The survival of all species on land depends in part on: thin layer of topsoil. Soil degradation around the world due to poor land management, pollution and industrial resource extraction is major contributors to climate change and threaten our ability to feed ourselves.
The soil has therefore been a topic of discussion in recent years documentariesthe focus of one shift in land management practice and a most important resource in the fight against climate change.
By looking at how it is depicted in works of fiction, we can try to understand how we humans interact with the soil. And through the soil, how we relate to the environment in a broader sense.
The speculative fiction genre (stories that go beyond the real world) is particularly useful because it provides an innovative toolkit for taking ideas apart and putting them back together.
Here are five works of speculative fiction that offer insight into the importance of soil.
1. Farmer in the Air by Robert Heinlein (1950)
This short novel follows 21st century teenager Bill Lermer as he and his family leave an overpopulated Earth for a life on Jupiter’s moon, Ganymede.
Baen books
There, good land is a highly valued asset, and a lot of effort is put into generating it. The topsoil is shipped all the way from the earth and delivered to sharecroppers for the conditioning of their soil. Through agriculture, Heinlein addresses some of the issues involved establish new communities.
At the end of the novel, in response to his family’s return to Earth, Bill declares that Ganymede is his home and where he belongs.
By cultivating the land he has become part of itand part of the farming community. But like so many science fiction stories that take a “do it right next time” approach, this novel’s resolution involves leaving a stricken Earth behind to start over somewhere else.
2. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy (1992)
Robinson’s trilogy is a reinterpretation of the American West on Mars, with a hopeful vision of the formation of a future utopian society.
Spectra
Soil microbes are often the focus of theoretical terraforming (modifying a planet or moon to make it habitable for humans) because they release CO₂ and warm the atmosphere.
In the Mars trilogy, terraforming is presented as a colonial act undertaken solely for the benefit of humans. However, Robinson’s novels make room for imagining the re-entanglement of humans and ecosystem by highlighting our dependence on microbial life in the soil.
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3. Paradises Lost by Ursula K. Le Guin (2002)
Le Guin in 1995.
Marian Wood Kolisch/Oregon State University, CC BY-SA
This novella chronicles a multi-generational journey on a ship destined for a distant Earth-like planet.
Over successive generations, apart from any semblance of an ecosystem (food is grown in ‘dirt’ with few, carefully curated microbes, and no animals or insects on board), social fractures and growing religious fervor develop.
Through Paradises Lost, Le Guin explores our connection to soil and the environment, including the depth of its influence on us.
4. Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (1993)
This novel’s setting in mid-1920s America, ruled by a populist president and rocked by climate change and social disorder, is quite prescient. It follows teenager Lauren Olamina as she tries to survive in a near-future nightmare of poverty, drought and forest fires.
Cup
After her comfortable, walled community is plundered by drug addicts, Lauren is forced to travel the highways on foot, building a new community around her Earthseed religion along the way. Eventually the community reaches Northern California (a very productive region for agriculture), where they settle and farm the land using seeds Lauren brought from her old home.
The soil here is a refuge – synonymous with social stability and prosperity; it provides food, security and homeland.
The novel closes with the passage from the Bible from which the novel takes its name, planting metaphorical seeds for Lauren’s new community and spreading them on “good ground” for a prosperous future.
5. Semiosis by Sue Burke (2018)
Tor Books
Semiosis wonders what it would be like if humans integrated into an entire alien ecosystem, and invites reflection on our current integration – or lack thereof – with our own ecosystem.
Humans travel from Earth to the distant world of Pax, where they depend on their new environment for survival. The planet is already inhabited and some inhabitants can speak through soil microbes and biochemical signals.
Through the generations of human descendants on Pax, a mutually beneficial relationship with the environment is created, with the soil as a guide.
