9 ms·

Soil: The world beneath our feet

174 points by ljf 4y ago

foobarian 4y ago
Every day we get a little bit closer to mass cultivation of truffles! Ahhh truffles.
bmitc 4y ago
This is a great article. I forgot where I read it, but someone basically said that we need to stop treating soil as just dirt. I have found out through my research that replacing invasive species and lawns with native plants and also composting organic waste, leaves, and twigs and returning that to your lawn are two of the best things a single person or group of persons can do to thwart climate change. Organic material decomposing in landfills generates methane, which is 26 times more potent than carbon dioxide in terms of its greenhouse effects. Composting organic material generates much, much less methane, and you can use it to return sustenance back to your soil. Instead of taking twigs and leaves and removing it from your property, you can compost them as well and return it back to the soil or also just leave the leaves in some cases. Planting native plants is a big win all around, from soil conditions, to using less or no water or fertilizer, to improving wildlife and pollinator conditions. Additionally, replacing lawns, which should be viewed as wastelands and green deserts, with plants greatly increases carbon capture. These are things that nearly everyone can do literally right now. I've tried finding research, and my current knowledge is that composting could save as much as 8-10% of global emissions and restoring areas with native plants could save as much as 20-30% of global emissions. A few specific references that I have been using are Nature's Best Hope by Douglas Tallamy, as well as his other books, and the Monarch Gardens project (https://www.monarchgard.com/ https://www.monarchgard.com/) by Benjamin Vogt. It blows my mind that people keep looking for technocratic solutions when we have solutions right in front of us that could be done right now. Take a look around next time you're driving around and just note all the lawn spaces sitting there and doing literally nothing. They could be replaced with native plants with zero negative impact, and it would do wonders for the local ecosystem.
- throwaway1777 4y ago
  What’s the difference between composting in the yard and composting in a landfill?
  - bwestergard 4y ago
    Composting in the yard, if done correctly, is aerobic. In a landfill it will be anaerobic, generating more methane.
  - carapace 4y ago
    In a word, oxygen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerobic_organism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerobic_organism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_organism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_organism - - - - "Compost" and "composting" is a fairly specific kind of process, it's just not correct to call what happens in a landfill "composting" (or contrast with a midden which is just a pile of kitchen refuse, and also not "composting".) The key difference in composting (as contrasted with just piling up waste material) is the specific formation of a kind of ecosystem within the pile. A healthy compost pile produces it's own heat. It's a concentrated and accelerated form of the natural processes that happen in healthy soil, and in many ways it really is a kind of organism. (The dividing line between organism and ecosystem is not sharp. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbial_mat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbial_mat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoplax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoplax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_man_o%27_war#Colonial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_man_o%27_war#Coloni... and so on... ) Anyway, in a landfill you get your pockets of mostly organic biomass, and decomposition happens, but it tends to be anaerobic (which generally is less healthy from the POV of human metabolism) and the results don't get integrated back into ecosystems rapidly (isolation is not complete, so they ooze back into the water table but they are almost always accompanied by toxic chemical wastes, so it doesn't really help.)
  - oh_sigh 4y ago
    If you do it wrong - nothing. As others have responded though, oxygen is the difference, and that is why you need to "turn" your compost every couple of days. If you don't, it will start to get very stinky - if you're doing aerobic composting shouldn't really have a smell, maybe something slightly earthy but that is it.
boredumb 4y ago
Everyone should invest in a decent microscope. Whether it's some soil or a drop of pond water there is an absolutely insane amount of life that escapes the naked eye. Easily one of the best couple hundred dollars I've spent in my life.
- jacobolus 4y ago
  And if you want to be inspired (whether or not you own a microscope) take a look at Journey to the Microcosmos on YouTube https://youtube.com/c/microcosmos/ https://youtube.com/c/microcosmos/
- pesfandiar 4y ago
  What level of magnification would you consider decent in a microscope?
  - boredumb 4y ago
    you really only need 10x or 25x. https://www.tiktok.com/@madscientistken https://www.tiktok.com/@madscientistken This guy does live streams almost nightly and I've found myself entranced more than I'd like to admit.
    - dls2016 4y ago
      This rocks. I wood chipped a portion of my lawn and now grow fruit/berries there. Every morning after the kids get on the bus I walk around, pull some weeds and dig into the chips and dirt to see what's going on down there. Very relaxing. This article and tiktok make me want a microscope.
- hetspookjee 4y ago
  The LIDL sold me one 70euro a few years ago and it works marvels.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Closed-system farming, where basically everything is recycled - nutrients, water, biomass (except what goes onto people's tables) - is theoretically possible and this article describes what looks like a successful system. This is also the kind of thing you'd need on a large spaceship or Martian colony (where human feces/urine would also need to be recycled). However, the increase in labor needed shouldn't be underestimated. Some automation is likely possible with advanced robots, but this would mean a much larger fraction of the population would be involved in agriculture, perhaps as much as 10X as are currently employed. In the cited example in the article, apparently one worker has managed 7 hectares using a closed-system model, if we take 'single-handedly' at face value. In contrast, according to wikipedia, in the USA on average one worker can manage 100 hectares (1 square km) with industrial methods (lots of water and fertilizer wastage). This would be a pretty radical social restructuring, probably not what most people have in mind when they talk about 'postindustrial society'.
- black_knight 4y ago
  You mean… “This will create a lot of new jobs – hooray!”
- floren 4y ago
  I think about farming a lot these days, especially when I'm reading about startups on HN. Our culture has spent decades putting down agriculture as the lowest work, worse than waiting tables or running a cash register. Hell, I grew up on a farm and I still looked down on it. When I compare it to building CRUD apps because a VC wants another unicorn, though, it seems pretty attractive. The work is hard, but the results are tangible, and you're fulfilling the most basic human need. Which is more worthwhile: actually growing potatoes, or programming Farmville? I would love a future in which a much bigger percentage of the American population lived in clusters of small farms, growing food to feed themselves and to send to market. A community of 10-acre plots (why 10 acres? see https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48753 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48753), with a co-op organization that gathers up people's produce and hauls it to the nearest city for sale. > where basically everything is recycled - nutrients, water, biomass (except what goes onto people's tables) The parenthetical is an interesting problem... the current agricultural system seems to be a machine for pulling nutrients out of the soil, shipping them to cities, and then flushing them out to sea. Then we attack farmers for putting fertilizer into the soil.
soheil 4y ago
> Without a radical change in the way we eat, by 2050 the world will need to grow around 50% more grain. Is that the only way? What if we grow grains that need 50% less water? This article is mind numbingly preachy and ignores that technology can and always has been at the forefront of human progress. Yes, if we wake up one day in 30 years and find that we have made 0 technological progress then we will need 50% more grain.
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  It's not the only way. We could keep eating grain but stop the multiplication of humans on the planet. But technology won't solve the problem that if human eating habits stay on the current trajectory, they will eat 50% more grain. I get it that this is not what you meant. But the progress of technology, while you can rely on it getting somewhere, is unpredictable. It'd be foolish to count on it without considering contingencies in case it doesn't deliver.
  - soheil 4y ago
    I know it's good to always hedge against risk. But to hedge against technological progress is shorting humanity as a whole and is a dark place to go. Arguments of type "let's reduce population" nonetheless stem from that line of thinking as you eluded to.
    - rhn_mk1 4y ago
      I don't see how hedging about development of a particular technology is a bad thing. We have expected CPUs to get faster, but it didn't get there. Some people were presumably hedging against it, and now we've routed around this with multi-core computers. People might have expected flying cars, yet they didn't come to be. Instead, quick communication has been solved by the Internet. The world has many ideas, and they can be explored simultaneously, but we also must face the possibility of failure in case we paint ourselves into a corner, like we just did with the global warming. I find broad exploration rather optimistic compared to being single-minded about something happening in the future.
  - 4y ago
mkurume 4y ago
There's a fantastic (and humorous) lecture from Dr. Elaine Ingham on soil science for anyone interested in digging into the science: https://youtu.be/ErMHR6Mc4Bk https://youtu.be/ErMHR6Mc4Bk
perth 4y ago
Who is Sandy Loam? Who smudged the dirt docs?
kvetching 4y ago
Regenerative agriculture. Get rid of the feed lots and create a nationwide system throughout the farmland so that after every few years, all the land will have had cattle grazed upon it, adding nutrients back into the soil. It's absolutely insane that Regenerative Agriculture was not mentioned once in this. There are farmers that have figured out ways to make their farmland fertile again. These practices just need to be expanded.
seanwilson 4y ago
> We face what could be the greatest predicament humankind has ever encountered: feeding the world without devouring the planet. Already, farming is the world’s greatest cause of habitat destruction, the greatest cause of the global loss of wildlife and the greatest cause of the global extinction crisis. It’s responsible for about 80% of the deforestation that’s happened this century. Of 28,000 species known to be at imminent risk of extinction, 24,000 are threatened by farming. Only 29% of the weight of birds on Earth consists of wild species: the rest is poultry. Just 4% of the world’s mammals, by weight, are wild; humans account for 36%, and livestock for the remaining 60%. > ... While 1% of the world’s land is used for buildings and infrastructure, crops occupy 12% and grazing, the most extensive kind of farming, uses 28%. Only 15% of land, by contrast, is protected for nature. Yet the meat and milk from animals that rely solely on grazing provide just 1% of the world’s protein. It's unreal when framing this as the "greatest predicament humankind has ever encountered" and all the stats pointing to intensive animal agriculture as the obvious problem that "eat less meat" isn't entertained as a serious option. We're literally growing food to feed to animals that we bred ourselves, while losing ~90% of the calories in the process instead of eating crops directly when meat isn't required to be healthy. I don't share the high hopes people have with things like lab grown meat either as we've been waiting for years for it to arrive at scale and affordable, and it's not going to replace all the cuts of meat people want. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets "If everyone shifted to a plant-based diet we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops."
- Melatonic 4y ago
  Fungi in general are amazing - it blows me away that in western culture we place such little emphasis on their consumption. There are three kingdoms (for the most part) that we can choose to consume - Plants, Animals, Fungi. And yet we just almost ignore the third one for what reason again? Many mushrooms are also a great meat alternative and have tons of health benefits not found elsewhere and can be great for the environment. They are, for the most part, less concentrated in protein than animals but still much higher than most plants.
jvvw 4y ago
Read the book Teaming with Microbes by Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis, about soil, recently - very interesting.
calebm 4y ago
> "meat and milk from animals that rely solely on grazing provide just 1% of the world’s protein." Love the article, but this seems like a straw man. Meat and milk much more than protein. And it's difficult to replace things like butter without sacrificing health - look at margarine.
- ehejdud 4y ago
  Yet Italian food doesn't use any and still extremely popular...
joeman1000 4y ago
Soil is incredibly ‘underrated’, this is a great article. It: + filters contaminants in the groundwater + stores water for later use + hosts the nutrients for plant growth and therefore human life + dampens the effect of massive rainfall events by being porous and soaking up surface runoff We are doing so many bad things to our soil. + We’re leaching all the nutrients out of it without replacement + we compact the hell out of it, reducing permeability and the benefits I mentioned above + we cover it in concrete, meaning groundwater recharge is decreased and more rainfall becomes surface runoff, resulting in flooding + we let it erode due to this higher surface runoff The erosion rate is higher than the rate at which it is replaced as well. We have a few meters of topsoil at any given point on earth, minus oceans and deserts and now urban centres. We absolutely are not treating this vital part of our life correctly. It’s easy to write it off as nothing. I did the same until I was forced to learn about soil in so many different contexts as a civil engineer. Luckily curriculum nowadays teaches more sustainable practices in soil hydrology and the design of urban drainage networks. The old ways still linger though, which just treat it as an infinitely available engineering material.
docmechanic 4y ago
These two stats took the top of my head off: "Only 29% of the weight of birds on Earth consists of wild species: the rest is poultry. Just 4% of the world’s mammals, by weight, are wild; humans account for 36%, and livestock for the remaining 60%."
iancmceachern 4y ago
This reminds me of blood. Most of us think of it as this fluid our body makes and uses to move oxygen, co2 and nutrients around. In reality it's far more complex then that. It does things, work, chemistry, and is non-newtonian. It's another organ.
zeristor 4y ago
Lots of new ideas about plants encouraging bacteria around their roots, I guess this started before gut fauna in animals. So many things to think about.

174 points by ljf 4y ago

Every day we get a little bit closer to mass cultivation of truffles! Ahhh truffles.

This is a great article. I forgot where I read it, but someone basically said that we need to stop treating soil as just dirt. I have found out through my research that replacing invasive species and lawns with native plants and also composting organic waste, leaves, and twigs and returning that to your lawn are two of the best things a single person or group of persons can do to thwart climate change. Organic material decomposing in landfills generates methane, which is 26 times more potent than carbon dioxide in terms of its greenhouse effects. Composting organic material generates much, much less methane, and you can use it to return sustenance back to your soil. Instead of taking twigs and leaves and removing it from your property, you can compost them as well and return it back to the soil or also just leave the leaves in some cases. Planting native plants is a big win all around, from soil conditions, to using less or no water or fertilizer, to improving wildlife and pollinator conditions. Additionally, replacing lawns, which should be viewed as wastelands and green deserts, with plants greatly increases carbon capture. These are things that nearly everyone can do literally right now. I've tried finding research, and my current knowledge is that composting could save as much as 8-10% of global emissions and restoring areas with native plants could save as much as 20-30% of global emissions. A few specific references that I have been using are Nature's Best Hope by Douglas Tallamy, as well as his other books, and the Monarch Gardens project (https://www.monarchgard.com/ https://www.monarchgard.com/) by Benjamin Vogt. It blows my mind that people keep looking for technocratic solutions when we have solutions right in front of us that could be done right now. Take a look around next time you're driving around and just note all the lawn spaces sitting there and doing literally nothing. They could be replaced with native plants with zero negative impact, and it would do wonders for the local ecosystem.

throwaway1777 4y ago
What’s the difference between composting in the yard and composting in a landfill?
- bwestergard 4y ago
  Composting in the yard, if done correctly, is aerobic. In a landfill it will be anaerobic, generating more methane.
- carapace 4y ago
  In a word, oxygen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerobic_organism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerobic_organism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_organism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_organism - - - - "Compost" and "composting" is a fairly specific kind of process, it's just not correct to call what happens in a landfill "composting" (or contrast with a midden which is just a pile of kitchen refuse, and also not "composting".) The key difference in composting (as contrasted with just piling up waste material) is the specific formation of a kind of ecosystem within the pile. A healthy compost pile produces it's own heat. It's a concentrated and accelerated form of the natural processes that happen in healthy soil, and in many ways it really is a kind of organism. (The dividing line between organism and ecosystem is not sharp. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbial_mat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbial_mat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoplax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoplax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_man_o%27_war#Colonial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_man_o%27_war#Coloni... and so on... ) Anyway, in a landfill you get your pockets of mostly organic biomass, and decomposition happens, but it tends to be anaerobic (which generally is less healthy from the POV of human metabolism) and the results don't get integrated back into ecosystems rapidly (isolation is not complete, so they ooze back into the water table but they are almost always accompanied by toxic chemical wastes, so it doesn't really help.)
- oh_sigh 4y ago
  If you do it wrong - nothing. As others have responded though, oxygen is the difference, and that is why you need to "turn" your compost every couple of days. If you don't, it will start to get very stinky - if you're doing aerobic composting shouldn't really have a smell, maybe something slightly earthy but that is it.

boredumb 4y ago

Everyone should invest in a decent microscope. Whether it's some soil or a drop of pond water there is an absolutely insane amount of life that escapes the naked eye. Easily one of the best couple hundred dollars I've spent in my life.

jacobolus 4y ago
And if you want to be inspired (whether or not you own a microscope) take a look at Journey to the Microcosmos on YouTube https://youtube.com/c/microcosmos/ https://youtube.com/c/microcosmos/
pesfandiar 4y ago
What level of magnification would you consider decent in a microscope?
- boredumb 4y ago
  you really only need 10x or 25x. https://www.tiktok.com/@madscientistken https://www.tiktok.com/@madscientistken This guy does live streams almost nightly and I've found myself entranced more than I'd like to admit.
  - dls2016 4y ago
    This rocks. I wood chipped a portion of my lawn and now grow fruit/berries there. Every morning after the kids get on the bus I walk around, pull some weeds and dig into the chips and dirt to see what's going on down there. Very relaxing. This article and tiktok make me want a microscope.
hetspookjee 4y ago
The LIDL sold me one 70euro a few years ago and it works marvels.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Closed-system farming, where basically everything is recycled - nutrients, water, biomass (except what goes onto people's tables) - is theoretically possible and this article describes what looks like a successful system. This is also the kind of thing you'd need on a large spaceship or Martian colony (where human feces/urine would also need to be recycled). However, the increase in labor needed shouldn't be underestimated. Some automation is likely possible with advanced robots, but this would mean a much larger fraction of the population would be involved in agriculture, perhaps as much as 10X as are currently employed. In the cited example in the article, apparently one worker has managed 7 hectares using a closed-system model, if we take 'single-handedly' at face value. In contrast, according to wikipedia, in the USA on average one worker can manage 100 hectares (1 square km) with industrial methods (lots of water and fertilizer wastage). This would be a pretty radical social restructuring, probably not what most people have in mind when they talk about 'postindustrial society'.

black_knight 4y ago
You mean… “This will create a lot of new jobs – hooray!”
floren 4y ago
I think about farming a lot these days, especially when I'm reading about startups on HN. Our culture has spent decades putting down agriculture as the lowest work, worse than waiting tables or running a cash register. Hell, I grew up on a farm and I still looked down on it. When I compare it to building CRUD apps because a VC wants another unicorn, though, it seems pretty attractive. The work is hard, but the results are tangible, and you're fulfilling the most basic human need. Which is more worthwhile: actually growing potatoes, or programming Farmville? I would love a future in which a much bigger percentage of the American population lived in clusters of small farms, growing food to feed themselves and to send to market. A community of 10-acre plots (why 10 acres? see https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48753 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48753), with a co-op organization that gathers up people's produce and hauls it to the nearest city for sale. > where basically everything is recycled - nutrients, water, biomass (except what goes onto people's tables) The parenthetical is an interesting problem... the current agricultural system seems to be a machine for pulling nutrients out of the soil, shipping them to cities, and then flushing them out to sea. Then we attack farmers for putting fertilizer into the soil.

soheil 4y ago

> Without a radical change in the way we eat, by 2050 the world will need to grow around 50% more grain. Is that the only way? What if we grow grains that need 50% less water? This article is mind numbingly preachy and ignores that technology can and always has been at the forefront of human progress. Yes, if we wake up one day in 30 years and find that we have made 0 technological progress then we will need 50% more grain.

rhn_mk1 4y ago
It's not the only way. We could keep eating grain but stop the multiplication of humans on the planet. But technology won't solve the problem that if human eating habits stay on the current trajectory, they will eat 50% more grain. I get it that this is not what you meant. But the progress of technology, while you can rely on it getting somewhere, is unpredictable. It'd be foolish to count on it without considering contingencies in case it doesn't deliver.
- soheil 4y ago
  I know it's good to always hedge against risk. But to hedge against technological progress is shorting humanity as a whole and is a dark place to go. Arguments of type "let's reduce population" nonetheless stem from that line of thinking as you eluded to.
  - rhn_mk1 4y ago
    I don't see how hedging about development of a particular technology is a bad thing. We have expected CPUs to get faster, but it didn't get there. Some people were presumably hedging against it, and now we've routed around this with multi-core computers. People might have expected flying cars, yet they didn't come to be. Instead, quick communication has been solved by the Internet. The world has many ideas, and they can be explored simultaneously, but we also must face the possibility of failure in case we paint ourselves into a corner, like we just did with the global warming. I find broad exploration rather optimistic compared to being single-minded about something happening in the future.
- 4y ago

mkurume 4y ago

There's a fantastic (and humorous) lecture from Dr. Elaine Ingham on soil science for anyone interested in digging into the science: https://youtu.be/ErMHR6Mc4Bk https://youtu.be/ErMHR6Mc4Bk

perth 4y ago

Who is Sandy Loam? Who smudged the dirt docs?

kvetching 4y ago

Regenerative agriculture. Get rid of the feed lots and create a nationwide system throughout the farmland so that after every few years, all the land will have had cattle grazed upon it, adding nutrients back into the soil. It's absolutely insane that Regenerative Agriculture was not mentioned once in this. There are farmers that have figured out ways to make their farmland fertile again. These practices just need to be expanded.

seanwilson 4y ago

> We face what could be the greatest predicament humankind has ever encountered: feeding the world without devouring the planet. Already, farming is the world’s greatest cause of habitat destruction, the greatest cause of the global loss of wildlife and the greatest cause of the global extinction crisis. It’s responsible for about 80% of the deforestation that’s happened this century. Of 28,000 species known to be at imminent risk of extinction, 24,000 are threatened by farming. Only 29% of the weight of birds on Earth consists of wild species: the rest is poultry. Just 4% of the world’s mammals, by weight, are wild; humans account for 36%, and livestock for the remaining 60%. > ... While 1% of the world’s land is used for buildings and infrastructure, crops occupy 12% and grazing, the most extensive kind of farming, uses 28%. Only 15% of land, by contrast, is protected for nature. Yet the meat and milk from animals that rely solely on grazing provide just 1% of the world’s protein. It's unreal when framing this as the "greatest predicament humankind has ever encountered" and all the stats pointing to intensive animal agriculture as the obvious problem that "eat less meat" isn't entertained as a serious option. We're literally growing food to feed to animals that we bred ourselves, while losing ~90% of the calories in the process instead of eating crops directly when meat isn't required to be healthy. I don't share the high hopes people have with things like lab grown meat either as we've been waiting for years for it to arrive at scale and affordable, and it's not going to replace all the cuts of meat people want. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets "If everyone shifted to a plant-based diet we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops."

Melatonic 4y ago
Fungi in general are amazing - it blows me away that in western culture we place such little emphasis on their consumption. There are three kingdoms (for the most part) that we can choose to consume - Plants, Animals, Fungi. And yet we just almost ignore the third one for what reason again? Many mushrooms are also a great meat alternative and have tons of health benefits not found elsewhere and can be great for the environment. They are, for the most part, less concentrated in protein than animals but still much higher than most plants.

jvvw 4y ago

Read the book Teaming with Microbes by Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis, about soil, recently - very interesting.

calebm 4y ago

> "meat and milk from animals that rely solely on grazing provide just 1% of the world’s protein." Love the article, but this seems like a straw man. Meat and milk much more than protein. And it's difficult to replace things like butter without sacrificing health - look at margarine.

ehejdud 4y ago
Yet Italian food doesn't use any and still extremely popular...

joeman1000 4y ago

Soil is incredibly ‘underrated’, this is a great article. It: + filters contaminants in the groundwater + stores water for later use + hosts the nutrients for plant growth and therefore human life + dampens the effect of massive rainfall events by being porous and soaking up surface runoff We are doing so many bad things to our soil. + We’re leaching all the nutrients out of it without replacement + we compact the hell out of it, reducing permeability and the benefits I mentioned above + we cover it in concrete, meaning groundwater recharge is decreased and more rainfall becomes surface runoff, resulting in flooding + we let it erode due to this higher surface runoff The erosion rate is higher than the rate at which it is replaced as well. We have a few meters of topsoil at any given point on earth, minus oceans and deserts and now urban centres. We absolutely are not treating this vital part of our life correctly. It’s easy to write it off as nothing. I did the same until I was forced to learn about soil in so many different contexts as a civil engineer. Luckily curriculum nowadays teaches more sustainable practices in soil hydrology and the design of urban drainage networks. The old ways still linger though, which just treat it as an infinitely available engineering material.

docmechanic 4y ago

These two stats took the top of my head off: "Only 29% of the weight of birds on Earth consists of wild species: the rest is poultry. Just 4% of the world’s mammals, by weight, are wild; humans account for 36%, and livestock for the remaining 60%."

iancmceachern 4y ago

This reminds me of blood. Most of us think of it as this fluid our body makes and uses to move oxygen, co2 and nutrients around. In reality it's far more complex then that. It does things, work, chemistry, and is non-newtonian. It's another organ.

zeristor 4y ago

Lots of new ideas about plants encouraging bacteria around their roots, I guess this started before gut fauna in animals. So many things to think about.