Given the extent of global environmental change resulting from human activities and our increasing worldwide urbanization, there is a new urgency in the study of anthropogenic soil attributes and effects, one of the final frontiers in soil science.

We often hitch our daily soil work to harmonies and rhythms but our annual Urban Soils Symposium is the opportunity to have music be an intentional point of entry into soil — songs that tell the histories of places, songs that describe working the land and music that echoes the unexpected poetry that emerges from the ground.

From Ed Landa, one of America’s most prolific soil scientists and author the classic volume, Soil and Culture, comes this nocturnal composition.

World Soil Day 2020 is a campaign to keep soil alive and protect soil biodiversity. What is living soil? How are soils managed? How is soil biodiversity lost and how can it be protected?

“The U.S.D.A. still reflects the culture of 1862, the year of its creation and of the passage of the Homestead Act, which gave more than 270 million acres of Native American land to white settlers. At the same time, the Morrill Act “distributed” an additional 11 million acres of appropriated Native land to establish a network of state colleges of agriculture and mechanic arts, a network that to this day serves whites preferentially.”

In Marsh Senses, depictions of geological textures, coastal blue carbon storage capacity, Salt Marsh Sparrow and mussel populations, root density and native grasses are parsed out into unique textile designs. When quilted together, these textiles become abstract visual representations of a healthy salt marsh soil system…

On December 4, 2020 from 2-5 pm EST, in celebration of World Soil Day 2020, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, in collaboration with the Soil Science Society of America, will hold an online meeting to focus on two deeply interrelated topics: the future of soil science and diversity and inclusion in the soil science community. Please join.

The second of three installments of Ellie Irons’ weekly multisensorial fieldwork sessions — a meditative, vegetally-paced essay — is part of an ongoing art-science experiment, the Lawn (Re)Disturbance Laboratory.

At this point, even the skeptical Heezen could not deny what they were looking at: a pattern of scars that spanned the earth’s oceans, permanent wounds, torn into existence through the process of continental drift.

Created by puppeteers Alex and Olmsted, for our 2020 Urban Soils Symposium, "Earth, Worm" explores the finer details of soil's role in the world and the unique relationship it has with one of its most important inhabitants.

Over the past nine months, I’ve carried out weekly multisensorial fieldwork sessions as part of an ongoing art-science experiment, the Lawn (Re)Disturbance Laboratory (aka Lawn Lab). These sessions have gifted me regular doses of phytosocial engagement. After a long season of social and physical distancing from fellow humans, I have…

In the gorgeous short film that closed out a long, varied, and stimulating Zoomafternoon with the Urban Soils Symposium, the puppet artist Olmsted — half of the puppet theater-reconceived as film-makers duo Alex & Olmstead — offered an eco-koan. “Life exists,” she voice-overed, “because there are six inches of topsoil, and it sometimes rains.” It made me think of Bruno Latour’s recent book Down to Earth, in which he emphasizes the thin-ness of life on our planet, all of which exists, and always has existed, confined inside the “critical zone,” a narrow…

Artwork by Vanessa Daws

We are inseparably embedded in and co-evolving within biodiverse collectives. Humans are neither great, nor even possible, on their own. — Dorion Sagan via

Soils are alive and in constant conversation and perpetual development — calling and responding to climate , time, microbes, invertebrates, vertebrates. Soils, in their chemistry and biology bear witness to lives and determine the existence of lives. We turn to the soils to listen and to learn. Today we heard of soils collected under American lynching sites, of urban and suburban landscapes that have been mined of minerals and drilled for petroleum oil, of insecticides and Mexican ecologies, and of communities surreptitiously, resiliently creating compost for food and life.

“The US has a Clean Water Act. The US has a Clean Air Act. It is time for a Clean Soils Act, for we cannot have clean air, or clean water, without clean soils.” And with these words from Rattan Lal, so we began the 5th annual, Urban Soils Institute Symposium.

USDA — Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) has completed a coastal zone soil survey (CZSS) for Jamaica Bay in New York City — lab headquarters of the USI. NRCS soil scientists partnered with USI as well as the NYC Soil & Water Conservation District and many others to complete the work. Subaqueous soils are a record of past climatic events and provide information about what may happen to our terrestrial soils as they become submerged by the sea level rise.

With greater soil microbial diversity and perennial polycultures of nutritional—dense food crops, the agricultural landscapes that comprise 40% of the land surface of this planet could slow, if not eliminate the dispersal of novel viruses and bacteria.

“I believe soil is a living thing. That’s what soil health means, soil is life. Every living thing has rights. Therefore, soil also has rights,” says Lal. “As long as you are consuming the natural resources—food, water, elements—coming from the soil, you owe it to soil to put something back, to give something back, whatever you can.”

In these days of COVID-19, we are hearing a lot about bleach….Well, in soil science, we often face a similar challenge — for example, the removal of soil organic matter (OM) that binds mineral particles together in order to determine the particle size distribution (the % of sand, silt and clay), or the identity of the clay minerals present.

The pandemic has given me much food for thought. I am humbled by the power of Mother Nature who brought the world’s most powerful nations to their knees with invisible nucleotides.