Why You Need More Dirt in Your Life
Soil helps build up our defenses against disease and imparts a sense of the sacred—and we are killing it.
It’s estimated that children now spend less time outside than the average prisoner. This could have devastating effects: Kids need to be exposed to the microbes in the soil to build up their defenses against diseases that may attack them later. But it’s not just children, Paul Bogard explains in his new book, The Ground Beneath Us. The EPA estimates that the average American adult now spends 93 percent of their life indoors. As we retreat indoors, more and more of the earth is disappearing, with an estimated quarter of a million acres paved or repaved in the United States each year. [Find out why we are wired to be outside.]
When National Geographic caught up
