Soil Talks: In conversation with Liz Carlisle
Author, educator, and agroecologist Liz Carlisle joins Dr. Akilah Martin and Orrin Williams for a joyful, 30-minute conversation about what soil teaches about community wellbeing in this time of climate crisis.
Soil: A Family Reunion
By Liz Carlisle
I grew up in a very modest house with a very immodest tree in the backyard. Towering above my swing set, and the alley where the garbage truck picked up our trash every Thursday, the massive spruce shaded my picnics and beckoned me home after tricycle adventures around the neighborhood. Other things came and went: friends moved away, our old cat Ikey died, and at some point every fall the tinny music of the ice cream truck fell silent for the season. But the tree remained, resolute as ever. How wonderful it would be, I remember thinking in the midst of some childhood drama, to have such a sturdy trunk!
Tree trunks are quite wonderful, and of course, they are also at a five year-old’s eye level. But the real source of that spruce’s staying power, as I would learn years later, was underground. Beneath the soil surface, the tree was not static at all, but stretching out in all directions. Exchanging nutrients. Finding water. Teaming up with fungi to extend the reach of its roots.
Similar things were happening, unbeknownst to me, in the little patch of garden we tended in a strip next to the garage. Here I had a bit more of an inkling that the plants were in cahoots with other creatures underground, having caught sight of more than one wriggling earthworm when I helped my dad tuck starters from the nursery into trowel-sized envelopes in the earth. But still I watched the flowers and the snap peas burst forth and saw only a single plant and its own interior repertoire of miracles.
Such was the fantasy that colored the 1980s America of my youth: that a single tree could somehow grow very tall and resilient all on its own. As if the conversion of sunlight to energy to matter was not always a collective endeavor, the shared labor of millions of unseen beings working in concert. As if the soil itself was not a gift from our ancestors, both human and evolutionary. As if we were not obligated to reciprocate.
I woke up to the truth of the soil at twenty-seven, after learning the hard way that no amount of fortifying my own trunk would make me strong like the spruce of my childhood backyard. It was a farmer who showed me. “See this nodule,” he said, digging up a lentil plant to show me a little white bump on its root. “That’s where it fixes nitrogen from the atmosphere. But it’s not actually the plant that fixes the nitrogen, it’s the bacteria that lives in its roots. The plant uses what it needs to grow, then leaves some behind in the soil for the next plant.”
How we understand soil is how we understand life itself. In some ways, I’ve had to untangle the knot of assumptions that travel with the English word “farm” and the omnipresent iconography of homesteading that followed me from history class to the dentist’s office to the art gallery downtown. All that sodbusting business about taming wild lands and making them productive. I was floored when I learned that some cultures don’t even have a word for agriculture. According to ecologist Francisco Rosado-May, the closest expression in the Indigenous languages of Nahuatl and Maya is MeyajbilK’aax, which means “working with nature.”
Soil itself can be a kind of language to speak these truths of interconnection. As Leah Penniman writes in her book Farming While Black, there are West African elders who measure the age of their town by the depth of the pyrogenic “African dark earth,” since every farmer in every generation participated in the creation of this supercompost. There is something wonderfully defiant about this choice to invest in soil. Even as imperial powers threatened to literally unearth all this generational wealth, farmers bet on the fungi-full rather than the fungible, leaving a legacy inextricably woven with the fate of their non-human kin. As if Diana Ross and the Supremes held up the palms of their hands to the centuries of colonial violence and sang “Stop in the Name of Life.”
I think this is what soil calls us to do: To turn toward the community of life. To recognize that our very existence is predicated on continuous exchange with a multitude of mutuals. To give thanks for those who make energy from the sun or turn waste into fertilizer and make our lives possible.
Soil deals in We, not I. What is soil health but the graceful synchrony of millions of organisms moving in concert, like an enormous team of synchronized swimmers? Their crowning achievement not some measure of distance or height or strength but how very in tune they are with one another. An offering of carbon met almost simultaneously with an offer to gather nitrogen.
Soil deals in truth telling as well. Even at geologic time scales, there is no running away from the history of your parent material. Yesterday’s actions are today’s potential. My people tried to move on to another continent, mining someone else’s organic matter to sustain themselves. In the end, it all dried up and blew away, carrying their dreams with it. It’s a complicated inheritance, this settler lineage, and it’s no wonder our metaphors try to reassure us we can bury our past and forget. But in truth, the earth remembers. If we want to break the cycle of tragedies, soil gives us no choice but to repair.
Sometimes in the quiet after a summer rain, I smell that primordial scent of moist earth, like the faint aroma of a grill summoning me to a family reunion. It has been a long time, and there are conflicts to mend. Apologies will be necessary, and real ones. It would probably be easier to make some excuse to skip it. But there is a singular joy in reconnecting, remembering how to articulate with one another as pieces of a common whole.
The earth needs us to show up for this reunion of our soil-borne family. There must be space at the table for all, including those whose land was stolen, and those who were stolen from their land. Everybody pitches in. Everybody eats. And somehow we figure out how to dance together again.
I say the Earth needs us to reconnect with our soil kin. And it’s true: we have no other hope of bringing our planet back into balance. But as much as the Earth needs us to show up, I think we need it even more. When we look at this weary land, do we not see our own weariness? Maybe the soil is the kind mentor who has given us a task, ostensibly so we can be of help, but in truth, to show us who we are.
