'As dumb as dirt.’ Who on earth came up with such a foolish, disparaging expression?
From the days when we bake (and eat) mud pies until the day we return to the ground (dust to dust), our physical and psychological wellbeing is connected to and tightly interwoven with the soil.
Unfortunately, as humans have become more ‘sophisticated’, we have increasingly damaged Mother Nature, so badly in fact that in the past few years we have come to the stark realisation that our survival depends to a large extent on whether we can regenerate the soil. This has led to the worldwide trend of ‘Dirt-y Wellness’, according to a Global Wellness Summit (GWS) report released last year.
Soil. That pulsing ecosystem of microbiomes: More than 90% of all organisms on Earth live in the soil, billions of bacteria and fungi that turn it into a living microbial stew.
For two million years of human evolution, we lived ‘deep in soil, as foragers and farmers’. Then we became city dwellers, indoor beings, a species of house cats who have lost our daily interaction with the outdoors, ‘soil-deprived, no longer bathing in that bacterial and fungal richness’.
Mounting medical research indicates that the soil and human microbiomes have been closely linked since the earliest times and that the soil microbiome is the source of what humans need to survive, whether it is through eating plants
