Biodiversity Begins Beneath Our Feet
There’s a phrase I keep returning to, both in the compost pile and in the world: biodiversity starts with soil. And the more time I spend digging, growing, observing, the more I believe it’s not just true, it’s foundational.
Because soil isn’t just dirt. It’s alive. And where there’s life, there’s complexity. A single handful of healthy soil can hold more organisms than there are people on Earth. Bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, arthropods, an entire unseen ecosystem, humming below our boots.
And it’s not just underground noise. These organisms do things. They decompose matter, cycle nutrients, sequester carbon, structure the soil, and form the invisible scaffolding that plants, and everything that feeds on them rely on.
This is where the food web begins.
Plants don’t grow in isolation. They grow in relationship. With mycorrhizal fungi that extend their root systems, with bacteria that fix nitrogen, with the humus built by decay. The health of the soil community directly shapes what can grow, how it grows, and how resilient it is to drought, disease, or disturbance. You are quite literally a reflection of the soil that your food grew in, or was grazed on. The term for what we truly are is holobiont. More on that another time.
From the ground up, that living soil supports diversity, whether plants, insects, pollinators, birds, mammals, and us. You can’t have thriving above-ground biodiversity without vibrant life below.
Yet modern agriculture and much of modern thinking, treats soil like a passive medium: something to till, fertilize, and control. But the more we simplify it, the more we collapse the biodiversity that once thrived within. Monoculture starts in the soil long before it’s visible on the surface. We need a soil first farming.
Compost teaches us. It reminds us that decay is part of renewal, that diversity drives stability, and that the real action often happens in places we can’t see. It's the best evidence that death is the source of life. That it's all just a cycling of energy and that death isn't final, at least not in a physical sense.
So yes, biodiversity starts with soil. And maybe the path to restoration starts there too. Not just in what we grow, but in how we care for the complex, messy, microbial world beneath us.
Because in the end, building soil is building life. We are connected to it, a part of it. Everything that is here has cycled through it countless times. Soil is life.
