Soil: The old soil — lifeless dirt, really — was scraped off and trucked away.
Indeed, Damon's Mark Watney, who specializes in botany, spends a good deal of the film struggling to figure out how to grow food in the lifeless Martian soil.
Our chemical dependencies are stripping soil of its life-giving duties and turning it into lifeless dirt, the film says.
Rural parts of Tamil Nadu are in trouble; overcropping using using unsavoury farming practices has left areas with lifeless and polluted soil.
Even the desolate view of rusty soil, lifeless valleys and bare mountains is shrouded in a permanent orange haze.
The catch is that Curiosity team members can't tell yet whether the organic matter was once alive, was never alive and drifted onto Mars from space, or was simply cooked up in Curiosity's analytical instrument from lifeless bits of soil.
Since April, torrential downpours have washed away newly planted seed, drowned sweet corn and peas before they could be plucked, and transformed acre after acre of fertile soil into lifeless muck.
He complained that he had to eat pieces of frozen wine, that he had to live among Barbarians, that "ven when there is there is peace, everyone's terrified of another war and nobody bothers to do any ploughing … the soil here is lifeless, abandoned in stark neglect.
Primary succession occurs in essentially lifeless areas regions in which the soil is incapable of sustaining life as a result of such factors as lava flows, newly formed sand dunes, or rocks left from a retreating glacier.
In a region where rainfall is usually precious, some conventional soil has become so lifeless that it absorbs as little as half an inch of water per hour, Mr. Durham said, while regenerative fields can absorb more than eight inches an hour.
