BOOK EXCERPT
In The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World, activist, author, screenwriter and feature filmmaker Stephen Erickson identifies our Arch-Villain, the main cause of global warming which now threatens to bring about the end of our Anthropocene Epoch — of us and virtually every multicellular life form. He also reveals our singular solution.
Along the way there are exquisite creatures, human and non-human. The challenges they face reveal the immensity of the threat facing each one of us — and its urgency.
Meet Earl “the Worm.”
Earl “the Worm”
If someone was about to tell you an interesting story about someone they’d heard of, this guy named Earl who was known around town as Earl “the Worm,” you might assume the nickname referred to a character flaw, that he’s shifty, slippery. Perhaps Earl the Worm plays fast and loose in his relationships with friends and lovers; at best he’s undependable, worst, he’s untrustworthy, even dishonorable.
Earl the Worm is real. He is shifty and slippery but with regard to how he goes about living his life, he’s in no way flakey. His character is honorable, tried and true. He hails from a noble clan. Earl, as well as his ancestors, play “an important part in the history of the world.” Charles Darwin, the Sir Charles Darwin, said so.
Charles Darwin wrote this compliment about Earl’s forebears in 1881: “It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures.”1
Unlike Pat the Pooper, Earl the Worm is a soil denizen that you can see with your naked eye. He is a little camera shy.
One of the first things a farmer looks for and hopes to see when he or she unearths a section of their soil is whether Earl and of some of his friends are there. It’s a good sign if they are.
Worms create holes in the soil and with their movement down these tunnels, they force air in, aerating the soil. Their burrowing loosens the soil, helping moisture penetrate and roots to grow. They significantly increase both soil aeration and water-holding capacity.3 Micro-organisms flourish in these areas as well. Worms also create worm castings — worm poop — which is very good fertilizer.
How does Earl do it? How does he advance through the soil? With the topsoil in this photograph of Earl, I get it — he just moves it around a bit and bores down through gaps, but how does he get through dense compacted soil? Press your pinky against it and your pinky’s going nowhere. And Earl has no teeth. Even if he did and his mouth turned into this wild rototiller, where would all the broken bits of soil go? Under the ground, he can’t cast anything aside as there is no aside, just the tunnel hole he’s making for his body…
And it’s just darkness down there. No space, no light… How does he know where he’s going? And what for? What’s he up to? Do the microbes guide him? Are they his food source as he “processes” the soil?
Charles Darwin wrote that Earl is one of the most important creatures on our planet. What was it about Earl’s forebears that brought Mr. Darwin to this conclusion?
Earl feeds on both living and dead organic matter. He’s a surprisingly advanced little creature. In the photo, Earl is at least one year old. Earthworms are fully grown at one year and live up to eight years. His digestive system runs the length of his body, he has a circulatory system that circulates blood, and a nervous system that enables him to feel and react to pain. Earthworms don’t have lungs, so they respire through their skin. Earl doesn’t have eyes but he does have photosensitive cells that enable him to perceive light.
Tonight, Earl travels up to ground level. Night-time is when earthworms are most active. Above ground, their bodies glisten in the moonlight because they are covered in a lubricating mucus they secrete.
They’ll eat bits of plants or leaves, or they will search for a mate. Earthworms are hermaphrodites — each one has both male and female sex organs. They have two sex pheromones, Attractin and Temptin, social greeting cards, that facilitate things.4
Tonight after Earl eats, he attaches his mouth onto and drags bits of leaves, grass or seeds down into his wormhole and along a tunnel several feet long into his permanent burrow. Earthworms are good crop-field weeders as they like to consume weed seeds. Once home in his burrow, he’ll further shred the leaf, eating some of it and storing the rest, creating a future food source because… his burrow contains a cocoon.
After earthworms mate a ring slowly forms around a section of the body of one of them. As it separates away from the worm, the worm inserts its own eggs as well as the sperm from the other worm into it. It will seal and become a cocoon, and after a time, baby worms will emerge. Earl wants his burrow well stocked with food sources awaiting the arrival of the little ones.
So, how does Earl excavate the tunnel down to a burrow and then dig out the burrow itself? It is hard to see but his glistening smooth skin is laced with tiny S-shaped hairs called setae that Earl uses to anchor himself as he moves and burrows. The excavation takes some time, but earthworms expand crevices with force, applying 10 times their body weight.5 Slowly, steadfastly, diligently, worms create their network of wormholes and their burrows.
When worms poop, the casts they excrete consist of soil along with digested plant material. Compared to the surrounding six inches of soil, worm castings are five times richer in available nitrogen, seven times richer in available phosphates, eleven times richer in available potassium, and contain three times more exchangeable magnesium.6 Even more importantly, all these digested and excreted nutrients and minerals are now in the exact forms plants can use. In this manner, earthworms break down larger pieces of organic matter and convert it to humus increasing the soil’s fertility.
And these guys are busy. Earl rivals Pat the Pooper in output - only he’s at scale: In Elements of the Nature and Properties of Soils, authors Nyle C. Brady and Ray R. Weil observe, “In conditions where humus is plentiful, the weight of casts produced may be greater than ten pounds per worm per year.”7 Vandana Shiva notes that earthworm castings “can amount to up to 39.5 tons per acre per year.”8…!
Regenerative farmers do not need to add fertilizers. They have Earl and his brethren and a diverse sufficient host of microorganisms doing that for them.
The consistent presence of organic matter on the soil surface provides a food source for earthworms, cools soil temperature and increases soil moisture, building an environment in which they can thrive.
Earl the Worm had spent most of the night eating weed seeds and moving others in multiple trips down the wormhole and into his burrow. By dawn, tired, sated, he decided to call it a night. He nestled in on a tiny, rich bed of leaf and grass bits alongside his unbroken cocoon. His unborn young were developing fine, he just knew. The temperature of the soil would remain cool for all of them, thanks to the composting crop residue covering the surface above ground.
Earl was sleeping when it happened.
A noise, a vibration… Not coming from the cocoon — his little ones were not yet ready to emerge. Louder, the earth being struck, shaking. Louder still. Really loud. And all in an instant, darkness was struck through with searing light and his world fell in.
He cried out with a gurgling noise, an earthworm’s fearful response, as the plow blade sliced through his burrow obliterating everything. Earl was sliced in two and his blood and life fluids drained quickly as his head and the un-severed section of his body was rocketed up through exploding disintegrating soil, into glaring sunlight and open air. He fell atop a mass of clots of severed overturned ground. Earl died on broken soil in searing sun, while the sound and the fury and the vibration of the plow, its blades, and its engine were still nearby, before the dust finished settling about him.
The plow. Time honored, it remains a venerated symbol of the tradition of farming. The Romans during the centuries of their Empire, as well as the Egyptians along the once fertile banks of the Nile River loved to plow, as did the ascendant peoples throughout The Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia — the “cradle of civilization.” But over relatively short periods of time, they ended up destroying their topsoil. The warning spoken in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland, “Dead men tell no tales…” comes to mind as I reread David R. Montgomery’s observation: “Societies that don’t take care of their soil do not last.”
Regenerative farmers understand that plowing is one of the most harmful things you can do to your soil…
When you ask Ray Archuleta about tillage, he doesn’t mince words. Ray has over 30 years of experience as a Soil Conservationist, Water Quality Specialist and Conservation Agronomist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service. He operates his own 150-acre farm in Missouri and has a national reputation teaching agroecology principles. Ray told me in no uncertain terms, “Tillage is the most destructive thing we do in modern agriculture. You are destroying the soil and spreading the weeds everywhere.”
And Ray is only getting started. Once tilled, “The soil begins to cannibalize itself to heal itself. Tilling destroys the biotic glues and compacts the soil so it no longer can absorb the water. The soils have less water capacity, they become less fungal dominant. The soil balance is thrown off with an excessive growth of bacteria. The soil becomes leaky. It cannot hold on to the calcium or the nutrients.” Worse still, tilled soil becomes addicted to synthetic inputs. And Ray doesn’t stop there. The final consequence is seismically worse: “Our soil nutrient density has been cut by 50%, so the nutrients in the crops are 50% less because the soil has been destroyed. This connects to our cancers.”
Ray even has an apt phrase for this. He calls it “Till-icide.”
Earl and his brethren were already plowing this field. Their lattices of wormholes and tunnels, collectively miles in length throughout the field, were aerating and loosening the soil, and enabling it to better trap water. The worms added tens of thousands of pounds of nutrients and fertilizer in the form of their castings while protecting the all-important mitochondria. His death, his murder, was so unnecessary.
Plowing rips apart keystone creatures like Earl. As it breaks up the soil surface, it also breaks up the soil’s structure, what Kristin Ohlson describes as, “the internal architecture of sand and silt and clay created over the decades by earthworms and other organisms that allowed air, water, and nutrients to circulate.”9
No less significantly, plowing tears apart the soil’s internet.
Excerpt from The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World by Stephen Erickson. Published by TGH Press, August 2019. Copyright © 2019 by Stephen Erickson. All rights reserved.
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Stephen Erickson is an author and a dedicated environmental and animal activist for 30 years. He is also a screenwriter, feature filmmaker, and former Home Entertainment executive. He lives in Los Angeles and has 3 children. The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World is his first book.
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1 Presented in the Wikipedia page on Earthworm, this Charles Darwin quote is from The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, Charles Darwin, 1881 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2355
2 © Maryna Pleshkun/Shutterstock
3 Vandana Shiva. Who Really Feeds The World?. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2016. pg. 19
4 Novo M, Riesgo A, Fernández-Guerra A, Giribet G (2013). "Pheromone evolution, reproductive genes, and comparative transcriptomics in mediterranean earthworms (annelida, oligochaeta, hormogastridae)". Mol. Biol. Evol. 30 (7): 1614–29. doi:10.1093/molbev/mst074. PMID 23596327.
5 Earthworm description sourced in part from Wikipedia, Earthworm section, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthworm
6 Nyle C. Brady, Ray R. Weil, Elements of the Nature and Properties of Soils (3rd Edition). Pearson ISBN 978-0-13-501433-2
7 Nyle C. Brady, Ray R. Weil, Elements of the Nature and Properties of Soils (3rd Edition). Pearson ISBN 978-0-13-501433-2
8 Vandana Shiva. Who Really Feeds The World?. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2016. pgs. 21-22
9 Kristin Ohlson. The Soil Will Save Us. New York, New York: Rodale, 2014. pg. 9