George Monbiot Quotes

If a healthy soil is full of death, it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds ... Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long.

If you build up the soil with organic material, the plants will do just fine.

Soil is a living ecosystem, and is a farmer's most precious asset. A farmer's productive capacity is directly related to the health of his or her soil.

Topsoil is a place of digestion. It sucks and chews things into smaller pieces. When it's hungry, it turns grey and stony; when it's thirsty, it opens thousands of cracked lips. Subsoil is more skeletal: it doesn't digest.

That dark laboratory we call the soil.

It has been recognized since the dawn of microbiology that the soil is inhabited by a living microscopic population which is responsible for the numerous reactions that take place in the soil and that affect the life and economy of man in many ways.

The soil is not a mass of dead debris, merely resulting from the physical and chemical weathering of rocks; it is a more or less homogeneous system which has resulted from the decomposition of plant and animal remains. It is teeming with life.

I consider nature a vast chemical laboratory in which all kinds of composition and decompositions are formed.

Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it.

You can't chemical your way out of soil infertility

Worms are the intestines of the earth.

From dead plant matter to nematodes to bacteria, never underestimate the cleverness of mushrooms to find new food!

You will die but the carbon will not; its career does not end with you. It will return to the soil, and there a plant may take it up again in time, sending it once more on a cycle of plant and animal life.

We have to stop treating soil like dirt.

At either end of any food chain you find a biological system-a patch of soil, a human body-and the health of one is connected-literally-to the health of the other.

Out of the long list of nature’s gifts to man, none is perhaps so utterly essential to human life as soil.

Is it reasonable to suppose that we can apply a broad-spectrum insecticide to kill the burrowing larval stages of a crop-destroying insect ... without also killing the 'good' insects whose function may be the essential one of breaking down organic matter and maintaining healthy soil?

There is life in the ground; it goes into the seeds and also when it is stirred up goes into the man who stirs it.

Nature, and the original system that created us, must always remain somehow with us, the bedrock of our movements and actions. What is our duty? To live a life.

Earthworms are far more valuable than people.

It's impossible to contemplate the life of soil very long without seeing its analogy to the life of the spirit.

Consumption is also immediately production, just as in nature the consumption of the elements and chemical substances is the production of the plant.

Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.

Most subject is the fattest soil to weeds.

All soils are not fertile.