You can’t avoid the zombie apocalypse in popular culture. But you may not have heard about the real one going on right beneath your feet: A worm apocalypse has been transforming farmland around the world.
Why should you care? If you dreamed up plots to quietly undermine civilization, few could be more diabolical than destroying its foundation—the soil life that builds the fertility of the farmland we depend on to grow our food.
Still, it’s safe to say that most of us missed the recent study in the journal Soil Systems that lays out the case for the worldwide decimation of earthworms. Yet this new report offers a stark assessment of the health of Earth’s agricultural soils. And that should concern us all.