Although it is a less visible loss than those of biodiversity or global warming, it is no less serious and is closely related. If we aspire to a decent future and a livable planet, we cannot allow it.
Soils are the last layer of the Earth’s geosphere, which has a crust of only 0.473% of the entire mass that is made up of the core. Thinner even than the last layer of an onion. It is in that small percentage where every form of life displays the miracle of its existence. The soil is our main substrate, the only place where the magic of alchemy is generated by combining the non-biotic with the biotic, where thousands of trillions of microorganisms intermingle with minerals and organic matter to generate the nutrients that plants, fungi, insects and animals, we need to live.
Soils form the beginning of the food chain, which forms a dynamic cycle where various processes are interwoven to ensure that the fabric of life allows us to be here today, sharing a pluridiverse habitat where all species play a fundamental role. Therefore, today it becomes essential that we know that living soils are in danger. Suffice it to say that simply in our country, organizations specializing in these issues argue that our soils are degraded by up to 65% and they also maintain that at a global level they point out that if the way in which we are treating the soil continues, the trend will be that , in the year 2050, 90% of living soils will be degraded from low, medium and high levels.
The big question is why have we come this far? This does not have a simple explanation, since there are many factors that converge for this situation to be at the level of danger in which we are.
What we can affirm is that it is related to the way in which we conceive our being and being in this cosmos that we interpret under a linear paradigm that has sustained a mechanistic vision of life, which has an optic that views the world as a machine. subordinated to rationalist processes that fail to understand subtle, holistic and dynamic dimensions, which has uprooted us from Mother Earth. And just when this happens, our ways of building social organizational structures, administrative and educational institutions and our economic and commercial interrelations are totally disconnected from the pacha, from nature.
That is why the way we treat the soil is fully correlated with the way we treat our body, with how we structure our relationships, from the simplest to the most complex, and where the only thing that matters is generating profitability without caring about generating values. intangibles.