Locos por la Geología

Una traducción al castellano de este post aparecerá el próximo viernes.

Once again I have selected for you a very enjoyable paragraph form the book -that I highly recommend- by Charlotte Gill.

Dirt. At home we try to scrub it and bleach it and vacuum it up. We try to deny it with our various under-sink surfanctants. But in a place such as this, dirt is a precious understated thing. A tree planter’s bread and butter crumbs. It’s also nourishment, substrate and habitat. Just one layer of biologically active soil, as thin as a sheet of newsprint, or as deep as a few feet thick, on which all living things, sooner or later, depend. Plant sprout from this dirt and are eaten in turn by all the other creatures of the food web. This soil relies on its own living architecture to hold it in place, just as mammals need their bones. Around here it blankets steep ground and is lashed by winter rains. It has been subjected to the punishments of heavy machinery- scraping and compaction and erosion.

Wonderfully explained, don’t you agree?

We’ll see each other next Monday . Graciela.