Plough magazine recently published an essay of mine on eco-gardening, which is also a theme in my novel about fracking. In my garden, I squat and scoop up a handful of soil. Dark brown and crumbling, it looks lifeless except for a few delicate rootlets, maybe a pink worm-end. But in this handful, more living organisms thrive than there are human beings on earth. That’s over seven billion living things, mostly invisible to the naked eye, but busy interacting, living and dying,