William Bryant Logan, a naturalist, writer and founder of Urban Arborists, a tree care program in New York City. Photo courtesy Dirt: the Movie
It’s alive! The stuff we call and treat like dirt is alive and is Earth’s equivalent of skin.
One teaspoon of dirt teems with a billion organisms that are the root of a healthy ecological system that supports all of nature.
DIRT: The Movie will air on local PBS stations at 10 p.m. Tuesday, April 20. The movie is an outgrowth of “Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth,” a book by William Bryant Logan, a naturalist, writer and founder of Urban Arborists, a tree care program in New York City.
Narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis, the movie journeys through dirt’s four-billion year history and illustrates its role in providing us food, shelter, medicine, water, beauty and culture. “We are treating dirt as a story, not a topic,” said Gene Rosow, who directed the movie with Bill Benenson for the Independent Lens series.
Miguel Altieri, a professor of Agroecology at the University of California at Berkeley, says that what happens in the soil has tremendous impact on what happens above it. Photo courtesy dirtthemovie.org
It examines the toll on dirt from current agribusiness practices, such as planting hundreds of acres in monocultures of corn or soybean; the depeletion of rain forests and other woodlands in developing countries; and our over dependence on synthetic pesticides.
“What we often call dirt, you know the stuff you are trying to wash off our car or wash off our driveways, are really these soils and sediments that are vital to keeping our bioshpher healthy, which is all about keeping the plants and animals and ourselves alive,” said Peter Girguis, a Harvard professor of organismic and evolution biology.
Wine guru Gary Vaynerchuck tastes the soil at a vineyard, a basic way to determine the flavorful influences on wines. Photo courtesy dirtthemovie.org
The movie interviews green leaders throughout the world, including Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement, which plants trees throughout Africa. Saying “dirt might be more alive than we are,” Gary Vaynerchuck, host of WineLibrary.TV, always tastes the soil when visiting vineyards, explaining that the dirt influences the flavors of the wine. Alice Waters, founder of the Edible Schoolyard, observes how the children “just want to be in the garden.”
Once you’ve watched the hourlong program, you’ll never treat dirt the same way again.
