An Earthed Spiritual Practice: Dirt, Grace, Ecosystem Services and Giving Thanks

Does nature have value?

Of course it does. But how do we measure that value? And what happens when the way we measure something changes the way we see it?

One dominant way of measuring nature’s value has been as a material resource for humans to use. Land is valuable if it produces crops, timber, grazing, minerals, housing, profit. That measure has shaped much of the modern world, not always beautifully or kindly.

Another way of valuing nature emerged through the protection and value of wild places, including national parks and nature reserves. In that view, nature has value when it is left alone to be itself. It does not need to justify its existence by becoming useful to us.

More recently, research has explored the value of nature for human wellbeing. Green spaces, trees, gardens, rivers, birdsong, and the more-than-human world can support physical health, mental clarity, emotional regulation, and spiritual awareness.

And then there is another value, harder to measure but perhaps easier to recognise: the incalculable value of nature as something that has an equal right to be.

Ecosystem services and spiritual services

One useful idea from ecology is ecosystem services. These are the functions nature carries out that benefit human life, often without cost and mostly without thanks. Bees pollinate. Trees clean the air. Wetlands hold water. Fungi connect underground systems. Soil grows food, stores carbon, filters water, and mysteriously gets on with being astonishing.

The language of services is helpful in one way. It speaks to a money-shaped world in language it might understand: wake up, join the dots, if value matters to you, notice what nature is already doing.

But it also leaves me uneasy. It can make nature sound like an unpaid workforce. Efficient, measurable, useful and conveniently invoiceless. A kind of planetary facilities management team.

Still, the observations themselves are fascinating. And they can become more than data and become material for prayer.

If ecosystem services describe what nature does, perhaps we might also speak, thoughtfully, of spiritual services: the ways creation helps us pay attention, receive perspective, practise humility, remember dependence, feel wonder and give thanks – not because soil is useful to the soul in some neat transactional way, but because when we look at it in this way the natural world becomes more readable.

This is one way of reading the book of creation. Job says, speak to the earth, and it will teach you.

Giving thanks for the soil

Take humble soil, for example. Dirt. Has thanking God for the soil ever taken a prominent place in your prayers?

What if you considered what soil does as a kind of meditation?

• Organic matter in the soil can hold up to 20 times its own weight in water, making healthy soils more resistant to drought.

• By storing water, soils rich in organic matter can reduce run-off and help lower flood risk.

• Healthy soils store and filter water, improving water quality and helping to regulate water flow. Some estimates suggest a single hectare of healthy soil can store and filter very large volumes of water.

• The organic matter in soils fuels the living component: bacteria, fungi, microbes and other organisms, billions of them in a single handful.

• The soil also provides a home to many larger creatures, such as worms, beetles, mites, centipedes and springtails.

• These living elements undertake a number of services, including decomposition, which frees the nutrients held in decaying matter that plants need to grow.

• Around 95% of our food comes directly or indirectly from soils.

• Healthy soils play host to mycorrhizal fungi, which form relationships with many plants and help them access water and nutrients.

• Millions of species live in soil, but only a fraction have been identified and named.

• This complex system of hidden creatures and processes is fundamentally responsible for much of the food you eat.

• In fact, soil functions with such complexity that scientists are still discovering how much they do not know.

• There is emerging research into how contact with soil microbes may affect immunity, inflammation, mood and stress resilience, though this is not a simple soil boosts your immune system claim.

• Soil is a long-lasting, beautiful building material. Cob structures can efficiently regulate and store heat. You can buy outdoor wood-fired pizza ovens for £2000 and upwards, or build one from resources found in your back garden for next to nothing.

• Soil can even be compressed and formed into objects, furniture and building materials.

• In the UK, soils store far more carbon than the trees growing above them.

• Globally, soils store more carbon than the atmosphere and all vegetation combined.

• Improved farming and land management can help soils store more carbon, but soil carbon is not a simple fix for climate change. It is one important part of a much larger response.

• And that barely scratches the surface of only one element of the natural world.

The same exercise could be done with trees and forests, prairie, bogs, rivers, seas, bees, vultures, plankton, moss, fungi, clouds, rain, lichen, worms, roots, seeds.

Pick almost anything, sit with it, learn what it does, notice what it gives. Go from knowledge to gratitude.

A small practice of thanks

You could try this as a simple sit spot practice.

Choose somewhere ordinary: a garden, a tree, a patch of grass, a lane, a riverbank, a pot of herbs, a compost heap if you are spiritually sturdy.

Sit for ten minutes.

Notice what is actually there before you turn it into meaning: Soil. Leaf. Root. Stone. Beetle. Damp. Smell. Texture. Movement. Stillness.

Then ask three questions:

1. What is this doing?

2. What does it make possible?

3. What thanks does it invite?

You don’t need to force a revelation, let that happen it's own way. What you are doing is practising attention.

For me, nature is God’s creation, full of grace. Thinking in this way brings science and spirituality together in an illuminating way. The facts deepen the wonder. And perhaps gratitude begins, not with a large feeling, but with the slow discovery that even the ground beneath us is already giving more than we knew.