Kate Brown: Resurrecting the soil
What can the history of the soil tell us about modernity and its ills? An experiment in urban gardening sets Kate Brown thinking about the consequences of the western world’s perennial misuse of the land – and how to return life to today’s extinct terrains.... My shovel hit the earth with a ka-chunk. My friend and I were digging trenches to lay down a line of asparagus. We didn’t get far. The ground on a stretch of urban territory in Washington DC consisted of a thin layer of grass covering gravel mixed with burnt-orange clay. Clay is the iconic soil of the American South.
In Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara, the man-hungry party-girl, stands in the smoking ruins of the Civil War and longs for the ‘red earth of Tara’. In the novel’s conclusion, Scarlett realizes that, more than any man, her native soil ‘was her strength’...
