The Value of Diamonds and the Value of Dirt

I love composting, and the harvesting and distribution of the resulting soil to my raised beds is one of the pleasures of gardening.  As I pitchforked and aerated my large compost pile in the cool of an August morning, feeling the warmth rising and enjoying the sweet fine smell of newly minted soil, my mind turned to the value of my labors. 

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. 

Earth and Life and Dirt

Mixed in with several loads of laundry, shopping, and doctoral project prep, I spent much of yesterday out in our yard, doing the things one does when you're trying to get a garden in order.  I had no idea it was Earth Day.  I was just doing what I needed to do.

I watered and weeded and inspected our two everbearing strawberry patches, both recovering from a relentless assault of voles last fall.  Pesky little varmints.  There's some replanting that will need to happen, but the few survivors seem to be bouncing back nicely.

I trimmed and shaped and sorted, moving the leafy debris to a few piles in the wooded area behind our house.

I circled the periphery of our front yard, and found that five of our six blueberry bushes are budding up nicely, with the largest already going to flower.  The sixth, well, I think it looked too much like a stick to a neighbor's mowing crew.  Oopsie.

I watered and weeded the patch of peas that I started a week or two back.  As I did so, I realized that the soil probably should have been enriched again before I planted.

That implacable, drably tan Virginia clay just isn't giving up its spare nutrients lightly.  It's cracked and dry and hard, even with the good rains we've been getting, and the young peas aren't happy.  I'd done what I could in the fall after I was done with the beans I'd been growing there, turning in organic matter, but it wasn't enough.  We'll see what the crop looks like.

I'll need to do something to that soil, if things are to thrive.  Though I've started composting and have started a new mulch pile in our back yard, the richness of that newly formed dirt won't really hit its stride until this time next year.  I'll need it before that, particularly if I'm going to try for another round of beans on my little plot come mid-summer.

Shoulda started my composting last year, I thought to myself, ruminating on the silliness of buying trucked-and-plastic-wrapped dirt from Home Depot.

So I was thinking about earth, about the complex organic mess of minerals and the former stuff of life, as I climbed up on the rooftop of our house.

Rains were forecast in the afternoon, and with the trees dumping tree-stuff all over the house in the spring, it makes for clogged gutters.  I clambered about on the shingles, popping the wire covers off of the gutters and scooping matter away from the downspout intakes.  In the gutters, there was dirt.  This was not the clay of the garden.  It was a mix of pollen and seed and leaf fragments, blown dust and rain. There in the gutters of my home, it was moist and warm, rich and dark, perfect soil, so close to life that it was almost alive itself.

Because the best earth was once alive, rich with the complex stuff of life.  It takes time, and life's own self-sacrifice.

And you find it in the darnedest places.