We can't bury our heads in the sand any longer. More than a third of Earth's top layer is at risk. Is there hope for our planet's most precious endangered species?

(Image: Auscape/Getty)

FIND the places where farms give way to the California wilderness and you’re sure to encounter an endangered species. It is not aggressive, but it is omnivorous, devouring anything that happens to fall dead within its reach. And like most rare beasts, the extinction of Abruptic durixeralfs would have cascading impacts on the ecosystem around it.

Don’t be misled by the name. This is neither animal nor plant nor microbe, but a subgroup of soils. Its members nonetheless slot into a classification system every bit as elaborate as that we use to categorise life forms. In the US alone, more than 20,000 soils have been catalogued. Many are facing extinction.

It may seem like madness to speak of soils going extinct, but more than a third of the world’s top layer is endangered, according to the UN, which declared 2015 the International Year of Soils. This December, it will release a much-anticipated report on the state of the world’s dirt. The news won’t be good: we are losing soil at a rate of 30 soccer fields a minute. If we don’t slow the decline, all farmable soil could be gone in 60 years. Given soil grows 95 per cent of our food, and sustains human life in other more surprising ways, that is a huge problem. “Many would argue soil degradation is the most critical environmental threat to humans,” says Peter Groffman, who studies soil microbes at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. Yet all is not – quite – lost.

The degradation of the world’s dirt has been a disaster in slow motion. …