USI 2020 Symposium, Day 1 / SOILS. THE LIVING FABRIC OF HEALTH
The opening day of the 5th Annual Urban Soils Symposium convened five speakers to reflect on this year’s theme as framed by USI Director Tatiana Morin, “Soils are the greatest connectors of our Ecosystem. They are a superorganism of the biosphere and an immune system for our Earth and our health. Soils are a living fabric that is always developing, always life-giving.”
What is the enduring relevancy of soils? What is multi-species health? What does health look like for our species as we return to an understanding that our health is dependent on and relative to the health of 8.7 million other species on earth’s lands and waters.
The metaphor of soil-as-fabric mirrors the very real and complex weave of the mineral and the biological. Soil patterns, when observed, illuminate the primacy of microbes.
Dr. Rattan Lal, recipient of the 2020 World Food Prize, spoke about the characteristics of soils, the competing uses of soils and endangered soils. He also voiced an impassioned call for a Clean Soils Act in the United States. “We have a Clean Air Act and we have a Clean Water Act and yet you cannot have clean air or clean water without clean soil.” Dr. Jean-Louis Morel, Professeur émérite at Université de Lorraine Laboratoire Sols et Environnement, presented a tapestry of soils and their uses in Urban, Industrial, Traffic and Mining Areas. Legacy place-based textile designer and clothing manufacturer, Natalie Chanin, Founder and Creative Director of Alabama Chanin, presented a montage of soils in her region of Northern Alabama that supported a violent cotton plantation culture and now also support and celebrate the landscapes and its residents diverse beauty and craft labor. Dr. Nikola Patzel, environmental scientist and psychologist and soil whisperer led a meditation on cultivating inner soil and microbiologist Dr. Geoffrey M. Gadd closed the conversation with a plunge into geomycology and the remarkable ways fungi alter and weather rocks and minerals.