Groundswell

A very long time ago...

...the Earth was a much colder place.

- -

Then the Earth slowly started to warm...

...by just a few degrees.

That small increase in temperature

completely transformed our frozen world...

...into a stable climate.

That changed us from hunter-gatherers...

...to farmers.

From farming came cities...

...and, eventually, great civilizations.

One after another, those civilizations rose to power...

...and fell.

Then we learned to harness the power of fossilized energy.

That power allowed us to build the world we live in today.

But like the civilizations that came before us...

...our power to alter land

may also be our greatest weakness.

To survive and thrive in the new world that's coming...

...we need to change.

And that change needs to happen from the ground up.

We need to enter a new age:

the age of regeneration.

The Earth,

our beautiful home, is a living thing.

- -

- -

And we're all part of her.

Our health and the health of our planet are deeply connected.

We're a microcosm of the universe.

Like all forms of life, we share something amazing.

When our bodies become injured, we have the ability to heal.

We can regenerate.

And thankfully, so can the Earth.

Because right now...

...our planet has a sickness.

Our mother

has a fever.

If you've been paying attention lately,

you might have noticed something.

-2012 was the warmest year... -2016...

...had the warmest global temperatures...

2017 was the third warmest year on record...

2023 will be the hottest year ever recorded.

2024 is set to be even hotter than 2023.

The Earth is now hotter than it's ever been.

And all that extreme heat is causing some extreme problems.

This year's fire season has officially set a devastating record.

- -

I know what you're thinking.

"Not another depressing climate documentary."

This is where we usually tell you the bad news

and try to make you feel guilty.

Well...

...this film is different.

It's about a solution to a whole bunch of problems.

It's about something we all have in common.

It's something we all need every day.

It's something we all love.

This film

is about... food.

And about how changing the way we grow food

might be our best hope to regenerate our world.

Now, here's where we tend to go wrong.

Humans keep trying to fix our heating planet

with policy and technology.

And so far, that hadn't cooled much of anything.

Is carbon the only driver of our heating planet?

Or is there something else?

Something equally important?

Since human beings began building cities and transforming landscapes,

we've removed three trillion trees.

That's half the trees on planet Earth.

And we've scraped away nearly three-quarters of the vegetation.

As humans, we've been pushing the landscape

towards desertification for as long as we have been growing food.

In particular, over the last few hundred years,

with things like large-scale agriculture.

"Desertification" is a term that describes when ecosystems

are replaced with hot, dry deserts.

Over half of the world's major aquifers are being rapidly depleted.

The continents are drying out.

Sh-Should I say it again?

As continents dry out and the plant life dies,

the land gets hotter.

The atmosphere is actually heated from below,

so whatever the temperature is here...

...on the ground, it's gonna be more.

In other words, we've turned our lush, green planet

into a hot frying pan.

The drying and heating of Earth's land is accelerating at an alarming rate.

The areas that are dry are growing at

two times the area of California each year.

The deserts are expanding rapidly globally,

destroying our ecosystem.

It's like a spreading cancer.

We feel like there's nothing we can do to stop it.

And yet...

...not only can we stop it,

we can actually reverse desertification and go back to abundance.

It's pretty simple.

The fewer trees and plants, the hotter it is.

And the more green on the ground,

the cooler the planet is.

To fix our warming planet and feed our growing numbers,

perhaps we need to begin with a solution that's not based on human intellect

but rather on the wisdom of nature.

There is one solution to fix our heating planet.

It's an ancient technology that's highly scalable.

It already exists everywhere in the world.

It can hold more carbon than the atmosphere.

And when it's managed right, it regulates water,

which, in turn, regulates the climate.

Soil is such an important carbon sink.

When we have healthy living soils,

we're allowing soil to actually inhale and breathe in

the carbon from the atmosphere.

There's more carbon in soil than there is

in all of the world's vegetation

plus all the carbon that's currently up in the atmosphere.

Some carbon is deposited in deeper soil layers.

It can persist there for thousands of years and even longer,

building up over time the amount of carbon that you have in soil.

When we have a healthy, functioning soil,

we can also store a lot of water.

The soil is the largest and cheapest

water storage tank that exists.

We can harvest water into the soils, hold it,

slow it, spread it and sink it into the ground

so that it can hydrate and quench those thirsty landscapes.

Soil is what makes the difference between

life and lifelessness on planet Earth.

Every living thing

on the face of the planet

depends on soil.

For food, feed, fiber,

for delivery and purification of water,

for recycling our waste,

soil being the most important reservoir of life that we know of.

There are trillions of microorganisms in a teaspoon of soil.

So how many microorganisms are there in a whole garden full of soil?

These things are supposed to blow our minds.

It's made of teeny tiny little things that are alive.

Inside there are trillions of microorganisms.

Whoa!

So, soil is a complex cosmos in itself

that we have so much to learn about and so much to love

and so much to respect.

We just really never want to treat our soil like dirt.

- -

Soil is sand until life is added.

- -

Once life is added, the sand becomes soil.

The source of energy

to feed all those different life-forms is photosynthesis.

All that photosynthesis is feeding the soil microorganisms.

And that all becomes food

for everything else that depends on it.

Although nature is infinitely complex,

life on land is made of three main components.

Every ecosystem