Unless you are a farmer or an avid gardener, it’s easy to forget the importance of dirt. But the stuff we walk on is not just nature’s pavement. It’s a living thing teeming with essential microorganisms. Life came from dirt (Adam means clay in Hebrew) and without dirt, it would end.
That’s the message of Dirt! The Movie. The Sundance selection (out April 6 on DVD) is a breezy but informative documentary on the stuff Earth is made of. Narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis and directed by Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow from the book by William Bryant Logan, Dirt is full of the wonder of it all—the carbon from distant stars that somehow collected on our planet, the long evolution of life-sustaining top soil, the endless cycle of birth and decomposition. Civilizations have fallen because they mismanaged their dirt, causing deserts to spread like cancer.
Dirt’s call to arms concerns the industrial farming that became prevalent in the last century. Monoculture, the planting of a single crop over a huge acreage, is vulnerable to insects and requires pesticides, which along with chemical fertilizers strip the soil of its nutrients. We are in danger of slowing poisoning and starving ourselves in the interest of short sighted agribusiness. Dirt’s snappy animation and lively interviews keeps the tone from growing dark.
