters our tomato plants

and our lovely pear tree and the rose bushes and there’s cauliflower.

So this is our compost bin, so remember all the weeds that I pulled up off our green roof

they’re going to go right in here.

And we found some earth with a lot of clay content in it,

and it’s really been nice to have it amended with the compost

look at that, isn’t that beautiful?

What we want to do is green as many areas of our urban areas as possible

to kind of mimic what nature has already stated works.

So many of us feel overwhelmed by the problems we encounter.

Sometimes you feel like so what am I, what can I do? Me, little me.

It was 1970, I was 15 and the Forest Service told us that smog was killing the forest.

They said they found that there were some trees that were smog tolerant

but no one was planting them and it was up to us kids if we were going to save the forest.

So what we did was take a piece of our camp that had been turned into a parking lot,

we peeled back a four inch layer of tar and oil and let the dirt come back to life.

So it really got started out of your concern for what was happening with the trees

and kind of grew and the volunteers joined and...

... and other people who thought it was a good idea joined in.

Tens of thousands of young people come here to learn about how nature works in cycles

and they learn how those cycles were broken, causing damage to the eco-system.

They learned their profound power and their role as the healers of that cycle.

How long would that take to, to grow with proper care to a fairly good size, 4 or 5 feet?

Two or three years.

And this is gonna be a Redwood?

It’s already a Redwood.

Oh, excuse me.

You look across any school yard in Los Angeles mostly it looks like a parking lot.

That very same process of attacking a parking lot is what’s happening in school yards and neighborhoods all over.

A prominent reporter said,

well if you remove the asphalt, where are they gonna play?

Well, that really reveals how far we’ve come from nature.

It’s really amazing what started happening

as students started to remove the asphalt and green their campuses.

This place used to be all concrete,

just like down there at the basketball courts. We planted an edible landscape.

That is very good !

It’s, experiencing nature is so comforting to these kids

who have never had their hands in the ground before.

They just need to be here, they want to be in the garden.

Well, I think we should all get our hands in the dirt,

and pick the vegetables ourselves

and bring them into the kitchen and make them into these beautiful soups.

- Sure! - Thank you!

Our whole lunch is actually made out of dirt

Thank you, dirt. Thank you very, ... for the salad.

Salad, sandwich, milk and lunch...

Yes, dirt you made my lunch.

Yes, dirt you made my lunch.

All our prayers are ancient prayers from the beginning of the agricultural season.

Begin with, I know I have to take something from you, Mother Earth,

to feed myself, to feed my family,

But I promise I will I return as much as I can.

This is compost. We just cultivated a bed

so we put compost all over it

and then layered it with some newer soil.

There’s no such thing as waste until it’s wasted.

Compost is the black gold that keeps dirt healthy.

I really think of this compost pile as a giant casserole

say a lasagna.

Cause all these things are going to start cooking.

That’ the way compost works:

basically you need two thingsyou need stems of plants or chopped up leaves, something like that,

and then you have the moist green ingredients, and that’s things like weeds or old cucumbers

or anything like that that’s leafy matter.

And the dried brown is the fuel, the moist green is the fire.

when you add nitrogen and carbon together you get this wonderful combustion

aided by our little friends the bacteria and the fungi

that are in here making it all work.

and it turns into something resembling the best soil you ever saw.

We got a call from the state of Maine that they had a fish waste crisis.

They were dumping fish waste out at sea

and EPA was beginning to crack down.

And I said lets bring all the waste onshore and compost it.

But guess what we had to deal with?

We had this kind of material here. Take a, take a whiff of that.

Holy smoke!

That’s um, that’s pretty strong isn’t it? That’s pretty strong.

Yeah. As soon as we started composting it everybody said

Oh, that’s what the Indians used to do.

We’re combining it with, with a carbon source.

And the traditional carbon source for making compost is soft wood sawdust,

but this is really step, step one.

Not bad. This is about one turn too early.

You can pick up a slightly ammonia smell with this

and that kind of gives me away that I’m rushing this just a little bit

The next step up, we’ve turned it four more times.

At this point you can smell it, no ammonia smell at all,

that’s a good sign, that’s a real good sign that we’re right on track.

It has a real earthy smell, smells just like dirt right out of your garden at this point.

And this is their final product, look at that. (Wow)

That, all it took was about eight months of composting.

It’s beautiful!

There was a neighbor no more than a couple of miles away

who had a business shucking clams,

and if we turned up at his operation at 3:30 when he quit work every afternoon

he would dump all of these barrels of clamshells into the back of my trailer.

We would bring them back and spread them on the fields and rototill them in.

It was a pretty interesting thing because the local extension agent came by one day

while I was doing that and he looked at this and he said,

Well that’s foolish Eliot, they won’t break down for a hundred years.

And I said, Great! You mean I have a steady supply of calcium

for the next hundred years?

And it was just these two ways of looking at it.

He wanted it today,

I was thinking of long term fertility and something that would be there for the future.

As of late people are realizing that soils and sediments actually contain

a fair amount of energy, and energy that you find is tied up as organic matter, right?

So soils, sediments, ah, waste water, right, the things that you may throw out of your kitchen,

as food scraps or the tremendous amount of organic-rich waste that comes out of industry,

you know, we would just dump that somewhere and ignore it,

and now we’re beginning to realize that we can harness energy from it,

and to that end we’ve been looking a lot at these microbial fuel cells

which are devices that harness energy from the naturally occurring cycles that take place in soils.

The basic premise is that you have microbes that live in soils and sediments

and they eat the organic matter in the soil,

and to generate energy from that they have to move electrons off of that

through their bio chemical pathways and stick those electrons onto something.

By using a microbial fuel cell that you would put into the soil

you can do things like turn this landscape light on.

So what you see here is our landscape light being powered by energy that we harness from microbes

which you could have in your home, in your backyard,

or we could use these to illuminate parks and public spaces.

And our hope is that we’ll be able to find ways

to use microbial fuel cells to power,

maybe outdoor landscape lighting, or even bring lights to rural remote regions of the U.S.

and of course, to help those people in the developing world improve their quality of life.

Rikers Island in New York City, one of the largest prison complexes in the world,

offers inmates the opportunity to work in the Greenhouse Program.

When we talk about dirt, we’re not just talking about dirt,

we’re talking about the spiritual as well as the physical attributes of one’s life,

and I think that’s what people relate dirt to after they come from jail into the gardens.

It’s no longer dirt, it’s a metaphor for a healthy life.

I grew up in Brooklyn, NY.

I have a three year old. I actually had my 20th birthday here. A fight brought me here.

You know, reality smacked me in my face, you know, being here,

and at the same time, I’ve, I’ve found something I like to do.

I notice when people come through the gates,

you know they’re hunched over, they’re feeling the impact of what’s like being locked up.

All of a sudden as they start moving through the garden,

you can kind of almost see their chest cavity expand and their shoulders go out.

Yeah, when I come out the doors I said wow, it’s so beautiful.

Then the first thing I see is my friends:

Donald and the guinea fowl are my favorite birds, and I love them to death.

They’re so serene and beautiful.

It’s something that one, a person would have to feel for themselves,

that’s behind those closed doors.

In the period of time that it takes to mix soil, to dig into the soil,

I see this transformation.

And it really comes with that first exploration into the world of dirt.

It’s really amazing what started happening

as students started to remove the asphalt and green their campuses.

Principals have reported that kids

are playing more cooperative games and less aggressive.

This is really cool.

Digging is magical. Everybody loves diging.

You have to get on your knees and you have to dig through that dirt.

Living things work together to make life a better place.

It’s a good thing. God made dirt and dirt don’t hurt.

The Dirt Program is great. It’s just another way to get back to society.

I’m actually helping people, feeding the homeless.

I would love to work with flowers and dirt,

now that I conquered my fear. I’m not scared what comes from it.

At some point we fall in love with the whole thing,

and it can either be an activity or it can be a plant they connect too

But they connect.

I like the cactus. I really do.

Things might want to come and eat off it, and can’t cause it’s tough on the outside and protects itself.

It’s sweet inside. I would say this is me.

When you’ve got a prison industrial complex and one that, you know, supports our GDP as much as this one does,

then, if we build a jail it will be filled.

What we wanted to do is show that there is another way,

if you’ve got a bunch of guys and gals who are planting trees,

who are installing green roofs, those are actually paying the city back,

in terms of storm water management costs, in terms of energy conservation costs.

The Green Team is an opportunity for inmates leaving Rikers

to continue building the skills they learned.

And it also offers them a way to get paid.

When I came out, I started workin’ the next week.

You know so I won’t get back any trouble or anythin’ like that.

I felt that if I kept continue programming positive you know I’ll stay out.

Our re-conviction rates of people

who’ve joined the Green Team are extremely low.

Then you get the wire first...

These green collar jobs are jobs that can’t be outsourced,

so when you’re working to restore a wetland,you’re working to put on a green roof,

even putting on solar panels, you’re not going to send your house to China to have that done.

It really is a nice way to bring together the three traditional parts of a person,

their physical moving part and their intellectual part and their emotional part.

People getting their hands in the dirt and actually knowing the power

that they have to tend to something, another living thing, I mean

that’s really powerful to folks who have been told all of their lives

that they have nothing to contribute.

Guide it in.

This is a lot about team building too.

And these projects benefit the whole community.

All of this concrete and stuff don’t need to be here.

You don’t have to leave the concrete jungle as is.

A lot of people they ashamed to touch the dirt and get ands dirty.

But dirt is what you’re made of, so it’s good.

Kids really get their power

when they’re learning and they’re dreaming combined.

In a number of neighborhoods where we’ve given the kids those sledge hammers,

and they’ve busted the concrete, many of them were gang kids.

After they got done with planting the trees,

they voluntarily went and painted out the graffiti.

There’s nothing more moving

to see tough kids have their hearts opened because they did the work.

And they learned where the real difference is.

And they see and feel the real difference they make.

And they see and feel the real difference they make.

and I’d be like, it’s just dirt, grandma. Dirt ain’t alive.

She goes, it has oxygen and everything in it, and minerals and vitamins.

And how do you think the plants grow, and the food is good,

And you, literally goes in one ear and come out the other.

But now that I’m older I understand more how it’s very important to help the environment

because sooner or later if people don’t really wake up and see

what’s going on with global warming and all of this, it’s gonna be too late.

It’s gonna be really too late.

Even though what you are doing may be very small,

may be very insignificant as far as you’re concerned,

collectively, if so many of us, we are doing the same thing,

we would accomplish a lot.

It really does start at home.

Sometimes we can’t change things on the grandest scale,

but if you start to change yourself, and your friend starts it,

and your friend starts it, pretty soon a lot of people are doing something different.

The good news is that we don’t need to start from scratch,

we can learn a lot of valuable lessons from the wisdom of nature.

Put on the skin a dress,

a green dress, like trees, like vegetation.

And then when the earth is covered with green, the vegetation,

with the trees, with the forest, it looks very beautiful.

And in this age of climate change,

can you imagine how happy the planet would be?

What we give to the soil, what we give back to the soil,

how we recycle our waste, back into the soil, is what’s going to sustain us.

We have great friends out there. We have biological allies.

Underneath, in the soil, are soil builders, which are the earthworms.

We’re selling worms. You can get worms to go.

Darwin said at the end of evolution’s history, they will be recognized

as the most important species, because they build the soil.

Oh there’s one, there, see, go get him.

What we’ve destroyed, we can heal.

When we have the trees like this going, going, going, going,

we see, now we can do more.

I may feel insignificant,

but I certainly don’t want to be like the animals watching as the planet goes down the drain.

I will be a hummingbird. I will do the best I can.

Oh that smells so good, it really does.

God made dirt, and dirt don’t hurt.

Put it in your mouth and let it work.

Dirt !

When nature works on her own, she only creates living soils.

But the moment the human being enters,

they can either work like nature and rebuild the life of the soil with every action,

or take it away.

The choice is desertification or fertile and living soils like these.

Of the billions of planets in all the galaxies of the known universe

only one has a living, breathing skin called dirt.

----------------

CREDITS ROLL

BILL LOGAN Author of the "Dirt, The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth"

VANDANA SHIVA Physicist, agriculture activist

FRITJOF CAPRA Physicist and writer

JOHN TODD Biologist and eco-designer

GARY VAYNERCHUCK Winemaker and TV presenter

WANGARI MAATHAI Nobel laurate

MIGUEL ALTIERI Entomologist of UCA, Berkeley

JEREMY NARBY Antropologist and writer

PETER GIRGUIS Biologist, Harvard University

PAUL STAMETS Mycologist

ANDY LIPKIS Founder-president of TreePeople

BOB CANNARD Farmer

PIERRE RABHI Farmer and environmental ativist

KEVIN ROWELL Bioconstrutor

MARISHA FARNSWORTH Bioconstrutor

DAVID ORR Professor of the environmental sciences

JEANETTE ARMSTRONG Spokesperson of the Okanagan Indians

JUAN VICENTE SANCHEZ Professor of agriculture, Argentina

SEBASTI’O SALGADO Photographer and co-founder of the Instituto Terra

LELIA SALGADO Co-founder do Instituto Terra

WES JACKSON Founder, The Land Institute

JERRY GLOVER Soil scientist, The Land Institute

BENJAMIN SHUTE Co-owner of the Hearty Roots

MIRIAM LATZER Co-owner of the Hearty Roots

DANNY PERCICH Farmer, Hearty Roots

MAJORA CARTER, Founder, Sustainable South Bronx

ALICE WATERS Chief founder of Chez Panisse, founder of Edible Schoolyard

WILL BRINTON founder of Woods End Laboratory

WES KINNEY Owner of the Kinney Compost

ELIOT COLEMAN Organic farmer

JAMES JILER Director of the Greenhouse Program

End ! ! !