Down and dirty -- a pile of reasons to fall in love with soil | Nicole Masters | TEDxTauranga

hi I'm Nicole masters and I'm an eggroll ecologist the vision of a few of you right now are going what is that so I work with farmers growers and producers around the world looking at how can we work with natural systems to improve nutrient cycling reduce imports and basically grow good quality food for you guys so this is some of the people that I work with I get them connected with soil why soil you asked when you talked to my family and asked them when I became the first passionate about soil my parents would have a story of finding me as a toddler at the bottom of the garden my little pinky picking out snails and eating them my grandmother recalls we used to drive the long summer trips and we play iSpy those familiar will knows by now I used to say once I see it I spy with my little eye something beginning with E and my Nana's another's kick-ass I spy players no and she wasn't gonna give up but eventually she gave up apparently I was quite focused I've done it we can imagine that it six the mic Nana it erosion I don't think I've had this lifetime of best the nation with landscape and what human beings have been doing and impacting on the planet so when I first discovered soil what surprised me the most was that why aren't you all soil scientists and it's all exciting really it is when we're looking at what's happening in terms of greenhouse gas emissions the quality of the food that we eat and water health it's all about soil yes it's not common dinner conversation it's underfoot out of mind out of sight and really registers on foreign code on policy at all so yes soil so I'd like to just get a little bit comfortable okay yes and then I could tell the tale and like many a good story it goes back to the beginning so I'd like you to take you back to Genesis and creation stories and around the entire world we have a story that we came from by the soil dirt or clay and it doesn't matter if it's the ancient Babylonian Sumerians Incas man's Indonesian Asians we have the story that connects us that we came from the soil and it's interesting in new zealand there are indigenous people that Marty have a story that they got tani who obviously predating internet-dating couldn't find himself a woman so he took some clay and it began to roll in and it made an effigy of himself with arms legs also important differences breasts yes and he made a woman and so this he took this woman that he rolled in a clay and he breeds them to him and he breathed life when she came alive of the sneeze to home or the order I sneeze and it is life when we look at what science is now finding is that certain types of clay and there's certain right types of chemical reactions in the right environment start form re and a the very beginning of the building blocks of life themself we come from clay and when we look at the word human it comes from the same root word as humans the dark brown chocolaty substance its topsoil is life as we come from now some of you be going clay you're right I came from outer space so I'd like to introduce into you my friend the party Brad it's also known as the water beer or the water piglet but half a millimeter in size this extremophiles can survive down to minus 270 degrees centigrade and above boiling it can survive and what would be a lethal dose of radiation for us about a thousand times that it can defecate its body to 3% of the water minute so you imagine it shrivels itself out and then it can survive like that for decades until someone applies a few drops of water in this creature water spring to life so it's cryo genesis the stuff that sci-fi movies are made of yet this creature could do it it's so NASA scientists thought well that's all very interesting let's see if it will survive the vacuum of space so it seems these tiny little creatures into outer space brought them back gave them a couple drops of water and these things spun to life so they can survive in the vacuum of space so in fact when you're looking at the tardigrade you may in fact be looking at alien life forms and they walk they walk below us beside us you'll find them and help me and more so encourage you to get a very simple student microscope and heaven look at these things with your kids because they're so extraordinary so these organisms and organisms across the planet would live in every single environment from the toe amount interest to the bottom of the deepest oceans and right now all over you so imagine right now if you all disappeared you would leave and you would leave behind just an outline of your microbes if we live just the microbes behind all these microbes in your gut and on you right now so we've evolved symbiotically with these bacteria since the theory beginnings of time side-by-side and without these microbes possibly you would die you certainly wouldn't be living a very fulfilled life and we actually look at how many salads are in your human body and the latest research on the human biome suggesting that we may have as much as 37 trillion cells in our body but actually there is a hundred trillion sounds of bacteria in and then on you right now and this often comes to me I have the fridge door open and I'm looking in the aimlessly but it occurs to me that perhaps it's not lean that brought me to the fridge to find that bear of chocolate everyone's the microbes and I'm not responsible so we have these microbes around us all the time then what doctors are now finding and it's very very very interesting and it ties them quite well with what the other speakers are said tonight that him that we're now finding that microbes in your gut system have a relationship to autoimmune disorders type 1 diabetes multiple sclerosis leaky gut arthritis obesity ADHD anxiety depression effort and more being linked to these microbes that we have in our gut system it's like an ecosystem like the rainforest imagine so I'd like to take you back to that very first day that you were born now try and remember it it might be challenging you might have was bringing it out of the Emery's but imagine that we've gone from this height as a sterile environment in the womb and you'll be pleased down that birth canal and this is a very first point of exposure to microbes and as you come out of that beer view now you've better really hope that your midwife doesn't have a bad case of halitosis or strep throat because if she breathes on you she inoculated to you with organisms that you carry for the rest of your life so if you have repairing sore throats and glue ear it's that very first exposure so this one research is a note Argo University have developed a template that you can buy and chemists and actually take that microbe inoculate it in your throat so that when your baby's born you can breathe good microbes upon their child because it's those first two years of life that hit up this whole system in our bodies as who breathes on you it's a do you have cats and dogs at home and most importantly you're allowing your children to explore the natural world are they getting down and dirty in the soil you see how much time children spend with their hands and their mouths so what they're doing is inoculating themselves and it's what sets them up with your entire immune system for their life so scientists call this the bomb effect that children that grow up in fact often have better order immune system to educate themselves so they've done some interesting research looking at what kind of gut might practice that we have only two or three generations ago so this one particular organism some research has been done on about eighty percent of the American population had this organisms Anika in nineteen forty this organism is responsible to creating enzymes that are appetite suppressant so there's organism picks and these enzymes after you've had a feed you don't feel hungry good organisms ahead yes now only today this is six fifteen of Americans have this organism and they go we're losing the diversity of these species and some of these organisms are important and they come from the soil it's about inhaling soil and about cleaning outdoors and getting it disposed to different microbes but what are we doing in the seed we can now have things like antibiotics vaccinations chemicals that weren't around before the 1940s we have heavy metals and we have this propensity for antibacterial soaps like being outdoors climbing trees and somehow muthi enroll so I asked when we cleaner or have we separated ourselves from a natural world that was so symbiotically connected to that these implications now I'd like you to just imagine for a minute your favorite smell I give you three seconds yeah you got it my favorite the smell is on a hot summer's day when you're driving in your car you get a shower of rain that hits the road with me that smell that you can smell is the excitement of an organism product enter my seats throwing spores up into the air basically reproduction the smell is called geosman G Osman literally translates as the odor of the earth so this beautiful smell that you can smell is made by a ton of my seats you may be familiar with them because you may have actually taken them in as an antibiotic sometime during your life so there's about 400 different antibiotics that are made from the soil organisms they're incredibly important in human history and it's what gives soil it's beautiful earthy smell as these organisms so it's antibiotics that you could breathe it what scientists are also finding now is that breathing and soil organisms are being inoculated with them can lead to increases serotonin production so you think serotonin producing about 90% of it in your gut system that it can reduce anxiety and depression and we can be gone with protec and go out and breathe some soil so I want to take you back and just look at this big picture so when we think about the steps for that have come and human understandings of microbes the same process is now happening in terms of what's going on in the soil so if you can understand how it is that we digest food so we chew it up and make it a bit smaller it goes through your gastrointestinal system getting smaller and smaller until it passes through into the blood and see your bloodstream right that process is a mediated basically by sister by your microbes yes so they break it down and they have enzymes vitamin C can be remote amylase all that stuff that makes us healthy well passes through their bloodstream know the same things happening in the soil that we've got a process and if we would look at what's happening in terms of where that energy comes from now what that was confusing we look at sunlight energy this is what power the entire planet photosynthesis so the very processes are taking sunlight energy that partly takes it down through its root zones as a carbohydrate so with sugar carbon hydrogen and oxygen that's what their plan protects out of photosynthesis sends it down through the root zone to feed microbes so the plant can't send out for pizza and it can't go down the road to the supermarket so it basically has the currency that's sugar that it seems to it's microbes and seeds you know what I feel like Mexican food tonight or I feel like Italian and the pizza in this Mac will actually dictate to the microbial community what it needs and we vitamins and enzymes now what's fascinating is the same process that we're doing to our own bodies in terms of antibiotics and chemical use and maybe we're not taking soluble fertilizers but the planter is disrupting this same natural cycle so we're not getting the full vitamins and nutrients that we should be getting and Ben Warren talked about it earlier on that we're losing food quality enough 60% of the nutrients are being lost out of our food since 1940 now some of that might be due to genetics and breeding but it's also because we're separating ourselves from this natural world and not treating soil like the living space sedatives so I'd like to draw your attention to this Apple and imagine for just a minute that it represents a planet Earth and the skin on this Apple represents the topsoil so what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut this Apple into four I'm going to cut it into four because three-quarters of the planet is in fact not topsoil three-quarters of the planet is the seeds so you imagine a quarter of this planet is Earth if we cut that in half half represents land that we cannot grow food on because it's too steep to so thinking in tactically our click top of the Himalayas so land that we can't grow food on I'm going to take the last eight that I'm going to cut it into four and those of you with a really good mathematical brain will know that that is 1/32 so if I cut it 8 into 4 what this represents is I'm going to take 3 parts of that what it represents is land that we can't grow food on because it's too steep to wheat to dry to rocky or it's already underneath cities and highways so of all of this planet Earth that we see to feed a burgeoning population of over 7 billion now we have a soil resource I'm going to cut this off to represent our topsoil we have a soil resource that's incredibly valuable it's the most vital of all of our resources on the planet and we treat it bug do thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 26,998

Keywords: ted talks, tedx, tedx talk, ted x, TEDxTalks, ted, Agriculture, Science (hard), English, tedx talks, ted talk, New Zealand

Id: JE_HHLBP82s

Length: 15min 46sec (946 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 12 2014