Movie Time

We watched this last night. It's an eye-opener.

DIRT! The Movie--directed and produced by Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow--takes you inside the wonders of the soil. It tells the story of Earth's most valuable and underappreciated source of fertility--from its miraculous beginning to its crippling degradation.

The opening scenes of the film dive into the wonderment of the soil. Made from the same elements as the stars, plants and animals, and us, "dirt is very much alive." Though, in modern industrial pursuits and clamor for both profit and natural resources, our human connection to and respect for soil has been disrupted. "Drought, climate change, even war are all directly related to the way we are treating dirt."

DIRT! the Movie--narrated by Jaime Lee Curtis--brings to life the environmental, economic, social and political impact that the soil has. It shares the stories of experts from all over the world who study and are able to harness the beauty and power of a respectful and mutually beneficial relationship with soil.

DIRT! the Movie is simply a movie about dirt. The real change lies in our notion of what dirt is. The movie teaches us: "When humans arrived 2 million years ago, everything changed for dirt. And from that moment on, the fate of dirt and humans has been intimately linked." But more than the film and the lessons that it teaches, DIRT the Movie is a call to action.

"The only remedy for disconnecting people from the natural world is connecting them to it again."

What we've destroyed, we can heal.

Touche'

I've been around farming all my life. My Dad's a farmer, and one who didn't think twice about giving a hard, dirty job to a girl, either. No quarter there. And my husband's a farmer. He has more mercy on me than my Dad did, but still. I'm no stranger to farm-related chores.

The other evening, my husband was loading seed. Now, seed is very expensive. People will steal it, and rain will ruin it, so he keeps it locked up in the shop until he's ready to plant it. Then, each evening he loads down the trailer with the seed he'll need the next day and backs his loaded trailer into the shop, closing the door down as far as it will go to protect the seed.

I sat there, on top of one of the pyramids of seed sacks he'd already loaded, watching him move two 50 pound bags at a time from a pallet in the shop onto the trailer. He was dripping sweat; I was rather comfortable, sitting there enjoying the view and the nice evening breeze.

As I am wont to do, I started thinking. "I wonder," I mused aloud, "how much of my life I've spent sitting on sacks of seed?"

Without missing a beat, my husband replied, "A lot more time than you've spent loading them."

Ouch.