Written By: Emily Osborne
Ok, I’ll admit that before watching this movie, I wondered how someone made a full-length documentary solely about dirt. It goes to show just how much I had to learn, and proved the director’s point in making it! So, what’s it all about?
The way I see it, the movie can be broken down into three distinct parts:
Why should we care about dirt?
The introduction describes the unique circumstances in which our planet evolved, allowing it to create and sustain multitudinous forms of life. It traces the source of all life back to the Earth’s vital, rich, precious layer of skin – in less elegant terms, simply dirt. It explains our human connection to dirt through ancient myths, sacred rituals, agriculture, and our childhood backyards. It effectively displays our dependence on dirt, a substance we literally could not survive without.
What’s wrong with the way we treat dirt?
Deforestation, mining, monoculture farming, urbanization – these modern practices are immensely destructive to the dirt that the Earth has been cultivating for the past several billion years. Soil degradation leads to desertification, depriving dirt of its nutrients and making it impossible for crops to grow. These problems occur alongside drought, famine, poverty, war, and unfortunately, often hit the poorest parts of the world the hardest.
How can we help restore dirt?
What I love about this film is that it provides tangible examples of how people are currently working to revitalize this life-giving substance. The TreePeople is an organization that transforms concrete schoolyards into gardens and green spaces, with students learning and participating in the process. The GreenHouse program in New York trains prison inmates in horticulture, enabling them to serve the community and providing them with jobs. This section stresses that no matter where you live, whether in downtown Los Angeles or rural India, there are creative, feasible, sustainable solutions available to you.
Dirt! features environmentalists, social activists, professors, philosophers, biologists, and NGO founders speaking from a wide base of knowledge and experience. (Note: The exclamation point in the title is actually warranted – everyone in the film is incredibly enthusiastic.) You’ll feel encouraged, entertained, and you may even be inspired to go outside to find the nearest patch of dirt and kiss the earth.
Find out more: http://www.thedirtmovie.org/
P.S. You can find the movie on Hulu!