Several months ago, as winter had begun darkening the afternoon landscape and we were driving along the rolling fields of central France, my friend Christophe said, "There's something almost erotic about these bare fields."

"Comment?" I said, as he had made the comment in French, which came out just a bit differently: "Il me semble qu'il y a une presence d'erotisme dans les champs nus."

An erotic presence in a bare field stripped of its green clothing, of its crops, of its native grasses. I'd never thought of dirt in exactly that way, even growing up on a Kentucky farm in the 1950s. There, in the autumn, after the tobacco had been cut and harvested and the land disked and readied for a winter "cover crop" of rye or clover, the kids and a pile of rocks rode behind the tractor on a sort of flat, wooden tray called a drag that was used to level out the surface, dust filling our nostrils and clogging our eyes. That dirt seemed anything but erotic—though of course, as I came to learn later, it was pregnant with relentlessly heaving, merging, breeding micro-organisms, the viruses, the bacteria, the fungi that are the original stuff of life.

The erotic nether life of naked earth has in recent years become more intensely examined by soil and plant scientists, poets, activists, and historians. Professors Ronald Amundson and Peng Gong at Berkeley's College of Natural Resources are using a variety of land- and satellite-based maps to locate and categorize soil across North America. What they look for are not merely the nutrients, as traditional agricultural soil scientists do, but the living and breeding organisms that have not yet been turned and cultivated by farming, roads, and housing. Even when the most sensitive farming techniques are used, the fundamental "erotics" of soil—the primordial succession of life that has persisted within it for thousands of millennia—are instantly altered when the tip of the plow first penetrates and rolls the soil over to the hot stare of the sun. Amundson, of course, doesn't use that sort of language. His is the language of science.

Cultivated soil, he said in a 2003 interview with Breakthroughs magazine, "is like an animal that has been domesticated," resembling "its wild or native ancestor, but there are enormous and profound changes in its characteristics." What that means concretely is that the integral organic matter within soil—mostly the rotting plants laid down by the millennia—is broken up, which converts it into ready food for bacteria, fungi, and a host of smaller microbes. That act of consummation by the microbes liberates huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as a by-product. The fundamental chemical composition of the earth is irrevocably changed.

Needless to say, all those years I spent in Kentucky being hauled around as added weight on the wooden leveling drag only added to the world's CO₂ burden. Although neither Amundson nor Gong is scientifically concerned with one farming practice or another, they do argue for creating targeted reserves of undisturbed soils before their primordial character is eliminated for all time—as have been most of the Great Plains prairies.

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