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| Dirt Importance  What’s the difference between soil and dirt? Dirt is what you find under your fingernails. Soil is what you find under your feet. Think of soil as a thin living skin that covers the land. It goes down into the ground just a short way.
Even the most fertile topsoil is only a foot or so deep. Soil is more than rock particles. It includes all the living things and the materials they make or change. Without life, there is no soil. Living things haven't just made a home in the soil on our planet. Life actually made the soil as we know it.
Soil is vital to mankind's existence: it supports the growth of plants upon which all life on earth is based; soil filters the water which we drink; soil and its underlying rocks support the structures we build. From the food we eat to the clothes we wear to the air we breathe, humanity depends upon the dirt beneath our feet. Gardeners understand this intuitively; to them, the saying "cherish the soil" is gospel. It's one of nature's most perfect contradictions: A substance that is ubiquitous but unseen; humble but essential; surprisingly strong but profoundly fragile. It nutures life and death; undergrids cities, forests and oceans; and feeds all terrestrial life on Earth. It is a substance few people understand and most take for granted. Yet, it is arguably one of Earth’s most critical natural resources—and humans, quite literally, owe to it their very existence.
The foundation of a family can be preserved and black dirt can be put in place both inside and outside the foundation. Lifestyle — the weather, the isolation, the landscape, the inability to find a date on Saturday night —North Dakota's young people say that what makes for a wonderful childhood can be an inhospitable environment for young adults and may be the key culprit behind the depopulation of the Plains.
It's hard for young North Dakotans — a highly educated group — to have well-paying white-collar careers in a sparsely populated state (640,000 people) where 40 million of 43 million acres are farms or pasture.
Get a little piece of North Dakota as a keepsake or memorial. | |
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