Cover of The Soil Will Save Us by Kristin Ohlson

In the fight to solve the climate crisis, much has been said about the need to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. In her 2014 book, aptly titled The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers, and Foodies are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet, Kristin Ohlson argues that we should be placing just as much emphasis, if not more, on equipping the Earth’s soil to sequester carbon. This spiritual prequel to the 2020 Netflix documentary Kiss the Ground offers a multitude of perspectives on soil’s potential for carbon sequestration, albeit without the celebrity endorsements found in the documentary. Ultimately, The Soil Will Save Us is a thorough, if not particularly technical, guide to the ideas of soil carbon sequestration and conservation.

Carbon sequestration sounds like the name of a villain from Captain Planet, but actually refers to one of the more promising ways to slow our changing climate. Where limiting fossil fuel use reduces the amount of greenhouse gases spewing into the atmosphere, carbon sequestration takes the carbon already in the atmosphere and stores it on the Earth’s surface. Engineers are developing carbon-sequestering technology, but currently the most effective carbon sinks aren’t manmade. Oceans and forests can store huge amounts of carbon. Ohlson’s book makes clear to readers that soils are another key carbon sink, currently storing about 80% of all of the carbon in land-based ecosystems. If we can maximize its storage ability, she argues, the soil could save us from ourselves.

While the idea of soil as a carbon sink may not be new to those plugged into climate change discourse, The Soil Will Save Us presents this nature-based-solution for a decidedly non-scientific audience. This is not to say that the book is overly simplistic. Best exemplified in her likening the plant-mycorrhizae relationship to a pizza delivery business, Ohlson takes great care to explain every technical idea that she presents. Part of this ability may stem from empathy—Ohlson is not a scientist herself, but rather a prolific journalist whose work has focused on the natural world in recent years.

Kristin Ohlson, author of The Soil Will Save Us (Image source: Ohlson’s website)

Ohlson’s perspective outside academic climate science sets The Soil Will Save Us apart from other literature about soil carbon sequestration. While the book contains interviews with notable soil scientists, Ohlson doesn’t limit the book to only their perspective. Most interviews in the book are with farmers and land managers instead. Soil as a carbon sink is discussed at length, but equal weight is given to the economic benefits of soil conservation practices. Innumerable farmers interviewed throughout The Soil Will Save Us recount the same story—they were skeptical of soil conservation practices until they saw how it improved their crop yields and durability. For them, soil’s ability to store carbon was nothing more than “icing on the cake.”

The inclusion of these viewpoints turns The Soil Will Save Us into a broader examination of the mainstream environmentalist movement. Though Ohlson makes it clear early on that she is a firm believer in human-caused climate change, not all the farmers and land managers profiled are as convinced. Even Australian soil conservation expert Bob Wilson admits in his interview “I believe the climate is changing…but I don’t believe that human activity has caused this.” He and other land managers featured are in the soil conservation business for the short-term economic benefits, not the existential fight against our changing climate. Implicitly throughout the book, Ohlson asks us—do beliefs and intentions matter if actions are a net positive?

Ohlson’s position outside of the sometimes-insular scientific community also allows her to critique even systems as rudimentary as the scientific method. In one notable conversation with land manager Allan Savory, Ohlson does not shy away from pointing out how Savory’s holistic land management methods are not reproducible, as the scientific method demands, because they are intrinsically contextual to the land’s specific circumstances.

Agricultural research funding is also not spared from Ohlson’s critique. She calls out the fact that many agricultural programs at US colleges are funded by commercial agriculture giants. One memorable quote from Ohio State Professor emeritus David Zartman makes the consequences of this evident: “the money dictates the direction of the research,” he asserts “not the other way around.” Through this interview Ohlson makes the argument that this research funding from agricultural companies explains carbon sequestration hasn’t taken off in the United States like it has elsewhere.

The book’s title isn’t hyperbole—throughout the text the point is made time and time again that if we take the soil seriously, it really could help save us from the climate crisis. Sometimes however, this point is made a bit too emphatically; a conversation with molecular biologist David C. Johnson implies at the end of the book that we should focus all of our energy on soil carbon sequestration in lieu of limiting fossil fuel emissions because “we’re not going to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions anytime soon.” This idea is so outside of the scientific consensus about how we should address climate change, which stresses the need to reduce fossil fuel emissions above all else. Although Ohlson acknowledges this dimension of Johnson’s assertions, their inclusion in the book’s final pages is baffling.

Despite some diversions, The Soil Will Save Us leaves readers with a clear moral. Soil is a powerful, complex system, and we must start treating it as such if we want to get out of the hole that we’ve dug ourselves.