Soil [By Matthew Evans]

This book should be part of high school curriculum reading and discussion across the globe.  Everybody should know about it, because understanding the growing medium for the food and life that sustains us is critical to our survival. 

This topic had the potential to be a dull dissertation on the make-up of soil; the biochemistry; the nutrients; the gas-exchanges and the microbes.  This is all there, and it has rock-solid scientific credentials, but it’s written in a way that is anything but dry.  Anything but dusty.  It’s author has fermented a rich cornucopia of words that come together to be a book of fascination and intrigue, humour and delight, and ultimately empowerment.  

With chapters entitled:

 “Plants don’t eat dirt: The Underground Economy”; “How the Green Revolution is turning the world brown”; “Weeds: What we can see tells us about what we can’t”, there is so much here, and not only for those who like to grow healthy gardens.  I lost count of how many “aha” and “ha ha” moments I had whilst reading this. 

Here are a few facts from the book that may inspire you to borrow or get your own copy:

“There are more living things in a teaspoon of healthy soil than there are humans on earth”

“57% of the cells in our bodies are microbes, with an estimated 100 trillion individual bacterial cells in a single human body”

“Our gut is one of the most microbially dense ecosystems on earth”

“Plants produce exudates to adapt to threats, and encourage microbes to actively attack their neighbours rather than them; others communicate about swapping nutrients or to warn of pests”  “They can also put our detoxifying exudates e.g. in the presence of aluminium in the soil”

“Mycobacterium vaccae from soil, injected into cancer patients, had the unexpected effect of cheering them up; helped them think more clearly; fell less pain”  This microbe acts like an anti-depressant, boosting serotonin and norepinephrine”.  

“Soil microbes have been proven to make you happy, reduce stress, reduce allergies, reduce inflammation and ameliorate some of the effects of ageing”

Toward the end of the book there are FAQ’s about soil e.g. how to test it, what the best things are to do to generate healthy soil.  This is a passionate author, who has learned about soil by working with it, growing in it, researching it, and nourishing it.  His final quote “We just need to re-imagine the world, from the ground up” is exactly what his book inspires.