I thought, which is worth more: a one carat diamond or forty pounds of compost? As our human economies would have us understand it, there's no question. It's the diamond.
Forty pounds of compost, as of this writing, would set you back about five bucks.
A one carat, unset diamond, well cut? That ranges from just over a thousand dollars to around twelve hundred.
One is valuable, the other, well, it's as cheap as dirt, being dirt and all.
But humans are shortsighted creatures, and our imagined economies are bizarrely skewed. Why do we think this? Why is one thing twenty times more valuable than the other? What are the metrics we use and assumptions we make to come to this decision? Let's look at three: utility, rarity, and beauty.
Utility is one measure of value. How useful and necessary is a thing?
A diamond, cut in an ornamental manner, isn't all that useful. If we were to take that carat and use it differently, it does have some real industrial function. Being a phenomenally hard substance, diamonds make great drill bits and polishing surfaces. Diamonds also have use in certain computing applications, particularly the development of quantum/qbit processors. Cool, sure. But generally speaking, those are pretty specialized applications.
Soil, on the other hand, grows the food we need to eat, every single day. Without soil, we'd all die in a week. We are utterly reliant upon it. From the perspective of usefulness and necessity, there's no comparison. Soil is infinitely more valuable for human life.
What of rarity?
Generally speaking, we'd think that diamonds are far more rare. We see soil everywhere beneath our feet, and diamonds must be mined at great cost, so we think: diamonds are rare and valuable.
But...are they? Here on the surface of our little planet, sure. But there are likely one quadrillion tons of diamond (that's a million gigatons) deep under the surface of the earth. There are only around 116,000 gigatons of arable, fertile organic soil on Earth, (including grasslands, forests, and wetlands) which exists distributed in a meter-thin layer across the surface of the planet. There's a factor of ten more diamond in and on the Earth than dirt.
In the rest of the solar system, studies suggest that the cores of many planets are comprised of massive diamond deposits. There seems to be a layer of diamond ten miles thick under the surface of Mercury. On all four of the gas giants, diamonds may fall from the sky like rain.
But dirt? There is no organic soil on any other world in this solar system. None. And we have no evidence of it anywhere else in the universe, at least not yet. Soil is breathtaking rare and almost impossibly precious.
As for beauty?
Well, beauty is entirely subjective. Diamonds do catch the light in a lovely way, but why is that objectively more valuable than the warm richness of living earth, the promising pungency of turned biomass beneath your nostrils, the complex richness of soil rolled between your fingers?
It isn't.
So for me, at least, there is no question. Particularly as I turn the soil in the cool of an August morning.
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