TWTBACD Ch.70 - The Soil That Breathed

Chapter 70

The Soil That Breathed

2066

2066: soil breathes, prairie remembers what it was

[HAYES FAMILY — Travis and Susan-junior]

Susan Hayes-Kowalski was fourteen in 2066 and had three notebooks filled with observations from the Hayes farm's restoration acreage — the prairie corridors, the wetland margins, the oak savanna that was beginning, after eight years, to look less like a planted savanna and more like the thing it was becoming.

She had her grandmother Susan's quality — the specific attention that sustained inquiry requires, the willingness to go back to the same place at the same time every day and record what is there without imposing what you expect. She had been doing this since she was seven. Seven years of daily observation of the same square kilometre of restored prairie.

'The mycorrhizal network is connecting the prairie to the crop fields,' she told her father one evening. She had been comparing her observations with the soil sensor data.

'I know,' Travis said.

'It's faster than the models predicted.'

'Yes.'

'Why?'

He thought about it. 'Because the models were built on depleted soil data. They didn't have good data for what happens when you stop depleting and let the network repair itself. The network remembers how to be connected. Once you stop breaking it, it recovers faster than the models expected, because the models didn't know how much capability was still present.'

Susan-junior looked at the data on the screen, then at the window, through which the prairie was dark but present. 'So the soil remembered what it was.'

'Yes,' Travis said. 'That's exactly right.'

She wrote it in the notebook. She had the quality of recording precisely: not paraphrasing, not improving, just writing what was said, in the words it was said in, the way her great-grandmother Susan had kept accounts — with the understanding that accuracy now was the prerequisite for understanding later.