Deborah Garcia: Giving Soil a Starring Role

Experts are begin­ning to shine a spot­light on what organic farm­ers have always known: soil is a com­plex liv­ing, breath­ing organ­ism, which pro­vides nour­ish­ment for trees and other plants and a home to mil­lions of crit­ters. These farm­ers also know that we must treat our soil with the respect that all liv­ing things deserve or it will die.

Filmmaker Deborah Garcia’s new doc­u­men­tary, Symphony of the Soil, tells us the story of the mir­a­cle of soil and why our most fun­da­men­tal of resources is in peril. The message—we are badly abus­ing our soil—is deliv­ered with breath­tak­ingly beau­ti­ful footage filmed on four con­ti­nents, along with a mes­sage of per­sonal empow­er­ment for each indi­vid­ual to change the tracks in the dirt.

Garcia’s first feature-length doc­u­men­tary, The Future of Food, was a gutsy deep dive into the com­pli­cated issue of GMOs. Before any­one else, Garcia brought to light in film the behe­moth multi­na­tional cor­po­ra­tions seek­ing monop­o­lis­tic con­trol of the world’s food sys­tem through GMOs. In 2004, The Future of Food set the stan­dard and paved the way for game-changing films like Food, Inc., Forks Over Knives and Fast Food Nation.

The widow of the late Grateful Dead front­man, Jerry Garcia, Deborah Garcia admits her pri­mary film­mak­ing pas­sion is for sto­ry­telling in fic­tional films—romantic com­edy, any­one? But set­ting pas­sion aside, she feels a respon­si­bil­ity, and acts on it, to make doc­u­men­taries and tackle these tough issues to raise pub­lic awareness—and she suc­ceeds. Symphony of the Soil brings the viewer through Garcia’s own evo­lu­tion in her aware­ness and con­nec­tion with soil, which she calls “the matrix of life.”

Film and Food

In col­lege, both film and food served as sign­posts for the path Garcia’s life would take. The first direc­tion was food. “I remem­ber hold­ing this bloody piece of meat in my hands and real­iz­ing this thing had just been alive. That was the 1970s and mac­ro­bi­otics and back-to-the-land were every­where. I began cook­ing for myself, and through that I saw how many processed ingre­di­ents are in pre­pared foods,” she says. It didn’t take long for her to become a life­long veg­e­tar­ian and organic fanatic.

At that same time her hands would hold some­thing else that would shape the rest of her life—a movie cam­era. “My friend owned a movie cam­era and I asked him to show me how to use it. So he demon­strated the basics and then we made a short film. I real­ized, this is it for me. Film is just such a pow­er­ful and emo­tional way to tell a story.”

The Future of Food

Garcia always knew she wanted to make a film about food. Not a foodie film, but one about organic food and agri­cul­ture with a dose of food jus­tice. Following a dif­fi­cult period after her husband’s death in 1995, Garcia decided it was time to embark on a project that was com­pletely engag­ing. “I wanted to make a really seri­ous film that was dif­fer­ent from the other food films around 10 years ago that were obsessed with the per­fect olive or peach. I really wanted to cre­ate some­thing that would dig deeper into our food sys­tem,” she recalls.

When Garcia began talk­ing about her film to col­leagues and friends, a com­ment took her by sur­prise. “I was telling my friend about the film and she said, ‘So your doc­u­men­tary will have some­thing about genetic engi­neer­ing in it, right?’ My response was, ‘What?’ And she went on to inform me about GMOs.

“I was liv­ing in Marin County at the time, eat­ing organ­i­cally, and I thought I was very well edu­cated about food and agri­cul­tural issues, but I knew lit­tle about GMOs. I knew the tech­nol­ogy existed; I just didn’t know that they were doing it to seeds and that they were sell­ing them and we were eat­ing the stuff—it was just com­pletely under the radar back then. It was crazy that I was as well informed as any­body about these other issues, yet I didn’t know any­thing about this. At that point I knew I had to really focus on genetic engi­neer­ing. It was some­thing that needed to be pushed to the front of the film to make sure that peo­ple under­stood this was a whole new way of corporate-controlled agriculture.”

When The Future of Food was released, it received inter­na­tional acclaim from Jerusalem to Oaxaca. “The pub­lic were just ready for some­thing other than watch­ing peo­ple eat 25-course meals and talk about it for­ever. Before Future of Food came out, there wasn’t a food move­ment. There was a foodie move­ment; but Future of Food actu­ally went into social jus­tice, health issues and so on.”

The film would ulti­mately impact GMO leg­is­la­tion. Local screen­ings in libraries and other pub­lic forums helped edu­cate vot­ers and con­tributed to the sub­se­quent suc­cess of pass­ing Measure H in Mendocino County, California, one of the first local ini­tia­tives in the coun­try to ban the plant­ing of GMO crops.

From Seeds to Soil

The Future of Food suc­ceeded in doing just what Garcia had hoped: it brought GMOs to the pub­lic eye. But for this film­maker there was more that needed to be told. “Because I had got­ten so deeply into GMOs in the film, I didn’t cover agri­cul­ture as much as I had wanted to, so I thought a film about soil was needed. Soil is essen­tially the matrix of life; it goes from life to death and back to life again. There is all of this con­nec­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion going on under the soil—all these rela­tion­ships between bac­te­ria, nitro­gen, phos­pho­rus and the plant. It is incred­i­ble; it’s a miracle!”

As she began study­ing soil, the dif­fi­culty of the task she had set for her­self became appar­ent. “I started research­ing soil and I real­ized how com­plex it was and how dif­fi­cult it was going to be to make a film about soil. It was like ‘Oh no! I have already told peo­ple I am going to do this, so I have to do it.’ I under­stood how hard it would be, but for­tu­nately I like a chal­lenge,” she says. The mak­ing of Symphony of the Soil would take her to four dif­fer­ent con­ti­nents and involve numer­ous inter­views with farm­ers, ranch­ers
and sci­en­tists.

An Evolving View of Soil

As Garcia began a more in-depth inves­ti­ga­tion of soil while writ­ing the script, her view of its role in an agri­cul­tural con­text evolved. “When I started mak­ing the film about soil as an agri­cul­tural medium, my angle was, what can we get out of soil? What is in it for us? Then I began to study soil and to see how mys­te­ri­ous it is and all that goes on. In a for­est, a leaf falls from a tree and onto the ground and is eaten by microbes and returns to the earth; and then those microor­gan­isms release nutri­ents that feed plants that are grow­ing, which allows those plants to grow, which then die and go back to the soil. This is a truly amaz­ing cycle of life, and when you put agri­cul­ture into that equa­tion you are actu­ally tam­per­ing with the soil com­mu­nity. So the theme of what can we get out of soil? became the wrong question.”

Click any image above to see a larger version.

The view of soil as a com­mod­ity, some­thing for us to take and use, is a reflec­tion of American val­ues, the film­maker asserts. “The American cul­ture has a lot to do with how we treat soil and the kind of soil we are end­ing up with. We think we can be less care­ful because we have such a wealth of soil here; that we can kind of wreck things and not care about things and then all just move on. In Europe and other places, they have to be more care­ful because they don’t have the same kind of land resources. In the United States we are far more care­less about what we do to our envi­ron­ment. This care­less­ness car­ries over to being overly trust­ing about what we put in our bod­ies. There are a lot of chem­i­cals that they do not allow in Europe that we allow here; and so I think that we really are a dif­fer­ent cul­ture and a dif­fer­ent sort of breed and that this has affected, partly in a neg­a­tive way, what has hap­pened to our food sys­tem,” she says.

This view of soil cre­ates a mind­set that nature is sim­ply a human resource. “When you think of soil as merely an agri­cul­tural medium, it turns it into a game where the objec­tive is to farm every­where,” Garcia explains. “Why do we want to farm every­where? Why can’t we sim­ply have a prairie be a prairie? We need to appre­ci­ate nature as nature and not just nature with the heavy human hand all over it. I want to cel­e­brate the wild­ness of nature. In the film we do have quite a lot of agri­cul­ture included because that is our pri­mary rela­tion­ship with soil; but it also shows it is not the only rela­tion­ship we need to have with the land—that peo­ple can appre­ci­ate there is a lot of beauty in wild­ness and we don’t have to change that.”

Garcia wants view­ers to under­stand that, when it comes to tak­ing care of the soil, there’s a vast dif­fer­ence between organic agri­cul­ture and indus­trial agri­cul­ture. “Good organic prac­tices return to the soil; they give back with cover crops what the soil is com­posed of. Industrial agri­cul­ture doesn’t feed the soil and so it dies and becomes dirt. We are grow­ing these monocrops, like corn, pour­ing chem­i­cals into the soil and basi­cally turn­ing it into dirt. These destruc­tive farm­ing meth­ods will have us
out of top­soil in 30 years, by some esti­mates,” she warns.

For a film­maker used to shoot­ing peo­ple, a doc­u­men­tary about soil was a chal­leng­ing sub­ject. “The film is really all about life, but soil is essen­tially in the dark. At the begin­ning shoot we were out in a field and I pointed out a patch of soil to the cam­era­man and said, ‘Okay, that is the shot. Action!’ Well, noth­ing was hap­pen­ing. There was no action and I’m think­ing, what are we going to do? So, the idea of mak­ing a film—a medium which is all about movement—when you are just stand­ing there and look­ing at some­thing with no move­ment was chal­leng­ing,” she says. But when you watch the stun­ning shots of glo­ri­ous cliffs, fer­tile fields and impas­sioned indi­vid­u­als work­ing the land, you can see that the film crew resolved these ini­tial challenges.

Symphony of the Soil is actu­ally more than just a doc­u­men­tary; Garcia refers to it as a project. Currently show­ing at film fes­ti­vals and spe­cial events, this feature-length film is sched­uled for release as a DVD in fall 2012. In addi­tion, Sonatas of the Soil, which are short films, each delv­ing deeply into one topic, can be watched indi­vid­u­ally online; and avail­able also, for free view­ing and shar­ing, are Grace Notes—streamed video clips and out­takes that the film crew couldn’t bear to leave on the cutting-room floor. Among the more than 20 of these clips, Dr. Paul Hepperly from Rodale Institute demon­strates the ben­e­fits of organic soil man­age­ment; farmer Klaas Martens describes how begin­ning to farm organ­i­cally brought back the smell of soil he remem­bered from his youth; and acclaimed writer and activist Vandana Shiva speaks about the con­nec­tion of soil, mud, and the vision of sacred earth for India.

Garcia is hop­ing that the film will have the same impact for soil that The Future of Food had for GMOs. “I want peo­ple to become soil con­scious, where they under­stand that soil is valu­able and we have to treat it as if it is pre­cious, and that if we don’t treat it right it won’t sur­vive. I would love if peo­ple came out of the film and really looked out at the land­scape and could deeply appre­ci­ate what is going on there—that soil is doing this amaz­ing thing, which is basi­cally recy­cling all life. We don’t feel res­o­nance and con­nec­tion to the earth, and I would like the film to help peo­ple to feel that con­nec­tion and then appreciation.

“I also hope peo­ple learn from the film that soil is a com­mu­nity; that you can­not just pick up a piece of soil and say, ‘This is soil.’ Soil is a process, an organ­ism, and a com­mu­nity. I want to get peo­ple to begin think­ing about the whole idea of com­mu­nity and that it is valu­able, and that you have to give back to com­mu­nity in order for it to con­tinue. So far peo­ple who have seen the film are very moved by this way of think­ing about soil.”

Next Steps

Having tack­led and com­pleted two ground­break­ing doc­u­men­tary projects, Garcia is finally ready to have some fun. “Now I feel like… I have been good, I have done my social duty, and the films are out there and no longer sim­ply inside me. They will be out there doing good, and so I am help­ing,” she says.

So, what’s next? Garcia indi­cates she is in the mood for a roman­tic com­edy. “Comedy can be very heal­ing, and it’s ben­e­fi­cial to take a break. For the past 10 or 12 years I feel that I have been doing a lot of worth­while stuff. It’s as if I have been eat­ing a very whole­some meal and now I kind of need some dessert—a healthy dessert, but a dessert.”

To learn more about Symphony of the Soil, includ­ing screen­ing dates and loca­tions, visit www.symphonyofthesoil.com.