Review: Kiss The Ground

I want to start this off by saying if you like Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead, or even Supersize Me; you will like Kiss The Ground.

The idea behind most of these documentaries is to bring awareness to people. In Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead and Supersize Me; the audience is lead to see the effects of fast food not only on our bodies but on the system we live in. Naturally anytime someone is doing these experiments they tend to take them overboard, like having a supersized meal three times a day with a diet coke. However the message is clear, our eating habits are trash and it’s clearly affecting our systems.

Now, Kiss the Ground actually ended up making me extremely scared. Rightfully so. This documentary follows the agricultural practices of Americans and how it is affecting our ecosystem. I suppose it’s not ludicrous to say, especially after the snowstorms we had here in Texas, that global warming is making the climates unstable. Global warming. The big-ticket word that many people are likely to either scoff at or start freaking out about. This documentary made me solemn, as I was completely unaware of the issues. I mean, we are told it’s the cars and the livestock and we basically take that at face value. I know that the ocean was considered our biggest carbon sink; a carbon sink is a place we can store carbon from the air for long periods of time. As the ocean is heating up, it is releasing more carbon. Therefore, it’s not just livestock, our trucks but also the ocean.

Kiss The Ground told us that there is another way to save our harvests and climate. The way we approach agriculture in the world is actually another reason carbon dioxide has increased in the air. Apparently, we have been using the same practices in agriculture that our ancestors were using. Such as tilling, which disturbs the land and releases, you guessed it, carbon into the atmosphere. THE SOIL IS ANOTHER CARBON SINK. I’ll tell you what, I’m a very science-educated person and I still didn’t realize that.

The outlook is bleak if we don’t do something, such as educate our fellow humans and farmers to find a more regenerative farming system. The way we are going now the soil is becoming unusable in parts of the world leading to “desertification”, and our carbon released into the air is just staying there. They call the carbon in the air that we can’t seem to remove, our carbon legacy. Not a great legacy to leave behind. If we somehow manage to get more plants into the ground and sustainably manage those plants, these plants will take the carbon in the air and transition it into oxygen. These plants will actually then take the carbon and store this molecule in its roots, and the carbon will actually stay in the ground to help the roots and microbes in the ground. It essentially becomes trapped in the ground in the best way possible.

I had to stop the documentary after they said the following, “with our current agricultural practices we only have 60 harvests left before we can’t harvest anymore.” (This was also voiced by Woody Harrelson if you couldn't like that man anymore.) That is sixty years to figure out what we need to do. I had to pause, and I took and moment to think about my toddler, and my unborn children I might have. The fact that the world wouldn’t be able to sustain them. The fact that we could be heading for the biggest, man-made disaster we have ever seen, and it is all our fault. We are the only ones to blame for the mess we are in. And now, we are the only ones to fix this mess. The documentary still ends with a message of hope, a hope that we can pull together and fix our mess. I still believe we can, and I hope you take this and understand how you affect the world around you.