Episode 1 - Cultivators: Soil

[00:00:03] Hello, my name is Michelle Berry. And I'm Emily Wakefield, and we are your hosts for More Than A Podcast. We're both historians, but before you push stop, let us explain what kind of history we study. We're both environmental historians. Oh dear, Emily, I'm not sure that that makes us seem any more interesting. How about this instead? Basically, we tell stories about the past and try to make sure

[00:00:28] that our stories include animals, plants, bugs, dirt, weather, and the like. And we have created this podcast to convince you that history and even nature are more than you ever thought they were. We also both live and work in the U.S. Mountain West. Think of the region connected by the Rocky Mountains, where we've spent most of our lives. We met in graduate school and we've been friends for almost 25 years.

[00:00:56] In this podcast, we bring you stories about different parts of the ecosystems that you can find throughout the U.S. Mountain West from the Sonoran Desert, where Michelle lives, to the Northern Rockies, where I live. These stories have fascinating historical components and connections to contemporary issues. In addition to hopefully showing you how much more history can be, we also call the podcast More Than, because unlike typical history, we're going to put the more than human at the center of each episode.

[00:01:26] We are convinced that once you hear about the power the more than human has had in the past, you will love history and nature even more than you do now. Now, each of the topics we have chosen has many histories, so we're only picking a few to focus on in each episode. But for many of the episodes, we'll also have a special guest or two to tell us

[00:01:49] even more about that particular topic. Join us as we explore more than you could ever expect to in a podcast about the environment and history. So we want to begin our very first episode by thanking all of you listeners. We actually suspect that we have a lot in common with you. And the most important thing is that we're curious about history, about the environment around us, and about new ways to think about the relationships between those two

[00:02:17] things. Well, I guess those are three things. We're both also really wary of narratives of environmental catastrophe. And we think that these are dead ends, especially in terms of motivating people to care and to act. And so the narratives about the environment at this part are super deeply disempowering for humans and the more than human. So we wanted to create an accessible set of stories to offer some hope

[00:02:45] and at least some inspiration. So at the very top of our notes, it says, reminder to not type, write, or hit the desk. And I just hit the desk. So this is, you know, how this whole thing is going to roll people. So to do all of, to meet our goals, we're going to try to focus each episode on a more than human part of the ecosystem that connects the Mountain

[00:03:11] West all together. And we're going to suggest that each of those actors, well, act. And you'll notice that each of our episodes begins with an action noun. I had to look up and make sure that that was actually a grammatical term. And it is. Because when we were dreaming up this project, we were talking about who we hope to reach and kind of what the topic should be. And we realized that our ideal listener is Emily's 10 year old son, Ray, who is in awe of all the cool things he finds and

[00:03:40] learns about in the out of doors. And so when you, dear listener, walk away from each episode, we hope that you will have learned that each topic has a history. At least one, sometimes more than one. That each topic is cool and fascinating and interesting just in its own right. And because of what it is. So soil is cool because of its soil-ness, not because of what it provides to us or its utility.

[00:04:09] We hope that you learn that each topic shows us that dynamism, power, and agency are all around us in all things. And we don't need to control all of those things. And I would actually argue that history shows that we really can't and haven't controlled them. And lastly, we hope that you learned that when we learn about enviral or the biological, it looks differently when we think historically.

[00:04:37] Very importantly, our primary goal is to try and convince you that mainstream society in the Western world and specifically the US would do well to move beyond the nature culture or the human nature dualisms that almost unconsciously guide mainstream thinking all over the place in the 21st street. It's time the two of us contend to think about more than the divisions between humans and

[00:05:01] quote unquote nature and to think ourselves toward interconnectedness, toward relationships. And we hope through our stories, we can show you that the division between human and nature doesn't really exist at all. Importantly, we both live in the Mountain West and we love the lands and animals and bugs and peoples who also call this region home. So we decided that this would be the place where we would ground the podcast.

[00:05:31] And we may venture beyond the Rocky Mountains at times. I, in particular, have spent a lot of time in Latin America and think about it really deeply. But we always want there to be a component of the stories we tell that's attached to the Mountain West. And so we do this out of love and hope for this place. And because we think understanding a place allows us to contribute to making it better. Yeah, that's exactly right.

[00:06:00] We both very much chose to be in the Mountain West. Emily even moved away for a time and was very intentional in coming back because this is home for us. Okay, so now time for some caveats. We do not purport to be experts in each of the episode topics. We are teachers and scholars and historians, absolutely. But we are not necessarily social scientists or biologists or even historians of all the things.

[00:06:29] So sometimes we will rely on experts to weigh in on our topic and shed light on the provocations that we're offering in that particular episode. Now, on our website, you can find some resources for further learning and some of the sources that we relied on to craft the episode. So be sure to go check that out. And we are also not professional podcasters. So you'll forgive any imperfections in our recordings, we hope.

[00:06:53] Like, you know, when I hit the desk or Emily types a note or a dog barks. Although supposedly the technology will keep that from happening. But at any rate, you'll forgive our imperfections. One of our longtime slogans for our friendship and collaborations is to never let the perfect get in the way of the possible. We're so good at that. We are also limited by time because we didn't want to make this podcast too long.

[00:07:22] So none of these episodes will be comprehensive. They are intentionally gestive. And we want to pick your curiosity so that you go on and want to learn something more and explore things further. So if you want to see what's up next or if you missed an episode, you can go to our website and see the list of what we have there. We give a special shout out to our producer, Rooks Guidi, for holding our hands on this passion project of ours.

[00:07:52] And we are not podcasters by trade. At least one of us is an admitted Luddite. But we do love to talk. And we love to talk to each other. And we've been friends for a really long time. So you'll probably sense that during these episodes. Pretend like you've just joined us at a bar with lots of good mocktails, if that's what you prefer, to chat about more than you typically would discuss over a beer. Pull up a chair and let's begin.

[00:08:23] So if we're cultivating this podcast and building our ecosystem for more than from the ground up, we should start by looking at what's under our feet. And soil is the most important cultivator for all of life. So we should begin there, down in the muck, doing our best to get dirty. Right?

[00:08:46] And we, being historians, but also just people, don't often think about the soil unless it gets in the way. Right? Unless it's around us and it's unnoticed until all of a sudden the dust is blowing and it's in our eyes and it's on our table. I noticed a layer of dust on my computer this morning.

[00:09:10] We know that soil and dirt have been the backdrop historically, but until they're our face, we don't really give them the attention they deserve. It's so true. And I have a glass top for my coffee table in my main living room. And it seems to get dustier than everything else, which I don't really understand that. But anyway, I digress.

[00:09:35] You know, I think soil is one of, I think we've both kind of struggled a little bit with thinking about soil historically, even though that's what we're trying to get everybody to do. And of course, in the U.S., and for a U.S. historian like me, the one thing that you think about when you think about dust is the Dust Bowl. It's this ecological and ultimately an economic catastrophe of the 1930s.

[00:09:57] And contrary to popular understandings, the drought that contributed to soil's most infamous moment in collective memory in this country started in the 1920s. And it actually affected the Mountain West and the Southwest in general. It wasn't just a phenomenon on the Great Plains. And so I hope that people know the stories of those huge dust clouds that descended on Washington, D.C. and propelled pretty momentous political and policy changes.

[00:10:23] But I do think we are usually taught to associate this moment with Oklahoma and Texas. But the eastern portions of New Mexico and certainly, you know, sort of southeastern Colorado really experienced this drought and devastation. And one of the things that I think is really interesting about the Dust Bowl is the ways in which the more than human, in this case, dirt and soil, appears in our human memory. We have so many sources to provoke that memory with regard to this, to the Dust Bowl in particular.

[00:10:53] And I'm thinking of the moving photography of Dorothea Lange or the eerie artwork of Alexander Hogue. There's documentaries, both contemporary, such as PBS and Ken Burns, but also historic. And Em, I'm not sure if you've ever seen the 1936 film, The Plow That Broke the Plains. Have you ever seen that? In your class when I TA'd for you. Oh, that's right. I forgot all. Yeah, been using that for a long time. You know, it's funny.

[00:11:22] My dad always says, how hard can it be to be a history teacher? Because the past never changes. So you just do the same thing all the time. And I always say, I change my classes every year. And you've now proven that that's just not true. So for 20 years, I've been showing this film to students because it's a really powerful recitation of the causes of the crisis. It's a highly political film that was contracted by a government agency called the Resettlement Administration.

[00:11:52] The director, and I don't, Pare, I think is how you say his name. Pare, it's Italian, so I'm not sure how to say it. Pare Lorenz is very consciously chose to move beyond the blameless victim narrative of much of the New Deal documentation of rural peoples. And put the blame squarely on human misuse of the Plains ecosystem. And it's a great film. You can listen to it on YouTube. And it's not that long, so it's really worth checking out.

[00:12:18] It just has great footage of, well, dirt in the 1930s. And there's lots of sources and photographs and stuff that we can see thanks to digitization of history. But what strikes me in this particular film, and in so much of our memorializing of dirt and soil, is that while the authors seem to see soil as maybe a victim, but certainly a villain, their interpretive conclusions seem to be that soil is just a backdrop against which the human drama unfolds.

[00:12:47] So soil is lifeless in these depictions. And I think that's kind of strange and perhaps inaccurate. Often the backdrop is value laden, right? The information represents soils as either healthy or unhealthy. I think our guest today will be talking a little bit more about that. And I think even more tellingly, the word unproductive is often used in these sources.

[00:13:15] And I think, as evidenced by this episode, that the trajectory of thinking about soil might need to change a bit. And instead of thinking about it as sort of this inert kind of, quote-unquote, resource that we can manage, it's not a life stage set. It's the basis of life, and soil itself is alive. Okay. So, sorry. I just totally went off, Emily. So I think we need to back up. Sorry. I just went crazy. I love the Dust Bowl.

[00:13:44] So what do our listeners need to know about soil? Like, you know, just as an entity. Well, I was going to stop you there because soil is not just one thing. And that's part of why it's so interesting. And dirt and soil are also not the same thing. So there are lots of different ways of totally nerding out on the different kinds of soil.

[00:14:10] But what soil is, is the stuff that undergirds our society, right? It is not plants, but plants need it in order to grow. Soil has components to it made up of dirt, made up of rocks, made up of parts of plants. But soil is the piece that connects it all together. And it's also the space in between all of those other things.

[00:14:40] And so the really complicated mosaic of how the parts of the ground underneath us come together is very much the part of what soil is. And so it's more than what we think of when we just think of dirt or dust. It's also more than what we think of in terms of the scale. It's not a fleck or a speck. It's everywhere. It's ubiquitous. And it's the home to tiny little biomes that exist in one place alone,

[00:15:09] or these huge macro biomes that are supporting literally all of life. Except, and this is where I have to digress, sometimes soil is actually trying to kill us. It's not trying to make our lives better. It's not trying to give us things and nourish us. But it's kind of trying to kill us. And I have an example from last winter of how this happened.

[00:15:38] So my family and I were driving up through Riggins in Idaho, which is this part as the plane gives way into the Rockies. And it's a long canyon country where the snake and the salmon rivers come together. It's on the western part of Idaho. And we were driving behind an Idaho Fish and Game vehicle on this long trip up north. And it was literally dripping blood off the bumper in the back of the truck.

[00:16:07] My husband and I looked at it, and we looked at each other, and we were like, what in the world? And it went on for miles. I mean, blood just gushing out of the back. And it turns out that Riggins had just been identified as the first place in Idaho where chronic wasting disease had been identified. And chronic wasting disease is this crazy virus. It's an undulate version of mad cow disease, right?

[00:16:35] So it's a transmissible spongiform encephaly where the prions that get into animals' brains and waste them live in the soil. And so the soil is sequestering these prions. And then it's literally reaching up, and this chronic wasting disease is killing the animals. And before it wastes them away, it makes them stumble around and be sloppy.

[00:17:05] And just sort of act drunk. And then their bodies kind of disappear. And so what we witnessed was the elimination of an entire herd of elk that had been identified with chronic wasting disease because that's the best way to control its spread. Live deer or elk say hello, touching nose to nose. And the prions cross from one deer or elk to the other.

[00:17:33] And then once it's in the soil, it never goes away. It's insidiously spread. So through urine, through feces, through carcasses that are left in that soil. And it remains infectious for years, even if that entire carcass has disintegrated and faded away. It may even actually be transmitted by the earthworms tunneling through the dirt and the soil. And this is a historic disease.

[00:18:01] It's been identified as early as the 1960s in captive herds of deer. But it moved into wild deer populations in 1981 in Colorado. And the science of tracking it has actually been really slow. It's hard to know where it exists in the soil. You can't test the soil at every part of the Intermountain West, right? That would take forever. And so it's this really interesting example of how complex soil can be.

[00:18:30] Yeah, that's such an interesting story. And I think it'd make kind of a cool sci-fi story or a movie or something, right? The soil is trying to kill us. You know, it's trying to kill us down here in the Sonora Desert also. And I butcher the pronunciation of this.

[00:18:55] We colloquially call it valley fever, but coxidioides, I think, is how we scientifically say it. And it's a fungus endemic to our region here in Sonora Desert. It also occurs in Utah and New Mexico and even southern Colorado. Chilly, my dog, had it. People, human beings can get it. And it lives in the soil. And it does what a fungus does. It parties it up by eating a lot of stuff that is crucial for growth.

[00:19:21] Bungi are a really important part of those components of the soil that you just talked about. And so we think, I think we don't always think about the important work that those kinds of things are doing. We're, as human beings, we're pretty, I don't know, self-centered in a lot of ways. And so if you go to the Internet and you just Google it, right? Coccidioides is really just an illness when to happen. It's fascinating.

[00:19:46] It's hard to find sort of ecological information about it because it's mostly about human health. And the fungus, as I said, does cause a disease. But the societal obsession around the fungi is really fascinating because it just shows another way that humans are similar to animals, right? Just like you're talking about here. Deer can contract this illness from the soil. Human beings can contract this illness from the soil.

[00:20:11] And it shows how powerful microbes are in creating medical and political activities, informing and forcing science to try to study where these diseases originate and where they're living and how we can sort of mitigate their effects. That's pretty powerful stuff for a little tiny microbe to do. So I just think it's super interesting to think about how powerful soil as a whole is. As you said, it's everywhere.

[00:20:40] But then also how even just these little tiny components of the soil have tremendous agency. And they also provide these fascinating metaphors. You talked before about soil being productive or unproductive. And then soil being this powerful component, right? Giving life or incurring death, right? Spreading death around. I think the metaphors of soil have been really powerful in history too, right?

[00:21:09] Native soil as a synonym for territory or place or ownership. And I think that that use of soil really doesn't do justice to the mixture of different things that soil is. How unique it is across time and space, right? How dynamic it can be. And the different layers that it provides, which are this other really interesting metaphor. And here I think about gardening.

[00:21:37] Because I think about gardening a lot because I'm really, really bad at it. I have a black thumb in everything. Like houseplants, tomato plant, you name it. I cannot grow it. But I love to try. So it's an expensive, unproductive hobby. But one of my favorite feelings, and why I think I like that despite not getting more than 10 tomatoes at the end of the summer.

[00:22:04] One of my favorite feelings is actually just digging into the earth with a shovel. And feeling with my hands the difference in different layers. Sometimes you'll dig down and hit clay or a texture that's really different from the top layer. Or sometimes it's a different color, a different temperature, a different moisture. And there's so much life underneath. Roly-poly bugs, earthworms.

[00:22:31] And watching that emerge and just imagining what's happening under there is, I think, itself opening up a whole other world. Even if the plants don't grow from that earth like I would like them to do. Right. I think, you know, I think you bring up such a cool point about, you know, soil itself is an archive.

[00:22:55] And so, you know, everything that has gone before is still there, maybe even in the memory of the soil. And, of course, I think if we were to take more of a traditional ecological knowledge from indigenous thinking and native understandings, we could perhaps think about the ways in which the soil has memory and communicates things to us and holds on to activities.

[00:23:19] You know, the deer, the hooves that have stomped on it or even the cattle that have maybe created various kinds of effects with their movement and their grazing. It's just kind of fun to think about the soil as always present and almost a witness to everything that has happened in our past. You know, and I think it's important to remember that soil is fragile.

[00:23:46] I think because we step on it and we know all the abuse that we give it, we forget that it really is fragile. And one of my fail, okay, I'm just going to geek out. When I was a park ranger in Colorado National Monument, I had to lead hikes with visitors, also known as tourists. And if you would ever go with me on a hike, even to this day in a desert setting, I'm likely to say to you, watch your step. Look out for the soil. You need to pay attention. What are you doing? Right. If you're not on the trail, don't get off the trail.

[00:24:16] Stay on the trail. It's actually kind of annoying. But the reason for this is because of something called Cryptobiotic Crest or the fact that I was trained as a guide in a region where this thing called Cryptobiotic Crest existed. And we were taught how crucial it was for all of life. And so in the 80s and 90s, crypto did not mean what it means today. It meant it was currency, but it was currency for life.

[00:24:44] It was it's an unassuming and rather invisible component of soil, especially on the Colorado Plateau. And if you don't know it's there, you can step on it. And I suspect we don't really call it Cryptobiotic Crest anymore. I think that fell out of favor because it sounds so inorganic. But crypto is, in fact, very organic. And if normal soil is the foundation of all life, then crypto is the glue for life in arid biomes because it's those places that have fewer plants.

[00:25:13] Right. We know plants are spaced out in desert places because of the scarcity of water. And those fewer plants mean fewer roots to hang on to the soil. And so crypto actually exists to hold the soil together and prevent terrible erosion. And it does all the things that normal soil does, but it just looks way cooler. And in fact, if you know what you're looking for, you might see, you know, areas of crypto that is five inches in height, which is so cool. And some crypto is newly formed.

[00:25:43] Much of it is very old. It's historic. It's like thousands of years old. And crypto just works by fixing nitrogen, not only from the soil, but by using bacteria to convert nitrogen in the air to a form that plants can use. And then it gives native seeds that have co-evolved with it a cozy place to nestle as they begin to establish themselves.

[00:26:05] And, you know, if you've ever been on the Colorado Plateau, sandstone is sort of the stuff that makes all of the beautiful red rock formations. And then when that erodes, you get pretty much sand. And as we all know, sand isn't easy to hold off, right, with your toe. Like if you're walking in sand, it's hard to get a good footing. It's true for plants as well. And then so this is a really important component of soil and of life on the Colorado Plateau.

[00:26:33] And if we step on or we ride our ATV over it or trample it with our bike, the crypto dies. And it can take many, many decades for it to reestablish if it ever does. And so the presence of algae and lichens and the rest of the components of crypto, especially in western desert soils, has really been a popular research topic. So, you know, the early 1960s is when we start seeing scientists going, what is that weird looking soil?

[00:26:57] And by the time we near the 90s, sand management agencies begin to argue for changing full on land use prices. So that and the phrase became we don't bust the crust. Very clever. And that has meant trying to rethink the impact of things like grazing and recreation.

[00:27:15] And then, of course, obviously, education and awareness to work to ensure folks know that powerful beings exist in that funny looking stuff that's just all over the place in these western desert spaces. I was my partner and I were recently up in Sedona and there were all of these, you know, clearly probably well intentioned bullhacking. And it's just Sedona was just very busy at various times of the year. And they were moving around each other to get around each other on the trails with their mountain bikes and all this stuff.

[00:27:44] And I'm sitting there and my partner was just horrified. And I'm like, stay on the trail. You're busting the crust. Stay on the trail. Anyway, so. But it is really. I know it's true. So it's really because folks just don't know. They just didn't understand what was going on. And I had the opportunity to explain it to a couple of people. And they were like, wow, that is so amazing. And I'll be more careful.

[00:28:07] And I remember one person said that she could just imagine a million little helpers in the crust to make sure that the plants were OK, which I just loved. And so, of course, she was like seven. Of course, a child would say something that cool. And that beautiful. I love that. But I also love how you point out that soil can be harmed, right? And that careless acts of people on it crush and cause erosion and really destroy that soil. But soil can also be cared for.

[00:28:36] And human caretakers of soil, I think, are a really powerful way of thinking about the indigenous agroecology of the Southwest and through Mexico and Latin America as well. And one of the best examples of that is the reciprocity in planting, right? People that are much better gardeners than I am have learned that if you pair the right things together, they do better. And I've tried this. I'm not very good at it. It still works better than most things that I do.

[00:29:05] But this method has a name, right? It's called polycropping. And it's the idea of planting squash, corn, and beans together helps those three sisters help each other out. And there's a chemical reason behind that. There's an ecological reason. But as strong as that is the cultural and historic reasons that help those plants take care of each other.

[00:29:29] So corn's fibrous roots, for example, give stability to the soil and they provide shade for the squash. And importantly, the bean fixes nitrogen into the soil and all plants need nitrogen in order to grow. And as they work in that relationship together, they provide physical protection, but they also help the plants really become friends, right?

[00:29:56] They are like sisters in that way by conserving moisture in the soil and all benefiting from that style of planting. So the Diné or the Navajo, the Hopi and the Pueblan peoples were the first to farm like this. But it happened in various places in the Andes and throughout Mexico as well. And it also came with it, the practice of fallowing, right? After you've used a particular place for farming, letting it have space, right?

[00:30:25] Letting it sit alone for a while, free from cultivation for a set amount of time so that the relationship could be rejuvenated and the soil could rest before it was used again. Yeah, I love it. My favorite sister is the squash, right? Because I just love how crazy it is. I used to have a pumpkin patch in my garden in Colorado as a kid. And my mom was always trying to weed my garden. And I just refused to weed my garden because I just didn't understand the point of it.

[00:30:54] And so it was the craziest looking garden anyway. But specifically, the squash and the pumpkin patches were particularly nutty because it's prickly. So I never wanted to go in and pull the weeds out of the garden, even with gloves. Because, you know, you get whatever. The dang stems on those things are prickly. And then that also keeps, right? The squash helps keep herbivores from coming in and eating all your garden. And so just that I think the squash is my favorite because it's so crazy. It's sprawls. It's prickly.

[00:31:23] It's like, this is my space. Leave me alone. Get out of my way. But it's, you know, it's interesting because I, of course, the indigenous understandings of how those plants get together and their reciprocity that they, the concert in which they acted with the soil is so cool. And of course, Western science took some time to realize how brilliant that was, I think, in some ways.

[00:31:51] And while the U.S., the United States Department of Agriculture has not always been the harbinger of sustainable practices, they have been creating, you know, increasingly soil archives about ways to try to, quote, conserve soil. And that goes, takes us back to that dust bowl because it's in 1935 when the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act, how's that for like old school boring history, was passed. But it was actually written and advocated by a New Mexico congressional representative

[00:32:18] named John Joseph Dempsey because the drought had had such a harmful effect on his district and his state. And he was well known, I love this, for his ability to convincingly argue that soil was essential to national security. Imagine if we began to think about ecological health as an urgent security measure, you know, we could probably go on forever about that. So I'll stop there. But what an interesting concept. The law, though, set up the Soil Conservation Service.

[00:32:47] And at the time, it was incredibly sort of progressive for the United States government. And it asked, it was asked to do a lot in the law, but its main task was to study soil and to figure out ways to conserve it and enrich it. We could talk a little bit, and probably we will in another episode, about the difference between conserving something and preserving something and that long history in environmentalism.

[00:33:12] But for almost 100 years, the Soil Conservation Service has utilized photography to take before and after pictures of different kinds of approaches to what became known as, quote unquote, soil management. And again, the collusion of government and science to try and attain control of the more than human is evident here. But we also see, especially now, towards the latter 20th century and into the 21st century, soil scientists and the USDA starting to think about the brilliance that the Three Sisters

[00:33:41] type agriculture contains and contained and begin to think about ways to emulate that a little more so that we can have more sustainable agriculture, because the soil really is the basis for plant life and for our food systems. Well, and I think that elusive control, both by scientists and government officials, is a

[00:34:04] really interesting opening into what our soil scientist is going to talk with us a little about, which is this framing of soil as either healthy or unhealthy. And this thinking about it as what it provides might not be the best framework for actually centering the relationships that exist with soil and the many different ways that it has

[00:34:29] been useful over time and also to think about human societies. So we're going to welcome Mariana here. Yay! Fantastic. I can't wait. I am so excited to introduce our next guest, which is a colleague of mine here at Boise State. Dr. Mariana DeGraff is an Associate Dean in the College of Arts Sciences and also a professor

[00:34:59] of biology. And I got to know Mariana a couple summers ago when we taught a field school in Cascade, Idaho on a ranch outside the little town and adjacent to a lake. And she taught me how to core soil samples in the ranch land, which is one of the most impressive experiences of sort of the experiential learning realm that I've done. So Mariana, thank you so much for joining us.

[00:35:27] And could you tell us a little bit about yourself? Hi. Well, thanks so much for having me. So like you said, my name is Mariana DeGraff. I hail originally from the Netherlands. I did my bachelor's there in environmental management and forestry. And then I came to the United States to do my master's and my PhD at the University of California in Davis.

[00:35:57] And after that, I just sort of stayed here. I did a postdoc at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in ecosystem science and microbiology. And then I came to Boise State University in 2010 and started as an assistant professor in ecosystem ecology. And stayed here. And now I'm associate dean for research and creative activity and graduate education.

[00:36:23] And I still do a lot of research as well, together with my students. Thank you so much. And we're so glad to have you here. So I know you call yourself an ecosystem scientist, but I think of you as a soil scientist. So could you say a little bit about what it means to be a soil scientist and sort of what kinds of questions that you ask of the earth in that research? Yeah, definitely.

[00:36:50] And soil science is a really important component of ecosystem science. Because as an ecosystem scientist, and this is really varied, overlaps with soil science, we asked the question of how do plants live in soil and change the soil? And then how in return does the soil feed back to the plants and change the plants?

[00:37:14] And so I think it's best explained with an example of the type of questions that I ask. When I was pretty little, we would always go to the beach for vacations. And I would sit on the beach and see a grass growing on the sand. And I would think, how is it possible that this grass can just grow in dry sand where it's really warm, you know, somewhere in the Netherlands?

[00:37:43] And then I would look behind me and I'd see the dunes. And I'm like, somehow this grass turns the soil into a dune. And then the dune makes different plants. And then those make forests, ultimately. And how is that even possible? How do these things keep changing each other? And all that has to do with nutrient cycles and carbon cycles. So plants feed the soil. And the soil then gets microbes.

[00:38:13] And they turn around and feed the plants. And on and on it goes. And you get these changes in ecosystems. And that's really the type of questions I ask. Is if we have a fire in the desert here, how does it change the plants that are in the soil as well as the soil? And then how does it keep feeding back to each other?

[00:38:35] Or if you grow crops in agriculture, how can you grow crops to create the most organisms in the soil that provide the most food back to the plants so that you can grow the crops with less inputs from fertilizer to derive artificially, for example? That's so fascinating. And the soil you described seems so lively, right?

[00:39:02] Such an actor in all of those landscapes. So it's so nice to meet you and have you here. This is super fun. And when we were talking about soil as our first, so the podcast was sort of growing an ecosystem, which you should love, that's associated with the Mountain West, so that we can, with species that you can sort of see down here in the Sonoran Desert and up in the Northern Rockies and everywhere in between. Maybe not everywhere in between, but certainly kind of occur throughout the region.

[00:39:31] So I love this ecosystem approach that you have. And it's so funny because we were thinking about who's our ideal listener, right? And, of course, you know, we want everybody to want to listen to it, but we decided that one of our model in our minds when we record this thing is Emily's 10-year-old son, Ray.

[00:39:55] One of the smartest people we both know, and he's one of the most curious, not cynical people that we know. So that's the kind of – so I love that you talked about your childhood and just sort of curiosity and looking at those grasses in the sand and going, wait, how is that possible? Soil. Nonetheless, soil is bizarrely complicated, and I always – I often find myself struggling to articulate what exactly soil is. You know, the building block of life, got it, blah, blah, blah.

[00:40:24] But if you had to explain to Ray or to me what exactly soil is, what would you say? Yeah, so what I would say is that soil really begins with little pieces of rock that break off of rock, so little chunks of – we call them minerals. And then that plant material, so that grass that grows in the sand, right? The sand is the minerals. It's the pieces of rock, and then the grass is the plant.

[00:40:53] The plant at some point, you know, in the winter, it dies, and then it breaks down. So if you think about – I've been thinking about how to best explain this to a 10-year-old, but if you think about having your pumpkins for Halloween, and if you keep them outside of your house for too long, then they start breaking down. You see them shrivel up, and those are fungi that do that. They're little microorganisms, and so those do the same thing to grasses.

[00:41:22] And then the grasses or other plants in the soil create sort of a glue that binds all those little pieces of rock together, and that's how you get the little soil clumps, and then the soil starts getting darker. And then in between those are all the microorganisms and other invertebrate, macroinvertebrates,

[00:41:45] little bugs that live in the soil, and they eat those plants that sit in the soil. Sometimes they die too, and they again create all that material that forms the soil. And in between those little chunks of soil that now exist, you have little pores with air or water in it.

[00:42:11] And so this is how the soil becomes a little bit of an ecosystem. Yeah, that's so cool. So also what I'm hearing you say, and this is one of the things that we're trying to focus on as we talk through these different episodes is all the relationships, not just among what we traditionally think of as nature, right, the ways in which the fungi interact with the roots of the plants and the water, et cetera,

[00:42:36] but also the ways in which the humans also interact with those more-than-human aspects and all of that. And so as we started to, as we recorded other episodes, the history part of this was so simple for us. It was just like birds, for example, really easy, just lots of history about birds and humans and how birds have affected human, you know, development and different moments in the past, in the quote-unquote human past. But soil, we got kind of stuck.

[00:43:05] And I would say that this episode is maybe less historical than either of us would like. But one thing that we thought a lot about was the ways in which soil is an archive of sorts. We can look at the soil and we can know some of the things that have happened to it and some of the things that it has done, you know, to affect the historical trajectory of the world or of the ecosystem in which that soil exists.

[00:43:35] And so I'm just wondering, from your view as a science, that's kind of how we might think of it as historians. And then every now and then drastic changes in that soil become, you know, sort of become the center stage, right? The dust bowl in the U.S. is probably the best example of that. But those moments are not as common in history, in the field of history, as we might want them to be, or maybe they should be.

[00:44:00] And so I'm assuming, too, that history doesn't show up a ton in the world of quote-unquote science. And so I'm just wondering, I know this is a hard question, from your view as a scientist, how do the components of soil help us to understand its history? And why is that important for understanding kind of the future, what might come as a result of that historical past of soil? Yeah, it's a really interesting question.

[00:44:30] And I've thought about it, and I have some examples that I think illustrate how soil can tell us history. And one of the examples is, I thought of it came from when I was an undergraduate student in the Netherlands. And we were biking around, naturally, because it was the Netherlands, on a field trip. And we went to this area that is a very sandy soil, very resource poor.

[00:45:00] So not a lot of nutrients, not a lot of water. There's a few skimpy little trees that grow there. And so when you dig down in that soil, what you expect to see is a sand kind of going down, right, if you dig deep. But what we found was that if you dig deeper, we saw this thick layer of manure, really.

[00:45:22] And what happened was that years and years and years ago, when farmers lived in that area, in their little huts, they had sheep, and they were farming with sheep that were eating the heather there. And in the winter, in the stalls, the manure would build up, they would take the manure and spread it out on that area. Now they don't do that anymore. But we can find that history back in the soil.

[00:45:52] And it impacts the kind of things that can grow there and the successional trajectory of that soil. Another example is, I have an experiment in Illinois, where we grow biofuels. It's switchgrass and big bluestem, which are grasses that you can use for biofuel production that are actually native to that area.

[00:46:20] And when we dig into that soil, what we find is that before we grew these grasses, there were different types of grasses that have a different kind of photosynthetic mechanism. And we can look at that using isotopes. We can analyze the isotopes in the carbon that come from those grasses. And so we can tell, okay, these kind of grasses lived there for a long time.

[00:46:47] But before that, again, we can see that there is a signature of corn there. So what we see is that farmers used to grow corn there. Then the CRP program came into place where farmers got subsidized to take land out of production for conservation purposes and plant other things on it so that the land was conserved. Because this kind of has to do with the idea of the dust bowl, right?

[00:47:16] You have to be careful how you work your land. And then now we're starting to use the land in a different kind of way. But we can see all those signatures in the soil. And then finally, I've been involved with a project that's in Nebraska. And at some point, somebody was driving around there and it was a soil scientist.

[00:47:41] Like, not an ecosystem scientist, a real good old, you know, studies the soil only, soil scientist. And saw a road cut. And saw this, like, really dark sort of line in the soil. It was pretty thick, you know, maybe a meter thick. And it was buried under all this, like, dusty soil called Luss. So there's, like, meters of Luss.

[00:48:09] And then there's this dark band. And then there's its lighter soil again. And so it turns out this dark band of soil was from the Pleistocene era where plants grew bigger and produced a lot more material and created a lot more plant matter in the soil, which creates a darker soil with more carbon.

[00:48:32] Now, interestingly, the dusty soil on top, because we're currently facing climate change, started to erode away. And now this ancient soil that had been sitting there inert and microbes didn't have new inputs of carbon. They didn't have water. So they just kind of sat there doing nothing. Microbes can survive years and years and years like that.

[00:48:56] But all of a sudden, they now get exposed to modern atmospheric conditions and new plants roots growing into there. And so we did a study to figure out how that impacts the carbon that sits in that soil if that goes back into the atmosphere and contributes to climate change in ways that we didn't expect. So I think history is actually really important in our fields. That's so interesting. Yeah, that's really.

[00:49:24] And I can just picture those layers, right? And how each one tells you something a little bit different if you ask them the right questions. Yeah. And then also, like, all the different people, right? Like, the pictures that those descriptions paint of the sheep farmer in the Netherlands and the Pleistocene era, if you can imagine such a thing, and Nebraska.

[00:49:46] And just all the, you know, it's just very cool to think about the span of history and the people and the non-people that experienced those times. Yeah. One of the other things that we talk about in this podcast is sort of the soil as a harbor for disease and sort of the parallels between health and disease. And it made me think of a conversation we had a few years ago about the framing of soil as either healthy or unhealthy.

[00:50:16] And that there are sort of modern management policy aims that are just sort of geared towards health. Don't we want everything to be healthy and healthy forests and healthy communities? And one of the things I learned from you is that perhaps that framing is not useful for soil.

[00:50:36] And I was hoping that maybe you could tell us a little bit about what that means in the context, especially of places like Boise and Tucson in the Mountain West, where soil isn't maybe as naturally healthy as we might assume it to be. Yeah. Yeah. And I think this is all context dependent. And so I think when we think about health, we think, and you said it, you said the words us and communities.

[00:51:05] And so it immediately brings it back to people. And so we humanize this way of talking about soil, right? And so when we talk about it like this, when I think about healthy soil, I link it instantly to healthy people and communities. And when you think about that, what you need is you need the soil to produce food, right? That is the biggest service probably that soil provides us with.

[00:51:32] That is very clear that everybody knows we need soil that is healthy to produce us with the food we need to eat. And it's such a basic necessity that I think when we talk about healthy soils, that's kind of where we go with our thoughts. And it's true. And it's true. If you want to grow food, you need a healthy soil to be able to produce that food. Otherwise, you get dust bowl situations. So I think in that context, it's really right.

[00:52:01] Healthy soil provides lots of nutrients to plants. It usually has a lot of carbon in it and it holds water really well. It's kind of like a sponge that provides all these things to plants and then to us. If you think about a healthy soil in our area, however, and you use that same way of thinking about it, it doesn't work.

[00:52:23] It's kind of like our ecosystem, but also your ecosystem, Michelle, in your area is adapted to really difficult conditions environmentally. Right? It's dry most of the year. It's water limited. There's not a lot of nutrients. It's super hot. And so all that life, the plants and the animals have adapted to those conditions.

[00:52:51] And with that, because there's this interaction between plants and soil all the time, the soil also adapts to these conditions. And if we try to create a quote unquote healthy soil through our lands in the desert, we would actually promote invasion of lots of species that are not helpful to our ecosystem.

[00:53:16] In fact, they would grow really big and they would dry out and we'd have lots of fires. And so actually it would impact our health negatively. So thinking about what is healthy for a soil needs to be placed in context of really what the question is. What is the soil trying to support? And then create that context and the constraints associated with it.

[00:53:44] And then you can talk about health within those constraints. That's so interesting. Yes. Thank you. Yeah. We talked a little bit in this episode about, you know, sort of indigenous approaches to the Three Sisters agriculture here in the Southwest and, you know, kind of across the region. And thinking about the ways in which so much of Western agriculture is about trying to get stuff to grow where maybe it doesn't grow.

[00:54:09] Ways that maybe are not ideal, ideally suited to growing in that particular way. So we talked a little bit about that before we had you on. And I think it's just something really important to think about moving forward. You know, the kinds of things that we're asking of the soil and to be conscious of the soil as a being, you know, as this living presence in our lives in much the same way that indigenous peoples have thought about soil for a long time. There's much to learn, I think.

[00:54:40] But we also talk a lot about how do we bring soil, how do we put that sense of relationship, that sense of soil being alive, being present in our everyday human existence other than just something, you know, that's out there that when it gets dry and windy, it becomes dust and it's annoying and it gets in your eyes and you itch, right? Emily and I are interested in thinking about how do we get folks to really think about and feel soil's presence.

[00:55:07] And so I'm wondering, you know, when you, as you're out doing your research and working on these projects, how do you use your senses and what, how does soil interact with you almost bodily, right? How do you understand the soil through your touch and your smell and your light? You're talking about the soil, school soil scientists driving along the highway in Nebraska. I could just see it. We all would look at it and be like, what's going on in that cut?

[00:55:33] But all of these different senses and do those match what you end up learning in the lab? Is there differentiation there? Do your senses lead you into the lab? Does your lab lead you back out into the, into, you know, into the actual place where you're, where you're researching? If you just can talk a little bit about soil as sensory and how we can know soil through our senses.

[00:55:56] I think my most important, the most important sense that I use when, when I look at soil is my eyes, actually like the color of soil tells you a lot instantly. I still remember when my advisor for my PhD, who I studied soil carbon with for years and years came to visit me here in Boise and he looked out the window of my kitchen and he said, Mariana, there's no carbon here.

[00:56:27] It's because our soil is very light. It's, you know, there's not, there's just not a lot of it in the soil. There is very few plants. It's dry. There's not a lot of incorporation of carbon. So that would be my first thing. It's like, this is a resource for soil. When I go to Illinois and I see the soil is almost black. I'm like, oh man, this has a ton of carbon. It's going to have a ton of organisms in it. And then I can take that to the lab.

[00:56:54] And I have to say that over the years, I guess I got kind of good at predicting it. I can look at the soil now and kind of predict how much carbon is in it and how many nutrients and how fast those nutrients are likely to cycle. So that's pretty awesome. I think the thing that is really a black box is what are the microbes in the soil and what do they do?

[00:57:16] So I can look at a soil and have sort of an understanding of, you know, how the cycling is going to go and how much carbon there is. But then I'm like, who does what? And what if we change those organisms to be something else? Then what happens to what's going on? And I would say that's kind of the area where I'm starting to put more and more of an emphasis because I cannot predict that at all by looking in a field right now.

[00:57:45] And the results that we're getting are surprising and so very exciting. So we do lots of experiments where we try to manipulate just the microbes, not the soil too much. Just we take the microbes out of the soil. We manipulate just those and then we stick a plant in it and say, what happens to the plant now? And then or we take a plant and we say, what happens to the microbes? And yeah. That's very cool. Yeah.

[00:58:14] I love to think of traveling a landscape too with somebody that can sort of see those things and understand what they mean. It's such a powerful tool to have in understandings change over time, right? Which is one of the most historical and interesting, I think, perspectives that we can have. Mariana, every time I talk to you, I learn something. This is such a valuable conversation. And I'm so grateful you were able to join us. This is awesome.

[00:58:41] And I kind of want to be, you know, I have to, I'm a historian. So it's too late, but I kind of want to be you. I wouldn't know that much about soil, but I think it's too late. But I know more now than I did. So that's good. All right. Well, thank you so much. Yeah. Thanks. This was fun.

[00:59:09] And that's it for this episode of More Than, a podcast. We hope you've loved what you've learned. And we hope it's made you think a little bit differently about nature and about history. We hope you've learned more about the world around you and the histories and stories that make up those places and those more than human beings who are so important to our historical past. We want to thank our guests and our amazing producer, Ruxandra Guidi.

[00:59:39] We'd also like to give credit to Jason Shaw, who composed our music, Back to the Woods. We'd also like to cite our sound effects from the BBC. And we'll give more specific citation information on our website. There, you can also find sources that we've used and links to other interesting stories to continue your learning. So go check out morethanapodcast.earth. If you'd like to, please leave a review about this podcast.

[01:00:08] And be sure to tune in next time for the next episode of More Than, a podcast.