3 ms·
From the link you gave: > "Then the earth itself will have the tendency to come inwardly alive and become akin to the vegetative." > ~ the term [hügelkultur]
by carapace 6y ago
From the link you gave:
> "Then the earth itself will have the tendency to come inwardly alive and become akin to the vegetative."
> ~ the term [hügelkultur] first appears in a 1962 German brochure written by avid gardener Herrman Andrä.
This captures the crucial point: soil is a kind of organism.
The corollary: farm the soil and the soil grows the plants.
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago> soil is a kind of organism. Surely, like a sourdough starter, a patch of soil is a small _ecosystem_ ? I say "small", but bear in mind how numerous microbes are: dry yeast is said to be around 20 billion cells per gram. There are far more individuals in your sourdough starter than there are humans on earth.
- carapace 6y agoI am beginning to suspect that a patch of soil thinks and behaves like a kind of organism, literally.
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y agoThis is the "Gaia hypothesis" on a smaller scale.
- carapace 6y agoYes, if you like. Consider the stromatolite, or trichoplax. It seems to me that the boundary, if any, between "ecosystem" and "organism" is conceptual rather than physical. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoplax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoplax