I can approach the Soil Renewal Zone. There are viewing stations, weathered concrete platforms, along the western periphery. I can look down into a stand of trembling aspen, or a wetland scrape, or a flowering meadow grazed by cattle. I can bring my old, broken Leica and peer through the rangefinder, framing photos I’ll never get to take. I can listen to the trilling of a skylark. I can sing back. I can inhale. Happily, human olfactory receptors can detect the smell of living soil, even at a distance. I try to visit when it’s breezy.
I cannot enter the SRZ. If I get too close, I’m repelled by the Flaming Sword—a forcefield, usually invisible, that glows green and chimes when I touch it. Although contact isn’t painful, I cannot penetrate the barrier.
I’ve been in the Zone exactly once, and someday I’ll be allowed back in. But I don’t know when, or whether I’ll even notice that I’m crossing the threshold.
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Out here, in the Populated Zone, the ground is mostly paved. If I leave my apartment, I can only step on asphalt or concrete—pointless roads and driveways, for cars that were long ago dismantled. In the city “parks,” there are patches of chalky dust, barren as lunar regolith. If a cactus or a lupine somehow germinates, it has to be reported and transplanted. There can be no lushness in the Populated Zone, which was never densely populated.
Our sin, our collective miscalculation, was to use up all the topsoil. There’s a photo in a yellowed book; it shows an industrial farm, a whole valley given over to one species. Colossal sprinklers stretch between the mountains, like dinosaur rib cages laid end to end. Something grows underneath, maybe sugarcane or maize (I wouldn’t know the difference). I don’t think those plants were deceived. They sensed that they were being coerced. Their roots were crowded, the rain from the sprinklers was tasteless, and where were the worms?
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The humus, dark plush formed over billions of years, was abundant but finite. Money kept moving. Forests were cleared, and the naked land worked to exhaustion. Crops failed, even on the big farms. What little would grow was less nutritious. With fewer roots to hold it together, the arable earth turned to powder. Rivers ran red and changed course as their deltas were clogged. The air was heavy with particulates.
The consequences, as you can probably imagine, were horrific. Famines and wars; loss of hope, loss of trust; general astonishment and guilt. Our island had to sequester itself so that the SRZ could be established. The Zone is not a private estate or public property; it belongs to the future. We’re attempting to manufacture chernozems, high-yielding super soils, almost from scratch. It will take a long time, perhaps millennia. The climate is favorable.
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When it was first created, the SRZ was more hands-on. It had to be planned and managed, like a twenty-first-century rewilding. The island’s remaining soil was gathered and enclosed within the Zone. Trees and cover crops were planted, to hold the precious dirt in place. Some wished to exclude nonnative organisms, but we couldn’t afford to be selective. The seed banks were emptied. Fish, amphibians, rodents, and ungulates were introduced.
Now, after many decades, the Zone is more autonomous. Natural processes have taken over. Roots break up the bedrock, converting it to clay. Microbes live under the spruces and grasses, devouring their litter. Worms eat their way through the hillsides, expelling their castings, refining the mold. Birds and insects keep arriving, including species thought to be extinct. The clouded Apollo has been sighted, and there are flocks of trumpeter swans. They scent the Zone from afar, or spot it from above, and the forcefield lets them in.
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We’re told that the Zone is succeeding. The porous soil teems; theoretically, it’s arable. But no one may harvest anything while it accumulates—there’s the rub. Every tree that falls must be left in place. The deadwood hosts beneficial fungi, then decomposes, enhancing the loam. When deer are culled periodically, to mimic the effect of absent predators, the meat has to be abandoned, sacrificed to beetles.
Eventually, after many generations, small-scale, no-till farming will be permitted. But this can’t happen now, because the system doesn’t have enough nutrients. We’re waiting for life to integrate the elements, both classical and chemical. Progress cannot be accelerated. Meanwhile, we eat lab-grown gruel.
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There are three ways for a human to get inside the SRZ.
The first is to be involved in a birth. You can be the person giving birth, you can be the midwife, or you can be the baby. All human births happen in the Zone. The mess is left inside—the amniotic fluid, the mucus, the blood, the feces, the afterbirth. Animals feed on the placenta, or else it rots. This is an offering to the soil-building system, a way we can contribute.
I can’t get pregnant, and it’s too late for me to become a midwife, which requires years of training. But I do support the birth policy: there are many good reasons for it. To begin with, it’s an incentive to reproduce. Delivery is painful and dangerous; contact with the biosphere’s your compensation. There’s also the ritual of Grounding, which is said to be good for the infant. Before the skin-to-skin, there’s a full minute of skin-to-earth. Exposure to turf or mud, at this early moment, leaves traces in the psyche. Islanders have this in common. We’re a family of exiles, protective of our homeland.
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The second way to enter the SRZ is to die. I’ll be buried there, in a shallow grave without a coffin, without embalming. There was a debate about this practice initially, since our bodies are loaded with heavy metals and preservatives and plastics. As we decay, these contaminants are transferred to the soil. But the engineers who planned the SRZ made some calculations, and concluded that we do more good than harm. The nutritional input is immense.
A teacher told me that she was consoled by this prospect, this inevitability, of returning to the Zone. Maybe to the very same glade-floor that once embraced her newborn backside. She believes that our brains “reignite” when our corpses are deposited, for a single blissful moment. But I am not reassured. I do not look forward to deliquescing. I begrudge the maggots every atom they extract from me, and the greedy rhizomes, and the mosses. Of course, they won’t care about my wishes. No one asked God where the manna came from. They’ll just siphon me up.
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The final way to enter the SRZ is to become a Compost Worker. That’s the only job title in the Zone. You have to be willing to get dirty, to dig graves and lift corpses, to handle food waste and excrement. The crew is skeletal, and working conditions are harsh. To prevent soil-smuggling, employees are kept in isolation, and subjected to invasive searches. They wait in solitary bunkers, until they’re called in to stake a sapling or kill a doe. It’s a permanent commitment, for no money. You sign away your rights. In exchange, you enjoy the privilege of laboring in the Zone for a few hours each week.
Only a lunatic, or a fool, or a very disappointed person would consider signing up. I must be one of those things; every day, I think about enlisting. Some people want power over others. I want to stand in a marshland at sunset, and notice the vernal pools blushing. To locate a plot of aromatic berries, even if I’m not supposed to touch them. To lie down in grass before I’m dead. To notice that the brambles have drawn blood. To hear all those sounds I’ve only heard about—frog into freshet, spade into sod.
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Melissa Tuckman teaches courses in literature and gender at Rowan University. Her writing has appeared in several publications, including Litro, Rust + Moth, and Tiny Molecules.