It’s time to announce the winners of my paperback giveaway for Cat Sebastian’s Start Shipped!

AL, Meli S., Kate L, and annike: soon, you shall receive an email requesting info for me to send your copy to you. Hurrah for queer books!

I have been celebrating the entrance of The King in the Forest into the world by reading other books, most especially nonfiction books which are in no way connected to anything I plan to put in a novel any time soon.

The first among these is a book I picked up in this year's University of Chicago annual book sale (a source of great joy in my life): A World of Rivers: Environmental Change on Ten of the World's Greatest Rivers, by Ellen Wohl.

With that title, you would be forgiven for thinking this is a book about water, but in fact it is secretly a book about the great glories of dirt. Wohl is a fluvial geoscientist, which is to say, a scientist who studies how rivers move dirt around. Rivers are constantly taking dirt (mineral sediments and organic materials) off their banks and carrying it downstream, where said dirt is dumped off again in sandbars, wide marshes, or anywhere else the current flows. Every chapter of Wohl's book include a compelling section where she explains what each river does with the sediment it harvests, and how different human interventions – dams, canalization, diverting water for irrigation and drinking – affect the free flow of dirt through the system.

She begins with the Amazon, which is so much bigger than you think it is: its yearly output of water in cubic meters is over five times the outflow of the next largest river in the world, the Congo. When it floods, the river creates a vast watery landscape of water up to thirteen feet deep for hundreds of miles on either side of its already-vast central channels. Across this shifting landscape, which hosts pink dolphins, capybaras, caimans, and roughly 1 bazillion fish, the river is constantly cycling sediment from the Andes into the thin, acidic soils of the rainforest floor and back into the main channel. The natural soils are quite difficult to grow crops it, so the original peoples of the Amazon developed raised beds of enriched soil called terra preta (black earth, in Portuguese), which are found throughout the rainforest basin and are still productive today. Scientists think these patches likely resulted from a decades-long process of regularly working in burnt organic material.

Due to its incredible size, the Amazon has never been dammed, or even bridged. This greatest of all rivers shoots water into the Atlantic with such force that it has no river delta; the enormous quatity of sediment it carries is instead launched to the very edge of the continental shelf, where the gap between shallow and abyssal waters is gradually being filled with an incredibly steep ramp, which you can see in a map of the floor of the Atlantic. (A smaller portion of these sediments are taken by ocean currents up into the Caribbean.)

I was hooked. I was delighted. TELL ME MORE ABOUT DIRT, ELLEN WOHL.

In the chapter on the Danube, Wohl lays out the basic dirt-driven difficulty of river engineering: if you make the channel for the river too narrow, it runs too fast and ferociously, eroding its banks and undermining their stability. If you make the river channel too wide, the water slows down too much and dumps its silt in bars which eventually cause the water to seek a new and easier channel. In the natural way of things, rivers wander all the over everywhere, corralled occasionally by encountering a bank of harder stones. But rivers which humans live close by get shoved this way and that, channelized and straightened for better river traffic (hello Missouri), diverted for agricultural use (hello Colorado), and dammed for industrial and electric uses (hello Columbia, but really all of these rivers.)

The thing I soon realized about Wohl’s book is that it values the free movement of sediment above all other environmental and human goods in the text, which is a fascinating position to argue from but a worrisome one to read. The book is not a fan of hydroelectric power (keeps too much sediment too far upstream), in-river dams (messes with the natural turbidity of the sediment), or any measures to control regular flooding (does not allow the replenishment of sediment in the floodplain.) I am not saying she doesn't have a point about messing around with a river's natural flow, as recent studies suggesting that the delta city of New Orleans [hyperlink to Guardian study]needs to start relocating now due to the persistent threat of sea level rise and river erosion of the levees. Would that still be true if the Missouri was still allowed to carry all the dirt given unto it by the Rockies down to the gulf?

I've written elsewhere about my experiences of the 2011 and 2019 Missouri River floods, which highlighted the limited ability of the Army Corps of Engineers to control the water in the current system. Would these catastrophes have been so dramatic if the Missouri and the Mississippi had not been so straitjacketed by dams and dikes? Would the slower-moving but even more catastrophic pollution of Iowa's rivers by agricultural runoff be as bad if the rivers could still regularly replenish this ground with dirt?

The truth is that I am not, per se, an environmentalist. For me, questions of the environment are important because they of how they shape human lives and how they increase or diminish human suffering. I care about the ecological health of rivers because, fundamentally, I want the people who live on their banks to be safe and healthy. This is necessarily a balancing act, and nowhere is this tension more obvious to me in the case of the dirt which rivers carry. Too much: bad! Not enough: also bad! Wohl started to lose me in her quest to free the sediment in her chapter about the Nile, in which she criticizes the governments of Sudan and Egypt for wanting to control and divert the river for predictable water access throughout the year, to avoid both drought and unmanageable flood. The human cost of not allowing the river to flood is significant – the river no longer deposits new rich dirt on its banks, forcing farmers to purchase the same fertilizers which are steadily destroying the water quality of Iowa's rivers.

But Wohl's book doesn't always tangle with the human cost of letting the river do exactly as it wants. In fact, the word “overpopulation” comes up in discussion of the challenges rivers are facing, as in human overpopulation, as in too many people. Weirdly (not that weirdly) she uses this framing of too many people being a problem to be solved in the context of rivers which are heavily utilized by Black and brown people, like the Nile, the Ganges, and the Congo, and not so much to talk about a river like the Danube, which crosses through a still very white eastern Europe.

As I am neither a homicidal maniac nor a eugenicist, I curse Malthus to hell and think instead about dirt.

I think about dirt, because what I am is a child of the Missouri River floodplain – of the loess bluffs which stand at the edge of the prehistoric flood zone – of the farmers who drained and irrigated a livelihood out of the prairie wetlands which once covered most of the state of Iowa. Iowa has – had – some of the deepest and most fertile soils on the planet, due in large part to this dense network of rivers criss-crossing the prairie. I also am the child of people who took this incredible landscape and methodically destroyed the ecosystems and interconnected wetlands which created it in five generations. Only within my lifetime have Iowa farmers started widespread use of cover crops and no-till planting* to control the erosion of our precious, beautiful dirt.

I carry the questions of dirt with me wherever I go: what is good dirt? What were our ancestors doing with the dirt? What are our responsibilities to the dirt?

We have been worried about this for a long time. Dirt is domesticated earth, the child of geology harnessed and put to work for our continued existence. The Egyptians had a god of floods, Hapi, whom they held as responsible for the deep black mud which arrived once a year, the sanctity of which is attested back to 1800 BCE. If the dirt is not replenished, it stops doing the stuff we need it to do; if the dirt is too trampled, or too wet, or too dry, it stops doing the thing, and we are all very hungry.

Roughly a thousand years ago, a wide variety of writers in al-Andalus (modern-day Spain and Portugal) were composing extensive treatises on agronomy, most spending significant space on the types of soil and how to fertilize and cultivate it. Only a few of these manuals survive, but for example, Ibn Wafid, a master gardener living in Toledo from 998 to 1075, included chapters on soil types, water in the soil, and soil preparation for a wide variety of crops, from turnips to sugarcane.** Ibn Bassal, who was active in Toledo for the ten years after Ibn Wafid died, divided soil into ten types – including: soft and light, mountainous, sandy, black and well manured, and white (?) soils – and discusses seven types of fertilizer, including different kinds of animal waste and bathhouse ashes. Ibn Luyun (1282-1349) also classifies soil in his treatise, with the added flourish of laying out the information in rhyming couplets which could be easily taught to tenant farmers.

These agronomists were, to be clear, determined to bring the earth under human domination. Ibn Bassal ranks land quality by whether it has never been worked (bad!), has been worked once (okay), or has recently been plowed (the best).

One is not sure whether to be reminded of the peoples of the Amazon, who gradually built up their patches of rich terra preta over a challengingly acidic and mobile soilscape, or the first English colonists of Massachusetts, who within a generation of arrival had already been forced to switch from cereal crops to dairying by soil exhaustion.***

It is interesting to look at heavily agricultural countries where a wider variety of soil conservation methods have been necessary due to geopolitical circumstances. Cuba***, historically a sugar colony which was rapidly deforested in the 20^th century, still grows significant amounts of sugarcane, coffee, chocolate, fruit, and other tropical crops. The country has been largely cut off from global markets since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, meaning that a lot of agricultural technology taken for granted in other parts of the industrialized world is either not available or punishingly expensive. In the nineties, many Cuban farmers turned to using animal traction, because tractors were increasingly hard to acquire, but cows were not. Oxen also have the advantage of not compacting the soil as much as heavier equipment and producing nitrogen-rich manure. A wide variety of soil enrichments were also tried, including dry and liquid sugarcane processing residues (pretty successful), different kinds of nitrogen-fixing bacteria like Azotobacter chroococcum (also pretty helpful), green manures – that is, planting various kinds of legumes which are then left in the soil to enrich it – and the addition of crushed quantities of zeolite, a highly-available local mineral which contains important elements (magnesium, calcium, and potassium) and also improves the texture of the soil.

I am especially interested in these interventions because they are being deployed on an industrial level to significantly diminish the need for nitrogen fertilizers. I have spent a fair bit of time working on small organic market farms, and while it was a wonderful experience for me, I have my concerns about whether methods of maintaining soil quality which require a large number of people doing very fiddly work with hand-tools can be deployed without either massive increases in the price of food or significant labor rights violations.

Dirt. Dirt. Dirt. Dirt. Where has it gone? How do we get it back?

*I base this assertion on when the farmers in my family started talking about no-till, but I am roughly supported by reports put out by the federal government and Iowa State University. I'm not sure the two reports, from 2009 and 2018, can be directly compared, as the federal report breaks out no-till protocols by percentage of crop residue left on the field afterward, and the ISU report uses one phrase to encompass the whole idea. However, in 2009 true no-till practices only accounted for 7.8% of Iowa cornfields, and by 2017 ISU was still only reporting 30% of cropland as no-till.

**I am here relying on Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain, by D. Fairchild Ruggles. The only full manuscript I have access to is Ibn Luyun's (1282-1349), translated into Spanish by Joaquina Eguaras Ibáñez. Unfortunately, I believe this volume to be currently lost under my bed.

***A process briefly described in Paul S. Kindstedt's Cheese and Culture. It has been observed that England was not necessarily sending their best and brightest minds to North America at this time, so possibly the residents of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were unusually bad representatives of contemporaneous European practice.

****This information is from Sustainable Agriculture and Resistance: Transforming Food Production in Cuba, edited by Fernando Funes, Luis Garcia, martin Bourque, Nilda Perez, and Peter Rosset. The book is from 2002, so I have chosen to not quote any specific study numbers.

What are your thoughts on dirt? What's the dirt like where you are from? What have you attempted to put in your compost which you regretted?

Much luck and hope,

Sharon