Our Future Is in the Soil

Producers/directors Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow are out to change all that with their remark­able doc­u­men­tary Dirt! The Movie—in very much the same way that their view­point was changed six years ago by read­ing a book they had been given. “One day a friend of ours handed us a book called Dirt: the Ecstatic Skin of the Earth by William Bryant Logan,” Gene Rosow told Organic Connections. “It was a look at the topic of soil, the dirt, that we’d never seen before. Logan observed it from every direction—from the point of view of health, sci­ence, spir­i­tu­al­ity, his­tory, good story telling and good char­ac­ters. After read­ing his book you never look at the ground beneath your feet the same way, and we thought if we could make a film that left audi­ences with a sense of that, it would be really interesting.”

Dirt! The Movie brings this mes­sage across. From the open­ing scenes of the film, which point out that soil is com­prised of the same ele­ments as the stars, plants and ani­mals and that “dirt is very much alive,” the viewer gets the firm idea that dirt isn’t just this stuff that col­lects in the cor­ners of the garage; it is a liv­ing, breath­ing entity. Treat it right and we thrive. Disrupt it as we have done and we end up with what we now have: drought, cli­mate change and famine.

The view­point is brought to us through an impres­sive ros­ter of par­tic­i­pants, includ­ing renowned chef Alice Waters, Andy Lipkis (founder of Tree People), Wes Jackson (founder and pres­i­dent of the Land Institute) and many more. Dr. Vandana Shiva, world-renowned sci­en­tist and envi­ron­men­tal leader and founder of Navdanya (“nine crops”), a move­ment pro­mot­ing diver­sity and use of native seeds, gives us this mes­sage: “For us, mud is not just the matrix of life in which we grow our plants; it’s our build­ing structure—it’s our very sense of who we are.”

Wangari Maathai, Nobel Laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement, teaches us, “Clothe the earth; put on the skin, a dress—a green dress, like trees, like veg­e­ta­tion. And then, when the earth is cov­ered with green, with veg­e­ta­tion, it looks very beau­ti­ful. And in this age of cli­mate change, can you imag­ine how happy the planet would be?” John Todd, biol­o­gist and eco­log­i­cal designer and win­ner of the Buckminster Fuller 2008 Challenge, tells us, “Dirt is very much alive. It prob­a­bly has in it and around it all of the king­doms of life.”

The direc­tors pur­posely sought out par­tic­i­pants from many cor­ners of the globe. “Pretty early on in the pro­duc­tion we real­ized that this is a global topic,” said Rosow. “We really have to think about what’s hap­pen­ing around the world—particularly when we’re see­ing that half of our pro­duce is com­ing from some other coun­try. We also wanted to make a film that was really pos­i­tive, that showed another world is pos­si­ble and that there are solu­tions to prob­lems as they relate to soil, to dirt. Those solu­tions are hap­pen­ing across the planet, which sent us to seek out the most inter­est­ing peo­ple that we could find who were talk­ing about these solutions.”

Click on any image above to see a larger version.

The mes­sage has hit home. Right out of the can, the doc­u­men­tary was accepted for its world pre­mier at the Sundance Film Festival. Shortly after­wards, one of the first pub­lic view­ings of the film was in Salt Lake City for a group com­prised of junior and senior high school stu­dents; and the pro­duc­ers were quite sur­prised as the stu­dents watched atten­tively and laid off tex­ting the whole while, even hush­ing each other. After the view­ing, the pro­duc­ers held what turned out to be a lengthy Q and A period. Dirt! The Movie has now gone on to great acclaim and audi­ence reac­tion every­where, and it is also sched­uled to be broad­cast on PBS dur­ing Earth Day week in April of this year.

Shortly after its release, inter­est in the film went global. “One day right after the Sundance Festival a woman called up and said, ‘I’m call­ing from the European Commission. Do you know what that is?’” Rosow related. “I told her I did, and she said she was call­ing about the film because they wanted to show it there. The gen­eral pub­lic knew noth­ing about the soil, and she asked if we would come over and show the movie to the peo­ple in the European Union who are writ­ing the laws, because they’re prepar­ing a soil direc­tive for all of Europe. We did that, and then they invited me back to show it by spe­cial invi­ta­tion to the European Parliament. Their reac­tion was so pos­i­tive that they’ve already trans­lated it into French, Italian and Spanish, and now they’re doing German. They want to use the film to orga­nize aware­ness through­out Europe in a very active way.”

Rosow sees the chal­lenges ahead—but also the poten­tial­i­ties. “It’s inter­est­ing that peo­ple are becom­ing aware of oceans and water and pes­ti­cides and food, but nobody thinks about soil,” he said. “And even when you go to con­ser­va­tion orga­ni­za­tions, national ones, with whom we are work­ing in part­ner­ship to get the film out, there’s not a sense of soil as the ulti­mate nat­ural resource. Around the world we’re see­ing soil being degraded; it’s not con­sid­ered a liv­ing resource. At the same time, though, the poten­tial for turn­ing this around is start­ing with aware­ness; it starts with map­ping of the soil—all of which is begin­ning to take place. It’s start­ing with pol­icy changes that say how we grow food is sig­nif­i­cant, not only in terms of what we eat but in terms of how we deal with cli­mate change and qual­ity of life in almost every other way.”

Dirt! The Movie is now avail­able on DVD. Buy it through the Organic Connections store.

For more infor­ma­tion on the movie and to become involved, check out the film’s web­site at www.dirtthemovie.org.

Click here to watch the trailer on our site.