Of Humans and Humus

Genesis 2:7 (NRSV) reads "the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground." Poking around, one finds that in Hebrew, the two words are "adam" for humankind (from whence we get "Adam", the first man and representative of all humanity) and "adamah" for dust. This leads to, or is representative of, a link between humanity and the soil. As the story continues, humanity's relationship with the soil intensifies as the soil becomes the object of mankind's labors and out of it come the vegetation that humans are to eat. This relationship, furthermore, like all relationships, is complicated by the Fall:

"cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground. For out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return." (Gen 3:17b-19)

Notice the word choice in verse 17: "toil." The word is not work. I think humankind was intended to work and have relationship with the soil since the beginning, but in the Fall that work was corrupted to become toil and meaningless labor. Thus humankind's relationship to the soil and the earth realizes its first estrangement. Obviously one who sees their work as toil will come to resent the land, the scene of their vain efforts.

But this separation continues, as we notice throughout the Genesis account, every time "civilization" makes a progressive step "forward," relationships experience a further strain. In the Genesis 11 account of the Tower of Babel, languages are established. This can be seen as a further step of progress toward world civilization, and yet it also creates factional tensions and brokenness in relationships.

My argument here is that over time, our relationship with the land has been repeatedly estranged almost to the point of severance by the "progress" of civilization. Writer and agrarian philosopher Wendell Berry makes this point throughout his poems, essays, and novels. Berry looks at the shift of American values away from sustenance off of the land and toward "more noble pursuits" in the city, and argues that it is fundamentally backward. He also points out that whenever small farmers and their families lose land as a result of policy or economic conditions, the voice of society sees it as a liberation from toil. Unfortunately, liberation is in the eye of the beholder, and the rural poor often see it as the loss of a fundamental piece of their identity.

My point is that we as a culture have come to disdain the land and those who work on it. Even many of the so-called "environmentalists" look down on small farmers and see them as backward and part of the problem. The Genesis account, with its reminder that humanity and the soil are fundamentally linked, points to the error in the thinking of the supposedly wise in society. We cannot live without the soil. And so we must protect it from erosion, contamination, overuse, and most importantly ourselves.