Let me make something super clear. If you take nothing else away, remember this: Soil is NOT dirt. Soil is productive, it’s useful. It’s fundamental to life as we know. It is an essential natural resource, a major component of most ecosystems, and has been celebrated in art and song for millenia. Dirt is just soil in the wrong place. Soil is the thin layer of inorganic and organic material wrapping the earth like a cozy blanket. It is where the abiotic lithosphere (that is, the upper mantle and crust of the Earth, the airless, unmoving underground stuff) meets all the living things in the biosphere.