agriculture

Handwritten signs urge passersby to pick what’s ripe in Kamloops, British Columbia. (Photo courtesy of Elaine Sedgman).

A European honeybee pollinating pink milkweed.

With spring finally starting to show its face, we're thinking about everything that's green and growing. But as Yvonne Baskin shows in Under Ground: How Creatures of Mud and Dirt Shape Our World, we'd be nowhere without that most overlooked of substances: dirt. In the first chapter, she introduces an amazing world that holds two-thirds of the planet's biodiversity, from gigantic fungi to ancient microbes that can live in boiling hot springs or under sheathes of polar ice.

We are not alone in our struggle to achieve food security in the face of climate change. We are all in this together, growing food in partnership with diverse seeds, breeds, soil microbes, pollinators and other beneficial insects. But we need to acknowledge our interdependence with these other lives, because our fates are intertwined. In a sense, we are married to them, cohabitate with them and cannot physically or spiritually live separate from them.