Why You Need More Dirt in Your Life
Soil helps build up our defenses against disease and imparts a sense of the sacred—and we are killing it.
It’s estimated that children now spend less time outside than the average prisoner. This could have devastating effects: Kids need to be exposed to the microbes in the soil to build up their defenses against diseases that may attack them later. But it’s not just children, Paul Bogard explains in his new book, The Ground Beneath Us. The EPA estimates that the average American adult now spends 93 percent of their life indoors. As we retreat indoors, more and more of the earth is disappearing, with an estimated quarter of a million acres paved or repaved in the United States each year. [Find out why we are wired to be outside.]
When National Geographic caught up with Bogard by phone at his home in Minnesota, the author explained why Iowa is the most transformed state in the U.S., how soil is alive but we’re killing it, and how places where terrible things happened can become sacred ground.
You write, “We are only just now beginning to understand the vast life in the soil, what it does, and how our activities on the surface may affect it.” Talk us through some highlights of the new science—and how you became so passionate about dirt.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/04/soil-dirt-ground-beneath-us-bogard/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=link_tw20170501news-booktalk&utm_campaign=Content&sf74959362=1