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Just Dirt
The Movie
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Who woulda thunk it?.....a
movie about dirt. Next Thursday night at the
Midwest Theater in Scottsbluff, make that the
historic Midwest Theater in Scottsbluff, you can
watch a movie about dirt. No, not celebrity movie
or rap star dirt. No, not corrupt government
official dirt. No, not Wall Street banker dirt.
No, not sports star dirt. Just plain old dirt
dirt. I can hardly wait!
Dirt really is an exciting
subject for a movie, and if you are a gardener, and
if this movie is as good as it could be, attending
next Thursday night’s 7:00 showing at the historic
Midwest Theater should be about as exciting as
spotting that first spring robin in your yard
(which, by the way, I still haven’t). And because
it has been my observation that most good gardeners
are also, let’s just say “thrifty”, you’ll be happy
to know that the movie is also FREE.
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Because it is the nature of
life to want to grow everywhere, as early “plants”
moved out of the ocean , they faced the major
obstacle of trying to get the “life soup
ingredients” directly from the soils surrounding the
oceans. Those first “pre-plants”, by the way,
appear to have been large smooth rock-like colonies
of photosynthesizing bacteria located at oceans’
edges. The most current theory of biological
history is that some of these bacteria became the
first “plants” when they merged with early fungal
life forms to blend the capacity of fungal life to
pull elements directly from that early mineral earth
crust “dirt” with the capacity of early
photosynthesizing bacteria to capture the energy of
the sun to power this new merged form of life that
we now call plants.
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Previous Articles
A Loooooong
Winter
March 10
2009
Articles
2008 Articles
2007 Articles
2006 Articles
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Regular readers of this column
know that I often write about the challenges posed
for Wyobraska gardeners by the region’s relative
lack of historical biological soil development.
That’s a fancy way of saying that Wyobraska
landscapes generally start with little or no
topsoil. My own, still in progress, study of the
interrelationship between plants and the soil in
which they are growing has shown the subject to be
as fascinating as it is complex, and generally made
more difficult to understand than it need be by our
efforts to discuss or understand the subject with
far too few and far too simplistic words—starting
with the word dirt.
I’ll attempt a brief summary of
what I think I’ve learned over the years. Consider
this a kind of written movie trailer. The earth’s
crust was made up originally of a blend of small
particles of rock and dust. Those particles, of
course, were made up of the various chemical
elements out of which the universe is made. Out of
the 100 or so of these elements that make up our
planet’s crust and the atmosphere that surrounds it,
the plants, and for that matter, all living things,
use about 15 or 16 to grow themselves and conduct
all of the biological processes necessary for
life. It’s probably no accident that almost all of
these 15 elements (at least those that come out of
the rock and dust) are elements that are relatively
easily dissolved in water and thus ended up as the
“salts” in the planet’s oceans. That is why it is
almost certain that life’s evolutionary roots were
in the planet’s oceans—the ingredients for life were
all in the soup.
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“Dirt” became “soil” as plant
and animal life moved away from the ocean’s edges
and colonized virtually all of the earth’s land
surface. The cyclical nature of life meant that the
dirt became the place where the tissues of all
living things, plants and animals, went when they
died, and in one of the most beautiful and profound
processes of life, are returned to the basic
chemical elements from which they originally
arose. It is through this cyclical nature of life
with a capital L that the top layer of the earth’s
crust has become a veritable ocean of life. Any
college freshman microbiology student will tell you
that there is far more mass of living things below
ground than above ground. And if that doesn’t
impress you, consider this. The soil around the
root system of the average mature shade tree
contains an estimated ten thousand trillion
bacteria.
So much for the trailer for the
movie “Dirt”. By the way, it’s part of a series of
movies called Independent Lens that are produced in
cooperation between independent documentary film
makers and Public Broadcasting. I have seen
several of the recent movies in this series and not
been disappointed yet. See you at the movie!
dirt!
The Movie |