chernozem
On Tuesday, I dug up the leeks we grew this summer, and marveled at the earthworms wriggling in the hairy roots. Beneath the three inch crust of snow, a subterranean world was writhing with biotic activity—
a fact that made me think of “chernozem,” a word I first encountered in Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac:
What is the most valuable part of the prairie? The fat black soil, the chernozem. Who built the chernozem? The black prairie was built by prairie plants, a hundred distinctive species of grasses, herbs, and shrubs; by the prairie fungi, insects, and bacteria; by the prairie animals and birds, all interlocked in one humming community of co- operations and competitions, one biota. This biota, through ten thousand years of living and dying, burning and growing, preying and fleeing, freezing and thawing, built that dark and bloody ground we call prairie.
Aldo Leopold, The Round River,
A Sand County Almanac 1949
Last night, I asked my daughters if there is a Greek Myth that accords with Winter Solstice. “Pluto and Persephone!” was the answer my 13-year old gave, after a moment of eye-scrunching agony.
Yes, indeed. Our frigid, whitewashed world appears to be dead—but down there beneath our feet, there is life.
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