Soil : the incredible story of what keeps the earth, and us, healthy / Matthew Evans.

  • Evans, Matthew, 1966-
Date:
2021
  • Books

About this work

Description

What we do to the soil, we do to ourselves. Soil is the unlikely story of our most maligned resource as swashbuckling hero. A saga of bombs, ice ages and civilisations falling. Of ancient hunger, modern sicknesses and gastronomic delight. It features poison gas, climate collapse and a mind-blowing explanation of how rain is formed. For too long, we've not only neglected the land beneath us, we've squandered and debased it, by over-clearing, over-grazing and over-ploughing. But if we want our food to nourish us, and to ensure our planet's long-term health, we need to understand how soil works - how it's made, how it's lost, and how it can be repaired. In this ode to the thin veneer of Earth that gifts us life, commentator and farmer Matthew Evans shows us that what we do in our backyards, on our farms, and what we put on our dinner tables really matters, and can be a source of hope. Isn't it time we stopped treating the ground beneath our feet like dirt?

Publication/Creation

Crows Nest, N.S.W. : Murdoch Books, 2021.

Physical description

xv, 272 pages ; 24 cm.

Contributors

Bibliographic information

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

What you eat is made out of thin air (and a tiny bit of dirt) -- Soil, the Earth's miracle skin -- The Earth's kidneys: When good soil turns bad -- Plants don't eat dirt: The underground economy -- Here, there and everywhere: The 'old friends' hypothesis -- Look after the soil, and the plants look after us -- Nutritional dark matter -- Here today, gone tomorrow -- Big ones, small ones, skinny ones, fat ones: Worms -- Bombs, germs and plants: 100 years of fast fixes creating big problems -- How the Green Revolution is turning the world brown -- You'll never plough a field by turning it over in your mind -- Burying charcoal and building soil -- Weeds: What we can see tells us about what we can't -- Hoome gardeners rock -- Compost, compost, and compost -- If it quacks, is it a duck? -- We are all, temporarily, not soil -- Keep them dawgies movin' -- A grain of truth: Regenerative agriculture -- What's the beef with methane? -- Money in the bank -- They germinated a seed on the Moon -- Loaves and fishes: Feeding a hungry world.

Languages

Subjects

Where to find it

  • LocationStatus
    Medical Collection
    S590.45
    		Open shelves

Permanent link

Identifiers

ISBN

  • 9781922351418
  • 1922351415
  • 9781911668190
  • 1911668196