I love questions. Questions are like doorways that keep opening into other worlds. Our skill at asking questions peaks around age four or five and then is quickly hammered out of us by tired adults. We have to relearn the art of asking good questions, and that's one of the aims of my teaching.

The list of questions below is the list that the soil sponge course I've been teaching works to answer, through my own understanding, through the mentors I have studied with, and from the experiences of the incredible people who join the course. 

1. What are the large and small flows that make a landscape work? How do flows of carbon, water, nutrients, biological work, and human decisions interact with each other? 
2. How can I tell whether a landscape is generally healthy and functional? What are the signs of poor function and soil degradation?
3. How can we cool and rehydrate the landscape around us while providing abundant clean water through simple changes in land management? 
4. How can we pay for land regeneration without carbon markets or fundraising? How can we pay farmers a living wage for building a soil sponge?
5. Why is the soil carbon sponge the basic infrastructure that makes life on land possible? How does it protect against extreme weather events?
6. How are farms, towns, roads, and regions affected by the presence or absence of healthy soil or "the soil carbon sponge"? 
7. What is the biological workforce, and what essential jobs do other species do to create a functional landscape and climate? 
8. What are the principles at work in a healthy landscape? 
9. How does nature grow food without degrading soil?
10. Why does soil fail and what can we do to prevent that from happening?
11. What should we be monitoring, noticing, tracking, observing, and watching? How do we know whether change is going in the right or wrong direction? What are the warning signs that things are deteriorating?
12. What kind of citizen science data mapping can we do to track change over time? Why are maps useful for driving change?
13. What are some of the ways I can get involved? What is needed most? What groups/projects already exist? What is missing that I might provide?
14. What are simple ways of communicating these ideas? 
15. What stories can I collect around me and share? What photos do we have, or could I take that would help? What information and data can my community collect? 
16. How do we facilitate groups to make sure people are engaged, learning and listening to each other?
17. How do we get actual projects off the ground, and shift from information to implementation?

I hope you'll join me as I continue to seek the myriad answers to this set of important questions.

The tiny town of Emporia, Kansas has become my favorite gathering place to eat good food and meet like-minded people. Gail Fuller and his partner Lynette Miller are innovative farmers who challenged federal crop insurance rules in order to farm in a way that can regenerate land. Every year they round up an odd mix of 100 or more local farmers and ranchers, agronomists, policy makers, a few investors, and an assortment of other passionate folks from Australia, South Africa, Canada, and the US for a two-day field school in Emporia.