If Earth Day is the planet’s birthday this is probably about its 4.5 billionth!

We (homo sapiens) have been around for circa 300,000 of those birthdays. We are not the first ‘human’ species but there is a good chance we will be the last, unless we dramatically change the way we view the Earth. This is because modern industrial society is very ‘heavy’ on it; our systems are widely extractive and seriously polluting – we regard the Earth as a resource or a supply chain and its biosphere as a waste site.

To mark the Soil Association’s 80th anniversary, we created something that felt worthy of the occasion. Our Precious Earth Palette, twelve colours grouped across the four seasons , it is a celebration of eight decades spent working with nature, and a reminder of why that work matters.

When I was schooled at a Church of England primary school I was taught the Lord’s Prayer – it is a prayer fundamental to Christian worship. The version I learnt went:

Our Father, which art in heaven;

Hallowed by thy Name.

Thy kingdom come.

Thy will be done in earth,

As it is in heaven.

This was the translation arrived at in 1772 as successive versions, going back a thousand years to the Lindisfarne Gospels, were successively reinterpreted for modern comprehension. It was superseded in 1989 when Church Leaders believed they could more accurately capture its sense thus:

Our Father in heaven,

hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come.

Your will be done,

on earth as it is in heaven.

While for me replacing Thy with Your diminished the payer’s sacred nature, I have not conformed, when reciting it, to the change from ‘in’ to ‘on’ earth. This seems to me to be a particularly anthropomorphic reading (let’s overlook the patriarchal connotations of Father for the present) of the prayer, surmising that the Earth represents a surface for humans to roam on and govern rather than cohabit above others.

But if the Earth was God’s creation – which of course I don’t believe – then our role as one of its many stewards should surely be ‘front and centre’ as the Americans say. In fact, the Americans were the first to change the vowel in this tiny word when they updated the Lord’s Prayer in the American Standard Version of 1901. As with so much else in the C20th, we followed the US with revisions in 1928 and 1989.

What we must not now do is follow their government sponsored disregard for the common inheritance that is the Earth and its biosphere. In the US it is mainstream to use fossil fuels in a profligate way – land is for exploitation; it can be made productive with the addition of fertiliser, the felling of forests or the extraction of shale gas.

This is to TOTALLY misunderstand the value of our SOILS but it has proved to be an attractive and universal model.

Until we realise that our survival requires us to give up the oil business and dig into the soil business (pardon the pun) we are seeing ‘God’s creation’ through a very dirty plastic cup.

“Humanity’s future depends on our understanding that we are part of nature, not separate from it. Without a thriving natural world, we will not survive. Yet the way we farm and eat today is one of the biggest drivers of environmental damage.”

Helen Browning, Chief Executive, Soil Association

Celebrate and claim back the right to deservedly cohabit the Earth. Let’s put the earth into Earth Day – earth, aka soil, is actually all we have to live on! If we abuse soils we end up fouling rivers and poisoning the air.

Modern farming practices are some of the most significant contributors to global warming through carbon emissions, deforestation, desertification and declining fertility. The very bedrock of modern agriculture – inputs – are the cause. We use nitrogen based fertilisers to exploit the growing potential of land, but the more we do it, the more is required, the more that is required the more beholden the farmer is to agritech companies and ultimately the oil price.

Luminaries such as Rachel Carson and Eve Balfour foresaw this – Rachel Carson used her pen to open our eyes (and ears) with her seminal book Silent Spring and Eve Balfour, 80 years ago employed both the spade and an organisational ability that helped found the Soil Association.

How we interact with SOIL is now what will determine whether Homo Sapiens survives on the Earth, methinks. If we start to work with the incredible army of microorganisms in the soil we can empower plant species to meet our needs and help us recover from our fossil fuel dependence. I don’t just mean growing bio-fuels I mean growing a deep interdependence with the very structure of our soil. The Soil Association has shown how organic food can deliver greater nourishment of humans, animals and nature. That it has not become the default food production system which would be truly fair to us, is because the economic system that we are beholden to has a magic wand otherwise known as ‘externalities’.

We can demonstrate ‘cheapness’, ‘plenty’, ‘efficiency’, even ‘mega profits’ by dividing cost between the producer (who might get 1-5% of what the consumer pays) and the planet. What we are now seeing is that the planet absorbs this cost but has to make adjustments – a biospherical, self-regulating system that James Lovelock termed Gaia theory. Sadly for us we are only part of the equation to the extent that we have to learn to live with the consequences and a growing number of humans are not. Extreme weather, draught, wild fires, air pollution and flooding are claiming increasing numbers of human lives (not to mention the loss of countless other life forms) – 2 million from extreme heat and air pollution alone in 2025.

“Our survival depends on turning from the oil business to the soil business – and learning to work with the earth, not against it.”

Edward Bulmer, Founder

How we treat our soils has become existential – but the news is not all gloomy because properly managed SOIL is the most extraordinary, untapped source and with existing know how we can partner it to come to our rescue. Well managed soils can absorb tonnes and tonnes of soil and promote plant growth and tree cover that absorb tonnes and tonnes more. While it does that soil with good levels of organic matter can also hold water, prevent flooding and mitigate against drought. Fertile soils are more ‘efficient’ because they significantly reduce the need for the ‘efficient’ economic system’s externalities while allowing plants to pass on higher levels of nutrient to us and to ruminants. This can have wider and less recognised benefits like leaving more land for crops to create energy like bio-fuels, but even without this we can be much clever at harvesting the carbon plants create and that resides in the part we don’t eat after harvest.

Natural paint, for instance, can be made (ok only we do it) with polymer resins based on plant sugars extracted from maize and wheat straw, but imagine what advances we could make if we diverted the trillions of pounds/dollars of subsidy for fossil fuel extraction and unnecessary scientific research into understanding the biology and chemistry of plants and the SOIL they rely on!

Actually, without that we can already choose to buy organic food or natural paint – if we can afford it. A big ‘if’ but the choice already exists and a lot of us could make it by choosing to spend less on products that rely on externalities to make them seem cheap, so that economies of scale could allow the lowering of prices for more and more people.

If only Government could recognise this – Happy Earth Day from all the teams at Soil Association and Edward Bulmer Natural Paint!

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