Author Jo Handelsman lays bare the complex connections among climatechange, soil erosion, food and water security, and drug discovery.

About this event

Join author and biologist Jo Handelsman as she discusses her latest book "A World Without Soil: The Past, Present, And Precarious Future of the Earth Beneath Our Feet" along with NYC H2O, Earth Matter, Lower East Side Ecology Center, NYC Soil & Water Conservation District, and New York Urban Soil Instititute. In Handelsman's book, she addresses how the soil loss crisis is accelerated by poor conservation practices and climate change.

Soil is an essential part of the Earth’s ability to feed the world's population and it is key to climate stability. In this talk Dr. Handelsman will share the motivation for writing the book, A World Without Soil, after leaving the Obama Administration, and discuss the features of this precious and rapidly disappearing resource, what we can do to save it, and the consequences if we don’t.

Jo Handelsman is the director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and a Vilas Research Professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor in the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She previously served as a science advisor to President Barack Obama. Her research focuses on the role of small molecules on the structure and function of microbial communities. In the course of this work, she has discovered several new antibiotics from soil bacteria by traditional culture-based methods and metagenomics. She is founder of Tiny Earth, a consortium of college instructors and students across the world dedicated to discovering new antibiotics from soil bacteria. She has just released her book, A World Without Soil.