Why We Ignore Soil... And What That Says About How We Value What Keeps Us Alive

I used to ignore soil.

At university, I actively avoided learning about it. Soil felt boring. Lifeless. Just brown muck under my feet. Something inert and uninteresting. Why would I spend time studying that when there were bigger, louder, and more important things to focus on?

Why wouldn’t I walk all over it?

For a long time, this attitude went completely unexamined. It felt like common sense. Only later did I realise that my view of soil wasn’t something I had deliberately formed at all.

It was something I had inherited.

It was shaped for me.

Why Soil Is Overlooked in Modern Society

I grew up in a world that silently taught me soil didn’t matter.

At school, soil appeared briefly, usually as an anchor for plant roots. A substrate to hold chemical nutrients delivered via fertilisers. Rarely as a living system. Rarely as something I could understand, relate to, or care about.

When soil did appear beyond textbooks, it was often in caricature. A bearded, prehistoric-farmer-esque man, speaking in a regional accent about lovely mucky stuff.

Warm. Enthusiastic. Well-meaning.

And yet the message underneath was clear. Soil belonged to a particular type of person. Earthy. Rustic. Slightly unserious. Someone closer to the past than the present. I've even started wearing more earthy tones, barefoot shoes from Vivobarefoot, and buying organic food. Younger Alex would be shocked. Society implicitly told me that cheap food was good, and I didn't question it because I was too busy working.

Soil was framed as charming but simple, tactile but unsophisticated. Something to enjoy, perhaps, but not something that demanded intellectual attention or shaped the modern world.

This is precisely what my work in community composting and soil education in Bristol seeks to challenge. Soil is not nostalgic. It is contemporary, complex, and foundational.

Education favoured what could be measured quickly and tested easily. Soil is messy, slow, and interconnected. It doesn’t fit neatly into that framework.

Even environmental education skipped soil, focusing instead on carbon, energy, recycling, and technology. Important topics, but ones that float above the very ground they depend on.

I didn’t intentionally disregard soil.

I was taught to disregard it.

The Attention Economy Leaves No Space for Soil

Modern life rewards what is loud, fast, and emotionally charged.

TikTok trends rise and fall within hours. Media scandals dominate headlines, then disappear. War, terror, and crisis demand constant attention through fear and shock.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t care about these things.

I’m saying that on its own, soil offers none of this.

Soil does not trend.

It does not go viral.

It does not provoke outrage.

Certainly not in the way soil is traditionally taught or understood.

At university, soil education meant chemically examining isolated samples in test tubes. Stripped of context. Stripped of life and meaning.

Meanwhile, soil works slowly beneath the surface, building fertility over years rather than minutes. In an attention economy designed for speed and spectacle, soil is easy to ignore.

Soil Education Starts Earlier Than We Think

In many Indigenous cultures, soil education begins before birth. In some traditions, soil is consumed by pregnant women, entering both the mother’s and baby’s microbiome.

From the very beginning, soil shapes us.

Our food contains nutrients derived from the soil in which it was grown. Human health depends on the composition of those soils.

But the soils we now grow food in are increasingly depleted. Essential compounds such as fulvic acid and ergothioneine are becoming harder to obtain in meaningful quantities. When soil lacks these nutrients, our mental and physical health suffers.

This isn’t abstract.

We are all experiencing the impacts daily, often without realising why.

Diet, Soil, and the Rise of Chronic Illness

Diet is now one of the leading drivers of chronic illness worldwide.

Conditions such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders, depression, and metabolic dysfunction are no longer edge cases. They are becoming normalised. Increasingly framed as issues of personal responsibility, genetics, or lifestyle choice.

But diet does not exist in isolation.

What we eat is shaped by what our food is grown in. And the nutritional quality of food is inseparable from the condition of the soil beneath it.

As soils have become depleted, so too has the nutritional density of our food. Vitamins, trace minerals, and bioactive compounds have declined alongside soil organic matter and microbial diversity. The result is food that fills stomachs without fully nourishing bodies.

Ultra-processed diets now dominate modern food systems. Cheap, calorie-dense, shelf-stable, and biologically thin. They are designed for efficiency, not nourishment. In this context, chronic illness is not a failure of individuals, but a predictable outcome of food systems disconnected from living soil.

This is not about nostalgia or purity. It is about biology.

Human health evolved in relationship with microscopic organisms. Our gut microbiomes, immune systems, and metabolic processes co-developed alongside diverse soil life. When that relationship breaks down, the consequences show up in bodies long before they appear in policy.

We are living with the symptoms of soil degradation, even if we rarely name it as such.

Soil Is the Introvert Holding Everything Together

If soil were a person, it would be the quiet one in the room.

The introvert. The one doing the work while louder, flashier personalities command attention. We devote enormous focus to celebrities and influencers whose importance is amplified by visibility alone.

Meanwhile, soil silently feeds us.

Around 95 percent of the food we eat depends on soil, directly or indirectly. Soil regulates water, stores carbon, supports biodiversity, and underpins entire ecosystems.

Many medicines and antibiotics originate from soil organisms that evolved complex chemical defences long before humans noticed them.

Penicillin? Produced by soil-dwelling microbes.

Soil has been conducting biochemical research and adaptation for billions of years.

We are simply borrowing the results.

Humans Once Understood the Importance of Soil

This lack of soil awareness is not ancient. It is recent.

For thousands of years, agricultural societies organised life around soil cycles. Indigenous knowledge systems recognised soil as alive and relational. Food, waste, and land were connected through daily practice.

Philosophers and leaders understood this too. Hippocrates’ reminder to let food be thy medicine rested on an implicit understanding of soil. Franklin D. Roosevelt warned that a nation that destroys its soil destroys itself after witnessing the Dust Bowl firsthand.

Modern soil science has long confirmed what ancient cultures already knew. Soil biology, microbial networks, and organic matter have been central to soil science for decades.

Figures such as Dr Elaine Ingham, who popularised the soil food web, and educators like Matt Powers have spent years communicating this knowledge. But it is often shared through long-form, lecture-style content, sometimes lasting hours. Deep, rigorous, and valuable. Yet largely inaccessible to those who don’t already care.

This knowledge didn’t suddenly appear.

It existed. It was researched. It was published.

And it remained quietly contained within specialist circles.

My doctoral research into soil, behaviour change, and food systems sits at this intersection. Not asking whether soil matters, but why so many people never get the chance to encounter it in ways that feel relevant, embodied, and human.

Why Soil Doesn’t Fit Our Idea of Progress

Modern progress narratives prioritise speed, control, and technological solutions.

Soil resists all three.

You cannot rush soil regeneration. I lied. You can, but there are consequences. You cannot extract endlessly without destabilising the systems that depend on it.

As urbanisation accelerated after the Industrial Revolution, soil was physically and culturally distanced from daily life. Nature became valuable only when it could be extracted, monetised, or built over.

So, soil was reframed as inert. As a medium to be managed with inputs rather than understood through relationships.

This made soil easier to control.

And easier to forget.

What My Research Into Soil and Behaviour Change Reveals

My doctoral research is grounded in my experiences, education, and a shift in behaviour. Like soil, this didn’t happen overnight.

It began when I was hospitalised in 2018.

After years of disconnecting, late-night partying, eating badly, and living behind a screen, I hit rock bottom. Physically and mentally.

I tried everything. The gym. Going vegan. Waking up at 6:30 every morning.

None of it fixed me.

What changed was slower. I began to distance myself from screens. I got outside daily. I started paying attention to the small habits modern life normalises.

I started paying attention.

Now, I work with people who engage directly with composting, food waste, and soil. What emerges again and again is not apathy, but surprise.

People are shocked by how alive soil feels. By how emotional composting can be.

They don’t lack information.

They lack encounter.

That encounter often begins in spaces like the Compost Clinic in Bristol, where confusion and waste transform into understanding through touch, smell, and observation.

Meaning emerges through experience, not instruction.

Soil Makes Us Uncomfortable for a Reason

Soil confronts us with decay, waste, death, and interdependence.

It disrupts narratives of cleanliness, control, and separation. In a culture that values certainty and distance, soil feels unsettling.

So we learned, collectively, to look away.

Avoiding soil wasn’t laziness.

It was learned behaviour.

Why Environmental Solutions Fail Without Soil

Climate action, biodiversity protection, and food system reform all depend on living soil.

Without soil biology, carbon cycles weaken.

Without soil structure, water systems fail.

Without fertile soil, food systems collapse.

Soil is not an optional environmental issue.

It is the foundation beneath all others.

Soil Doesn’t Compete for Attention. It Waits.

Soil has survived ice ages, mass extinctions, empires, and economic systems.

It has watched attention shift from gods, to kings, to markets, to screens.

It does not perform urgency.

It does not demand relevance.

It waits.

The question is whether we learn to notice soil again before we exhaust it completely.

Relearning How to Pay Attention to Soil

Soil education is not about memorising facts.

It works when it:

• reconnects soil to everyday life

• makes food waste visible as future fertility

• encourages care rather than fear

• builds understanding through doing

This philosophy underpins everything from hands-on soil workshops to the Living Soil Partner programme, supporting organisations to embed soil literacy into everyday practice.

This isn’t nostalgia.

It’s soil literacy.

A Quiet Invitation

I didn’t ignore soil because I didn’t care.

I ignored it because I was taught to.

This essay sits within a wider collection of personal reflections on soil, attention, and care, where research meets lived experience.

Once you see that, it becomes harder to keep walking over something that is quietly holding everything else together.

Trends fade.

Scandals pass.

Headlines change.

Soil remains.

Quiet.

Essential.

Waiting.