Humanity is beset by dualities. North and south, liberal and conservative, rich and poor... Philosophically, politically, and even geographically, we find polarities everywhere we look. And so it should not be a surprise to find the same polarized forces at play in the study of our species. Futurist scholars disregard what has come before to focus on what's to come next while historian scholars reject the future to focus on the past. While Mr. Montgomery is undoubtedly an adherent to the latter, historian camp, Dirt is an intriguing attempt to bridge the gap between past and future under the umbrella of a single, logical premise.
Civilizations live and die on the health of their soil. For there is nothing more fundamental to the functioning of any civilization than a steady supply of food, or so argues Mr. Montgomery. Great empires from the Romans to the Mayans have expanded to meet their food supply, only to crash when either that food supply is cut off, or when political instabilities, created as a result of expansion, bring them down. People must eat. And if they cannot eat, they will not sit idly by and waste away to death; they will fight wars for the resources they require.
After laying out this theory of civilization extinction, Mr. Montgomery investigates the soil itself: its properties, its systems, and most importantly its limitations. For as farmers have known for centuries, soil can be exhausted by heavy use. What hasn't been common knowledge until recently is why. Enter the relentlessly scientific Charles Darwin who discovered that earthworms are a vital component in healthy soil, creatures capable of enlivening rocky mush into nutrient-rich earth for plants and crops. Building from this idea, Mr. Montgomery goes on to explain the methods used to work the land, how those methods have improved over time, how the yields from the land have grown to fit an expanding population, and, finally, how humanity is about to reach the land's capacity to feed all of its exploiters.
Parts science, history, memoir, and environmentalism, Dirt is a wonderful look into a world that we all take for granted. We all enjoy the products of civilization: cellphones, airplanes, restaurants, and movie theatres. But Mr. Montgomery successfully argues that all of these trappings come about as a result of the health of our soil. Without that, there is no food. And if there's no food, there's no people. And if there's no people, there's certainly no Iphone. What's more, what humans take for granted they have a tendency to abuse. We have made unique changes to Earth, modifying it in ways that can only be labelled experimental. What began 10,000 years ago with the agricultural revolution lives on, today, in a population that has exploded out to seven billion purely on the back of the capacity of the land to feed them. But none of the practices we have used to feed that population are natural or sustainable.
Mr. Montgomery does an excellent job of explaining how this has come to pass and offers researched ideas for how it can be mended for the future. For one thing seems clear. If we exhaust the soil, if we have no other way of growing food, nothing else matters. Billions of people will starve and die, all because of the health of something we consider dirty. (4/5 Stars)
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