"The Hidden Half of Nature" (HHN) is a profoundly exceptional book. Montgomery’s previous “Dirt: The Erosion of Civilization” was the book Jared Diamond’s “Collapse” could have been. In “Dirt,” Montgomery, an insightful geologist, much more rigorously than Diamond (in my view), documented the ‘long red thread’ of history as being a story of the rise and fall of civilizations first tapping and then depleting their soils. In HHN, he is joined by his wife, Anne Bikle, a biologist, and catalyzed by their own life experience, they connect the dots across seemingly disparate domains of soils and the human gut that I believe have the potential to form the ‘long green thread’ of a prosperous future for everyone except the fertilizer salesman.
Montgomery and Bikle begin with an enjoyable story of how, much to their own surprise, they were able to rapidly turn their dead soil into a living and productive garden by focusing on naturally building soil organic matter using things like mulch and composts. They then use this window and their scientific backgrounds to go on a rigorous journey about how all of this works. We learn that much of this insight was hypothesized long ago, but true scientific understanding has only emerged in recent years. I found the chapter on “Underground Allies” especially informative about the metabolic interconnectedness of root exudates with soil bacteria and fungi.
We then pick up where other recent ‘human microbiome’ authors have left off (e.g. Blaser’s “Missing Microbes” and Velasquez-Manoff’s “Epidemic of Abesnce”) to explore how microbial communities in our gut are not only essential for our own health, but function using the exact same principles as the soil system ecology. It’s not just an analogy, its sign of much more fundamental evolutionary principles at work.
The implications of the book are both practical and profound. In personal health, the book can be seen as providing the scientific basis for Michael Pollan’s famous tag line “Eat real food, mostly plants, not too much.” But it also helps us understand that the health of all of that "real food" begins with the functioning microbial ecosystem in the soil – without which, not only do the plants not grow, but they are short in the vital micronutrients that make you healthy.
Whereas ‘germ theory’ was a boon to 20th century civilization, Montgomery and Bikle now help us understand that whether through antibiotics or agri-chemicals, killing everything in order to kill a few things we can't see is a path to our ultimate destruction. Furthermore, many of the things we have been doing (e.g. synthetic fertilizers, eating *refined* grains) have been unintentionally killing more things than we realized. But they also offer a different and more prosperous path – options to intervene in the system in way to boost the things that allow the system to keep it’s own balance so that everything thrives.
The root of it all is, quite literally, soil organic matter. Build it, and we all prosper. Degrade it, and we all suffer… at least in the long run. I highly recommend this book so that we can all open our eyes to the (previously) hidden half of nature.
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Top reviews from other countries
Judy Denham
An interesting and fact filled book which explains concepts which ...
Reviewed in Canada on June 13, 2018
PAD
Excellent livre pour comprendre l'importance des "microbes" dans notre vie
Reviewed in France on September 2, 2017
Ron Immink
Gut and soil management
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 25, 2017
Amazon カスタマー
The living world is deeply interconnected
Reviewed in Japan on April 7, 2019