TL;DR
Soil health is the unacknowledged foundation of food systems, climate stability, water security, and biodiversity. While global narratives frame soil as uniformly collapsing, the reality is more complex. Degradation is severe in many regions but uneven, sometimes reversible, and politically invisible. This invisibility persists not from ignorance but because protecting soil is costly in the short term, with its benefits delayed. Most environmental issues, from climate policy to biodiversity targets, are traced back to living soil. Lose that foundation, and everything else becomes theatre.
A modest 3% of your body is nitrogen by mass, primarily in the form of amino acids, proteins, nucleic acids, and other biological molecules. Not heavy but vital to your well-being. Most of this nitrogen initially enters the body through the food we eat, particularly from protein-rich sources such as grains, meat, dairy products, and legumes.
A quick thought reveals that the nitrogen comes from the soil, since all food was once a plant, and most food production still involves fields and farms.
However, increasingly, the source of that soil nitrogen is artificial.
Since the mid-20th century, the industrial fixation of atmospheric nitrogen through the Haber-Bosch process has revolutionised global agriculture. This process synthesises ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen gas, producing synthetic fertilisers that drastically boost crop yields. As a result, much of the protein in the modern human diet now derives from plants grown with synthetic nitrogen or from animals fed those plants.
Researchers analysing nitrogen isotopes and global fertiliser application have estimated that at least half of the nitrogen atoms in the bodies of typical people alive today came from food that depended on these artificial inputs.
What was once a tightly coupled biological loop of nitrogen fixed by soil microbes and returned to the soil via decomposition has become dominated by industrial intervention. This has enabled the human population to expand beyond what would otherwise be possible under natural nitrogen constraints, making it a textbook case of entropy acceleration.
We replaced self-regenerating biological order with fossil-fueled inputs that degrade the broader system faster than it can recover. This has also led to widespread ecological consequences, including nitrogen runoff, dead zones in aquatic systems, and biodiversity loss. Thus, the synthetic nitrogen in our bodies is not just a biological fact—it’s also a marker of a planetary-scale shift in how humans interact with the Earth system.
The foundation we ignore is the soil.
All this should be obvious because we are heterotrophs that have to consume food to survive, and that food comes directly or indirectly from plants grown in the ground. There are hydroponics and aquaponics, forms of soilless agriculture where plants are grown in nutrient-rich water, sometimes in combination with fish cultivation (aquaponics). While these methods are efficient in terms of water use, land footprint, and control over growing conditions, they currently account for less than 1% of total global agricultural output by volume or value.
Most of the world’s food is still produced through conventional soil-based farming, including both rainfed and irrigated systems.
Healthy soil is a dynamic, living system with balanced physical structure, chemical nutrients, and biological activity that supports plant growth. It stores water, recycles nutrients, and resists erosion and disease.
Just as a healthy organism performs essential life-sustaining functions, healthy soil maintains ecological balance and resilience while supporting productivity. This includes its ability to cycle nutrients, retain moisture, host diverse microbial communities, and form stable aggregates that resist erosion.
Crucially, healthy soil is not inorganic dirt. It is teeming with life—from bacteria and fungi to earthworms and insects—all of which contribute to its structure and fertility.
“Healthy” also implies soil that can continue to function well over time without degradation. Depleted, compacted, or contaminated soils may still support crop growth in the short term with synthetic inputs, but they require increasing intervention for diminishing returns. In contrast, healthy soil can regenerate itself through organic matter decomposition and microbial activity, thereby reducing dependence on external inputs such as fertilisers or pesticides.
All this is context-dependent.
What is healthy soil for a wetland differs from what is healthy for an arid grassland or a vineyard. But across all ecosystems, healthy soil shares common attributes of biological diversity, chemical balance, and physical integrity. In this sense, “healthy” reflects an ecological state for soil that supports life, adapts to stress, and contributes to the broader functioning of the biosphere.
Healthy soil also allows farmers to grow crops and rear livestock.
But here is the thing.
Recent global assessments indicate that soil degradation affects 75% of the Earth’s land surface to varying degrees. This degradation threatens the livelihoods of over 3.2 billion people and is accelerating rapidly; some projections suggest that up to 90% of the land surface could be degraded by 2050 if current practices continue.
The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) defines soil degradation as
the reduction of the biological productivity or complexity of the land, including the decline of soil fertility, the reduction of the organic matter content, the loss of soil structure, and the acceleration of soil erosion by wind and water.
This definition emphasises the reduction of biological productivity and the various forms it can take, such as the loss of soil fertility and structure.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations describes soil degradation as
a process that lowers the current or future capacity of the soil to produce goods or services.
This definition focuses on the diminished capacity of the soil to provide essential functions and resources. It’s a broad definition that encompasses both physical (e.g., erosion, compaction) and chemical (e.g., salinisation, nutrient depletion) processes.
The European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) defines soil degradation as
the overall decline in the productive capacity of soil, leading to a loss of ecosystem services.
This definition highlights the loss of ecosystem services —the benefits humans derive from ecosystems. These services include things like food production, water filtration, and carbon storage. The JRC’s definition connects soil health directly to the well-being of both humans and the environment.
In other words, three-quarters of the Earth’s land surface has lost some of its innate productive potential. In the absence of artificial inputs, soil is less able to support plant growth than it was. It is less healthy.
The loss of healthy soil is driven by intensive agriculture, erosion, deforestation, salinisation, overgrazing, and pollution. It amounts to the loss of approximately 100 million hectares of productive land each year, roughly double the size of Greenland. This trend is not confined to any single region but spans continents, undermining the long-term sustainability of terrestrial ecosystems.
The impact on agriculture is particularly severe, with approximately 34% of all agricultural land (about 1.66 billion hectares) now considered moderately to severely degraded due to human activity.
I’ll just say that again.
A third of agricultural land is moderately or severely degraded.
This is the land that feeds us. It is where the milk in the fridge comes from, where the ingredients for the foot-long sub come from, and where the 137 million burgers eaten in the US every day come from.
Degraded means less productive, but in practice, it is much more. For example, soil erosion on croplands often occurs at rates 13 to 40 times faster than natural soil formation, and on tilled land, this can be as high as 100 times.
The accumulation of salt in soil (salination), which makes it unsuitable for crop growth and is caused by poor irrigation practices, has damaged more than 62 million hectares globally over the past two decades, with around 2,000 hectares lost each day.
Meanwhile, about half of the world’s rangelands and pastures are also degraded, reducing livestock productivity and increasing pressure on marginal land.
Soil carbon depletion is the loss of organic matter that reduces the soil’s ability to store carbon and support plant growth. It is caused by intensive tillage and continuous cropping, which has resulted in cultivated soils globally losing 25-75% of their original carbon content.
Total soil carbon loss from agricultural lands is approximately 133 billion tons of carbon, and the rate of loss has increased dramatically over the last two centuries. This is energy once captured by life, now diffused into the atmosphere, irreversibly lost unless vast effort and time are reinvested to restore it.
Then there is the decline in soil biodiversity, characterised by a reduction in the variety and abundance of organisms from bacteria to earthworms that maintain soil health. This decline is driven by pesticide use and monoculture farming, which have eliminated entire microbial communities across millions of hectares globally. Consequently, some agricultural soils now contain 90% fewer species than their natural counterparts.
Annual financial losses from soil degradation are estimated at US$878 billion, driven by reduced agricultural productivity, lost ecosystem services, and increased vulnerability to natural disasters such as floods and droughts. Degraded soils store less carbon, hold less water, and support fewer organisms, weakening their role in climate regulation and biodiversity conservation.
Various sources, including reports from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and academic papers, often state or imply a global land degradation rate of millions of square kilometres per year. For instance, some figures suggest up to 12 million hectares (120,000 km2) of productive land are lost to degradation each year, while broader estimates of affected land can be much larger.
I probably should stop now.
All this sensory input is probably increasing your heart rate and blood pressure to a release of stress hormones, which prepare you to flame me or run away. This is now an emotionally charged situation.
But I will press on.
I should not have to write this essay.
The idea that healthy soil is essential for life is technically well-established, having been known for decades, and the mechanisms are increasingly well understood.
In the 1980s, I collaborated with the Tropical Soil Biology & Fertility Program (TSBF) initially in Zimbabwe and later at the University of Botswana. The TSBF Programme was established in 1984 under the auspices of UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Programme and the International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS), as part of the “Decade of the Tropics” initiative to
determine management options that enhance tropical soil fertility by manipulating and optimising the soil’s biological functions.
Research covered mechanistic, process-based studies into nutrient, carbon, and water cycles in tropical soils to applied work at the ecosystem level, ensuring that research findings are actionable and relevant to farmers and land managers.
TSBF placed strong emphasis on capacity building and the adoption of practices within tropical countries. It operated networks and research centres across Africa—including Kenya, DR Congo, Rwanda, Mali, Zimbabwe, and Malawi—and coordinated with CGIAR bodies like CIAT, ICRISAT, and IITA to expand its reach and impact. The programme published influential handbooks, such as Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility: A Handbook of Methods, that standardised soil research methodologies internationally and supported effective knowledge transfer.
Sadly, it no longer functions. Perhaps only a handful of greybeards remember it. Soil fertility just isn’t that important.
Soil is often overlooked precisely because it is emotionally invisible, quiet, and slow to degrade. Its deterioration happens underground and out of sight, lacking the emotional immediacy of dying coral reefs or burning forests. As a result, even educated audiences frequently underestimate its role in food systems, water regulation, carbon storage, and biodiversity.
Unlike other environmental issues, there’s no widespread “soil movement,” few headlines, and limited political momentum.
Even the language used to describe soil can be off-putting. Terms like “degradation,” “carbon sink,” or “soil organic matter” will not resonate with general audiences, and the vital functions of soil biology remain abstract to most. Soil may be “common knowledge” in a vague sense, but that doesn’t translate into active concern or informed action.
Soil is also home to a host of horrible bugs.
Instead of the biodiverse ecosystem essential to life, conventional economic frameworks have long treated soil as a means of production rather than a form of capital to be preserved. Modern agriculture has treated soil as a factory, depleting its natural capital over time, creating a disconnection between humans and this living foundation.
Similar to how we treat nature in general, soil is objectified. We treat it as inert matter rather than a living partner. This disconnection stems partly from what psychologists call “temporal discounting”, which is our tendency to value immediate benefits over future consequences. A farmer facing economic pressure may prioritise this year’s yield over long-term soil health, not from ignorance, but from very real short-term economic necessities.
In truth, this is a feeble excuse. If the farmer is forced into poor management decisions that deplete soil capital, it is we, the consumers of the production he coaxes from the soil, who need to take a close look at the production systems we allow.
So our premise sequence is necessary. A journey into the details of why we need to wake up and pay serious attention to the health of soils.
Here we go.
Healthy soil is the foundation of food systems, carbon cycles, water regulation, and biodiversity, but is in steep decline across much of the planet.
At the risk of boring repetition, healthy soil is a dynamic, living system that plays a central role in food security, climate stability, and ecosystem health. Soils provide essential nutrients for crops, support complex microbial networks that aid plant resilience, and help retain moisture critical during droughts.
Approximately 95% of the world’s food comes directly or indirectly from the soil.
In addition, soils are major carbon sinks, storing approximately 2,500 billion tons of carbon—more than the atmosphere and all plant biomass combined.
Beyond food production and carbon cycling, soils are integral to the water cycle. They filter and purify water, reduce flood risks through infiltration, and help maintain water tables.
Soils hold roughly 25% of Earth’s biodiversity, with a single gram potentially containing thousands of species and millions of individuals. Organisms from microbes to mites and microscopic fungi to earthworms underpin above-ground ecosystems by recycling nutrients and supporting plant growth. This biodiversity is fundamental to resilient landscapes, enabling ecosystems to recover from disturbance and buffer against climate extremes.
Recall the IPBES Assessment Report on Land Degradation (2018) concluded that the rate of soil loss is estimated to be 10-40 times faster than the rate of soil formation in agricultural lands, with 24 billion tons of fertile soil lost annually.
Admittedly, averages across the planet are a crude metric.
Soil degradation varies dramatically across regions, even within farms, with some areas experiencing severe degradation while others remain stable or even get better. Recent research indicates that improved management practices, such as conservation agriculture, cover cropping, and rotational grazing, have successfully reversed degradation trends in specific regions. The situation resembles a mosaic rather than a universal decline. You can see this if you take a drive in the country after a warm spell. Some farms are green with dark, healthy-looking soils on the rare patches that are exposed, while others are dry and dusty.
Evidence strongly supports the soil’s foundational role in ecological systems and human well-being, but the claim of a “steep decline across much of the planet” oversimplifies a more complex reality. Significant degradation exists, but it’s neither uniform nor irreversible, with regional variations and emerging evidence of successful restoration efforts providing important context.
So does the following premise hold?
Soil degradation contributes directly to major global crises, including food insecurity, climate change, water scarcity, and rural economic decline.
As soils lose organic matter, structure, and nutrients through processes like erosion, salinisation, and compaction, their productivity declines. This reduces crop yields, increases dependence on chemical inputs, and leads to higher food prices and greater vulnerability, particularly for smallholder farmers and communities in arid and semi-arid regions.
A comprehensive meta-analysis by the Economics of Land Degradation Initiative estimated that soil degradation reduces global crop yields by 5% annually, resulting in the loss of 20 million tons of grain. Food security impacts are particularly severe in regions like Sub-Saharan Africa, where studies have shown yield reductions of 2-40% directly attributable to soil degradation. These productivity losses disproportionately affect regions already experiencing food insecurity.
Degraded soils release carbon that was previously stored, contributing to atmospheric greenhouse gases, while healthy soils act as sinks, absorbing and storing carbon. Land degradation, including soil carbon loss, accounts for nearly one-quarter of global emissions when combined with deforestation and other land use changes. Thus, the loss of soil health is both a contributor to and a victim of a warming climate, creating feedback loops that further destabilise ecological and agricultural systems.
Water scarcity is exacerbated by degraded soils with reduced infiltration capacity and water-holding capacity. Compacted or eroded soils lead to increased surface runoff, diminished groundwater recharge, and greater vulnerability to both floods and droughts.
The economic dimensions of soil degradation for both commercial farmers practising intensive agriculture can be masked by higher inputs. Up to a point, they can spend to maintain yields. However, around 500 million of the world’s 570 million farmers operate smallholdings of less than two hectares that produce around one-third of the world’s food, often through more labour-intensive methods. These farmers are less flexible. The Economics of Land Degradation Initiative estimates that global economic losses from soil degradation amount to $40 billion annually, with much of this burden falling on rural communities. More locally, a study in Tanzania found that soil erosion reduced household income by up to 30% in severely affected areas. There are dozens of reliable studies like these.
Overall, the evidence demonstrates direct causal links between soil degradation and global crises, though nuanced by numerous confounding factors.
Rather than make the crisis about soil, it is much easier to focus on one or more of climate change, population growth and distribution, poverty and socio-economic inequality, unsustainable agricultural practices, water scarcity and mismanagement, failures of governance or policy, conflict and political instability. Given all this, it is easy to see why soil might not be top of the agenda.
Hence, the following premise…
Despite its foundational role, soil remains largely invisible in public discourse and policy, often treated as inert dirt rather than a living system.
A research analysis of over 4,000 climate change news stories over five years found that soil was mentioned in less than 5% of coverage, despite its critical role in carbon sequestration. Similarly, an analysis of environmental education curricula across 12 countries found that soil science accounted for less than 10% of the content compared to other ecological topics.
A year or two ago, I searched the Australian Labour Party’s federal election manifesto for the word ‘soil’. It appeared twice in over 200 pages of policy proposals, both instances being in broad descriptions of the Australian landscape. There were no explicit policy recommendations for soil. Perhaps the economic advisors to the would-be government didn’t think that an industry that fed all citizens and generated approximately AUD 76 billion in food-related exports in 2024 (roughly 4.3% of GDP) was important enough to have its foundation mentioned.
And it’s not just Australia.
While water, air, and biodiversity have dedicated UN conventions and extensive regulatory frameworks, soil lacks equivalent global governance structures. The proposed Global Soil Convention has failed to materialise despite decades of advocacy. National policies are similarly devoid. A review of environmental protection legislation across 27 countries found that while 92% had comprehensive frameworks for water and air quality, only 31% had equivalent protections for soil.
This invisibility emerges partly from historical scientific framing. Agricultural science has predominantly viewed soil as a growth medium, rather than an ecosystem. A bibliometric analysis of agricultural research publications between 1975 and 2015 showed that soil biology papers represented only 12% of soil science research until the early 2000s, with the majority focusing on soil chemistry and physics for crop production.
This premise that ‘soil remains largely invisible in public discourse’ is well-supported by evidence. Both quantitative media analyses and policy reviews demonstrate that soil receives disproportionately little attention relative to its ecological importance. The scientific literature further confirms the historical tendency to treat soil as an inert medium rather than a living system, though this perspective is gradually shifting in recent decades.
And the way we operate within a capitalist economic system, especially what we demand of the 91 million or so farmers who grow two-thirds of global food production, only seems to make it worse, which introduces the following premise…
Neglect of soil health is reinforced by economic systems prioritising short-term agricultural yields and land exploitation over long-term ecological viability.
Agricultural incentives reward extraction. A global review of subsidy regimes found that less than 15% of the $700 billion in annual agricultural subsidies include environmental conditions. Soil health is almost absent. In 54 countries, policies continue to channel ten times more public money into price supports and input subsidies than into conservation programs—even when those inputs accelerate soil degradation.
The short-term logic is hard to fault. Cost-benefit models show that conservation practices such as cover cropping or reduced tillage yield positive returns after 5 years. In the first one to three, they cost more than they save. When margins are thin and debt is high, transition costs kill viability. This makes degradation economically rational even when it is ecologically suicidal.
Land tenure structures embed this logic further.
Roughly 70% of farmland in industrialised nations and 50% in developing ones is farmed by someone other than the owner. Leasing periods typically run for 1 to 3 years. The economic benefits of soil stewardship accrue to owners over decades, while the costs land squarely on short-term operators. Economists call this a split incentive. Farmers call it untenable.
Tenure also adds external complications such as this one.
Agricultural land in New South Wales is no longer priced according to what it can produce. The historical relationship between land value and productive capacity has collapsed under layers of financial abstraction, speculative interest, and policy distortion. What was once a market grounded in yield potential is now shaped by capital flow, portfolio diversification, and macroeconomic signals far removed from the soil.
During the pandemic-era boom, prices surged across Australia, driven less by improvements in agricultural returns than by investor sentiment and fiscal liquidity. Institutional buyers, pension funds, and high-net-worth individuals treated farmland as a hedge against inflation and volatility. They made agricultural land an asset class, not a livelihood. In this context, water rights became tradable commodities, and land functioned more like infrastructure than ecosystem.
NSW was emblematic of this shift. Its farmland values soared and then fell sharply, dropping by over 24% in 2024 alone, as the speculative logic that drove the upswing lost momentum. The correction revealed that demand now reflects market psychology rather than agronomic reality. Yield is no longer the metric of value. The price of land has become detached from its productivity.
This detachment matters. It distorts decision-making, fuels extraction, and undermines ecological stewardship. When land is priced for exchange rather than function, soil becomes expendable. Capital chases short-term ownership, not long-term regeneration. In a financialised system, degradation is not a failure of farming but a rational response to the incentives in place. Investment flows toward maximum energy throughput, not conservation. Entropy is externalised, exported to the soil, which quietly collapses under the weight of short-term gain.
Meanwhile, the farmer still has to pay for inputs and operations.
The result of all this is structural soil exhaustion. Agricultural markets reward yield over regeneration, immediacy over stability. The mismatch between the timing of costs and the benefit horizons makes soil care a financial liability. Within prevailing economic conditions, destruction becomes the norm.
Soil takes a long time to make, typically thousands of years from the parent material. But its biology is fragile and can be depleted within a few years of intensive production following the initial disturbance from land clearing. We have known this since the early days of agriculture. It is the rationale behind shifting agriculture that dominates small-scale production. But slow is not easy for our cognitive and psychological responses that evolved to deal with the immediate. We struggle with the medium-term future and the ecological time of soil processes.
This brings us to the following premise…
Psychologically, soil’s slow, hidden processes make it difficult for societies to value, visualise, or emotionally connect with, unlike more immediate environmental threats.
Humans are not wired to worry about what they cannot see. Across 67 environmental risk perception studies, threats that were invisible and gradual scored consistently lower in concern. This happens even when objective risks are matched or exceeded by more visible dangers. Soil erosion, for example, evoked far less emotional response than images of deforestation or polluted rivers. The phenomenon is well known in psychology as ‘danger at a distance feels less urgent’, even if it does not.
Soil degradation sits at the bottom of this perceptual hierarchy.
It’s not that unhealthy soil is any less dangerous than biodiversity loss or pollution; it’s just that it fails to trigger our evolved warning systems.
Emotional attachment follows similar rules. Biophilia studies show that humans bond more easily with nature’s charismatic features—trees, rivers, and animals—than with the substrate beneath them. In six countries, fewer than 10% of children included soil in their drawings of “nature”; over 70% drew forests, birds, or water. What is not seen is not felt.
Soil becomes ecologically essential yet emotionally irrelevant. The result is a collective blind spot. We talk of planetary care while ignoring the biological infrastructure that makes life possible.
The neural mechanics reinforce the bias. The human brain evolved to detect movement, change, and surface cues. Soil, even in the hand, offers none. Its living components operate at the microbial scale. Its functions unfold over seasons, not seconds. Even tactile engagement, like the feel of humus between the fingers, struggles to create emotional traction. Soil remains cognitively inert, neurologically quiet. The systems designed to alert us to threats barely register their decline.
This perceptual indifference is a problem in cognitive architecture. Soil’s invisibility, its slowness, and its structural subtlety place it outside the bounds of ordinary concern. This makes it dangerously easy to overlook, especially when industrial agriculture masks its degradation with inputs and yield charts.
What cannot be seen cannot be felt. And what cannot be felt rarely gets protected.
So the last premise follows…
Technological optimism and industrial agricultural models often obscure that degraded soils cannot indefinitely support human health or planetary stability.
Technological optimism has long concealed the erosion beneath our feet. The Green Revolution boosted global cereal yields by around 150% from 1960 to 2000, driven not by soil regeneration but by seed genetics, synthetic fertilisers, and irrigation infrastructure. These tools delivered impressive gains. But as soil scientist Rattan Lal observed, they also created an “illusion of permanence,” a belief that yield declines could be indefinitely reversed through new inputs. Longitudinal data sacross 38 countries shows that nitrogen efficiency fell by 22% between 1961 and 2010, signalling a system that demands more to achieve less.
The limits are no longer theoretical.
A meta-analysis of 610 studies shows that once soil organic matter drops below key thresholds, additional fertiliser cannot restore lost productivity. The same pattern holds for irrigation where declining soil structure undermines gains in water efficiency. Biology resists substitution. Mycorrhizal networks and microbial diversity, foundational to nutrient cycling and plant health, cannot be engineered at scale. Their loss marks a boundary that no amount of capital or chemistry can cross.
The most sobering data comes from the Rothamsted Experimental Station, where agricultural field trials have been running since 1843. Yep, that’s close to 200 years. These plots offer a rare longitudinal lens: fields managed solely with synthetic inputs show long-term productivity decline despite ongoing technological upgrades. By contrast, those maintaining soil organic matter have sustained yields for over a century. Decadal data reveal that soil decline unfolds slowly, then all at once, a pattern hard to see in short-term studies. They also show that technological substitution only delays, never prevents, collapse.
The premise holds across the evidence base. Innovation has masked degradation, but not reversed it. Industrial agriculture engineered a mirage of sustainability on weakening foundations and high yields. The illusion persists until the soil no longer does.
What remains is the biophysical fact that without living soil, there is no long-term agriculture, no ecological buffer, and no stable food system. Only the memory of a yield curve and the cost of ignoring what it caused.
Since the early 20th century, the Haber-Bosch process has poured synthetic nitrogen into agriculture, rewriting the planet’s nitrogen cycle and enabling billions to be fed.
The mark of this intervention is inside us. Half the proteins in our bodies are built from crops and livestock raised on artificial fertiliser. Isotope analyses show that most people alive today get their nitrogen not from microbes in living soil, but from machines burning fossil fuels. We are no longer just biological organisms. We are, at least in part, biochemical artefacts of an industrial process.
The nitrogen that sustains us is also the nitrogen that leaks into rivers, fuels ocean dead zones, and strips soil of its innate fertility. Human health and planetary health are chemically entangled. The same process that keeps us alive degrades the foundation that feeds us. We live inside a system that turns fossil energy into food and quietly dismantles the natural cycles it replaced. This is not an external threat. It is a system we embody. Humanity and its livestock are the consequence of a massive injection of fossil energy.
Nature no longer exists apart from human design. Our bones, blood, and muscles bear the signature of industrial systems, just as landscapes and climates do. This shatters the romantic idea of an untouched nature. It makes us hybrid beings, metabolising a planet we have remade. And if we carry the trace of that transformation in our bodies, we also carry the responsibility for deciding whether the next imprint will be regeneration or collapse.
And in this, we deflect responsibility. We ignore the ecological remake and its consequences, especially for the foundation of our food.
The neglect of soil is often blamed on poor communication. We just don’t make it alive and sexy enough. But the problem is that human attention is tuned to movement, threat, and social cues. We pay attention to fast, visible, and emotionally charged events. Soil is slow, quiet, and mostly hidden. It changes in increments too small for the senses, offers no immediate danger signal, and seldom enters conversation unless it fails.
In the hierarchy of human perception, soil sits below the threshold for notice.
Modern life widens this gap. Urban infrastructure and digital immersion keep most people from direct contact with the ground. For a billion or so in the Global North, milk comes from the fridge after a trip to the supermarket, perhaps even delivered to the door. In this world of convenience, soil has shifted from a medium of daily engagement to a distant abstraction. Even in environmental discourse, air and water command the headlines while soil barely registers. No matter that it is the base layer of food, climate regulation, and biodiversity.
All this is a collapse of imagination. People rarely defend what they cannot picture, touch, or emotionally recognise. Out of sight really is out of mind, even when it is where almost all your food comes from.
This blindness has consequences. What remains unseen will not be defended, even as it erodes, acidifies, or loses its living architecture. Protecting soil requires more than data or legislation. It demands ways of making it visible again and not as inert matter but as a living system on which all terrestrial life depends. Until we recalibrate our awareness, the ground beneath our feet will remain overlooked and continue to disappear.
And when the problem does come to mind, we cannot blame the messenger.
The idea that farmers degrade land because they lack knowledge is lazy thinking. Most know exactly what their practices do to the soil. They also know the numbers. They know that subsidies, commodity prices, insecure tenure, and debt push them toward short-term yield. The quickest route to income is intensive, input-heavy farming, even if it erodes the base it stands on. In an economic system that ignores ecological costs, extraction is not ignorance. For a farmer, it means feeding his family.
This logic embeds over generations. Land and techniques pass together, along with the expectations that keep farmers locked into the same patterns. Sustainable alternatives may exist, but they often demand more capital, more risk, and less immediate return. For anyone operating on thin margins in volatile markets and shifting weather, such choices look like gambles, not improvements. What appears irrational from an ecological standpoint is adaptive from an economic one.
Behaviour change campaigns and awareness programs will not fix a system that rewards depletion. Reform must alter the incentives so that care for the land pays better than stripping it. That requires policies and markets that make stewardship the rational default. And it requires recognising that many farmers are caught in a cycle they did not choose, one that extends far beyond their fields.
We say we value resilience, sustainability, and future generations. Yet we eat from degraded fields like aristocrats in a collapsing empire, clinking glasses while the floorboards rot beneath us. The more honest admission is that we value cheap calories today over a livable planet tomorrow. This is not a case of people being unaware of the soil’s role. Farmers know. Scientists know. Policy staff know. The neglect persists because the cost of protecting soil falls on those least able to absorb it, while the benefits are too far in the future to tempt anyone with power.
We have built climate frameworks, biodiversity targets, and water policy on the assumption that soil will quietly keep doing its job. The truth is the reverse. Those frameworks stand on soil. Remove every other environmental policy tomorrow and leave the soil intact, and civilisation will still muddle through. Remove the soil, and the rest is theatre. The foundation we ignore is not just beneath our feet; it is beneath every plan we think will save us.
Very impressive message, Dr. John. My soil is frozen now here at 44 N. Lat, and for that I’m thankful. Food of all kinds grown on good soil tastes better. I just say a prayer that we will never lose our ability to tell, and that demand for healthy food will persist.